Showing papers in "Sport Education and Society in 2011"

From embodiment to emplacement: re-thinking competing bodies, senses and spatialities

Abstract: In this article I discuss how a shift from theories of embodiment to one of emplacement can inform how we understand the performing body in competitive and pedagogical contexts. I argue that recent theoretical advances concerning the senses, human perception and place offer new analytical possibilities for understanding skilled performances and events. In doing so I critically re-think my own analysis of the Spanish bullfight as an embodied performance to demonstrate the benefits of a shift from embodiment to emplacement as a theoretical and methodological approach; and propose that there are wider implications of such a theoretical shift for interpreting performances in other cultural and social contexts.

Multiple voices: improving participation of Muslim girls in physical education and school sport

Abstract: This study reports on data from a larger-scale research project in one city in the West Midlands, England. The study was commissioned by the local education authority because of the rising incidence of parental withdrawal of Muslim girls from physical education. The aim was to provide evidence-based guidance to schools on improving the inclusion of Muslim girls in physical education and school sport. In-depth interviews in eight case study schools provided a thick description of the lived realities for 19 head teachers and teachers, 109 young people and 32 of their parents. Four additional focus group interviews were held with 36 Muslim young people in community/supplementary schools. Questionnaires were sent to 402 city schools and 12 supplementary schools (50 of which were returned). Methods focused on capturing views on experiences and concerns regarding the inclusion of Muslim girls in physical education. Content analysis and inductive and deductive analyses of data procedures were used. Responses ind...

Embodied Faith: Islam, Religious Freedom and Educational Practices in Physical Education.

Abstract: The growing incidence of withdrawal of Muslim girls from physical education prompted this study into tensions between religious freedom and educational practices. It was located in a city in the West Midlands of England. Data on experiences, issues, concerns and solutions related to participation of Muslim girls in physical education were collected by a team of eight researchers including Islamic studies and physical education subject specialists, city advisors and teachers. Methods used were: eight in-depth case studies across primary, secondary and Muslim state schools including interviews with 19 head teachers and teachers (two were Muslim), focus-group interviews with 109 pupils and 32 parents. In addition, four focus-group interviews were held with 36 young people in community/supplementary schools for Muslim communities. All city schools (402) and 12 community providers received questionnaires, 50 were returned. Consultations were held with key national associations including the Muslim Council of B...

Complexity theory: supporting curriculum and pedagogy developments in Scottish physical education

Abstract: This paper describes how complexity theory principles relating to self-emergence and connectivity have been employed to inform our recent developmental work in Scottish physical education We suggest that these complexity principles have purchase in postmodern times characterised by uncertainty, multiplicity, and contradiction (Fernandez-Balboa, 1997) We cite examples from the development and delivery of a Developmental Physical Education Programme in Scotland to assert that complex learning principles (Light, 2008; Morrison, 2008) can be employed to structure curriculum and pedagogy endeavours These examples from practice highlight the ways in which a complexity-oriented learning approach provides a challenge to hierarchical, reductionist, and behaviourist notions of learning which have long held a strong foothold in the field of physical education (Light, 2008) At the same time, we pay attention to critical questions which have been raised regarding the practicality of structuring educational practice with emerging theories such as complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006)

Investigating Learning in Physical Education--A Transactional Approach.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to suggest and describe a methodological approach for studies of learning within school physical education (PE) in order to investigate and clarify issues of learning in an embodied practice. Drawing on John Dewey's work, and especially his use of the concept transaction, a transactional approach is suggested as a way of developing an action-orientated method necessary for investigating learning in PE. The approach is illustrated by extracts from a video analysis of a PE lesson in Sweden, and shows how an analytical focus on meaning making, actions, events and participators in meaning-making processes can help to overcome methodological challenges related to dualist and cognitivist approaches and reach a deeper knowledge of student learning issues in PE.

"Are PE Teacher Identities Fit for Postmodern Schools or Are They Clinging to Modernist Notions of Professionalism?" A Case Study of Norwegian PE Teacher Students' Emerging Professional Identities.

Abstract: The concept of the ‘professional teacher’ is highly contestable, and the array of definitions that circulate in teacher education draw on competing theoretical and ideological positions. This paper explores what discourses about professionalism are currently available within Norwegian physical education teacher education (PETE) and, in particular, asks whether they reflect the needs of postmodern teachers in a ‘knowledge society’? It acknowledges that there are currently two dominant discourses about the ‘professional’ teacher, so-called ‘activist’ or ‘managerial’ professionalism, and asks whether, and in what ways, PE student teachers engage with and/or reject the discourses’ competing ideas about what counts as ‘good’ practice. By analysing the student teachers’ emerging professional identities, the paper aims to reveal not only the students’ subjective meanings about professionalism, but also illuminate the current power structures that operate in PETE about relevant ‘professional’ knowledge. It draws ...

‘Change4Life for your kids’: embodied collectives and public health pedagogy

Abstract: Recent work in human geography has begun to explore the fluidity of bodily boundaries and to foreground the connectedness of bodies to other bodies/objects/places. Across multiple subdisciplinary areas, including health, children's and feminist geographies, geographers have begun to challenge the notion of a singular, bounded body by highlighting the importance of, for example, relations of care and intergenerationality to everyday embodied experiences; remembered past/anticipated future bodies to self-perception and body image; affect/emotion to the production of embodied collectives; and connections to distant and proximate others to understandings of embodied rights and responsibility. In this paper we will review these areas of work in order to explore the ways in which this geographical work on embodied connections might contribute to recent debates concerning public health pedagogy and the production of embodied and emotional collectives in education. This will involve an analysis of the recent anti...

Primary physical education, coaches and continuing professional development

Abstract: Physical education (PE) in primary schools has traditionally been taught by qualified primary teachers. More recently, some teaching of PE in primary schools has been undertaken by coaches (mostly football coaches). These coaches hold national governing body awards but do not hold teaching qualifications. Thus, coaches may not be adequately prepared to teach PE in curriculum time. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the perceptions of a group of community-based football coaches working in primary schools for the impact of a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme on their ability to undertake ‘specified work’ to cover PE in primary schools. The programme focused on four areas identified as important to enable coaches to cover specified work: short- and medium-term planning, pedagogy, knowledge of the curriculum and reflection. Results showed that for the majority of coaches the CPD programme had made them more aware of the importance of these four areas and had helped to develop their kn...

Coming to America: challenges and difficulties faced by African student athletes

Abstract: There is a considerable lack of literature on international student athletes despite the extent to which colleges and universities are increasingly relying on them to heighten the winning reputation of their sports programs. This research focuses on international student athletes from Africa. Based on interviews of 16 student athletes from seven different African countries, the range of their experiences upon entering universities in the United States, particularly their challenges, were identified. Many of the serious issues affecting the student athletes were matters related to the host environment's underestimations about the African student athletes’ desires to learn, misunderstandings about their culture and religions and other negative assumptions that undermined their academic success. We also found that the vast majority of these student athletes experienced negative stereotypes and discrimination based on their race and their region of origin.

‘Body work—regulation of a swimmer body’: an autoethnography from an Australian elite swimmer

Abstract: This paper contributes to studies on sociology and the body by exploring my bodily experiences as an Australian elite swimmer in an autoethnographic framework. More specifically, it focuses on the relationship between the regulatory practices of others on my body and my development of self-regulatory practices. The stories in this paper reveal evidence of regulatory practices occurring from four different domains within the Australian elite swimming culture—the coach, the mother, the peers and the self. I have named the regulatory physiological practices as 'ethnophysiological' as they were triggered in the social context of Australian swimming and were legitimated through 'values packaged in a scientific wrapping'. Autoethnography, an ‘autobiographical genre of writing’ has been utilised as it enables the reader to vicariously share my bodily experiences, bestowing a voice of authority to my body to reveal personal experiences, voices and feelings. Within this paper, I will re-tell my stories of being an elite swimmer. I will detail stories of enaction, coach and peer regulation and self-regulation occurring within the elite culture persisting my career over a nine-year period. I use Sparkes' question in regard to embodiment to reflexively shape my analysis; 'what do my memories reveal about the socialisation of my body' and draw on literature relevant to sociology and the body.

Gender constructions and negotiations in physical education: case studies

Abstract: In Denmark as in other European countries, many girls, and especially Muslim girls, seem to lose interest in physical activities and sport with increasing age. However, in a Danish context, little is known about the reasons why girls drop out of sport and which role physical education (PE) plays in this process. In this article we present results of a qualitative study on gendered discourses and doing gender in a PE class at a Danish high school. Drawing on constructivist and post-structuralist approaches to gender and ethnicity, we explore the different opportunities of girls in PE based on in-depth interviews and video observations. Three case studies of three girls are the focus of this article: Nanna, the Danish ‘athletic girl’ who found a balance between (en)acting femininity and presenting herself as a competent athlete; Iram, the ‘Muslim girl’ whose position as a Muslim causes her to hide her sporting abilities and Ida, the Danish ‘normal girl’ who re-interprets PE and adapts it to her needs. These...

The conventions of sport clubs: enabling and constraining the implementation of social goods through sport

Abstract: In order to shed light on the possibilities for using sport as a vehicle for the realization of social goods—understood as sport having a wider social role—this paper scrutinizes Norwegian sport clubs. The study is guided by the concept of convention, which refers to individuals’ cognitive structures, and to social structure. Three sport clubs were investigated and three qualitative methods, including document analysis, observation and interviews, were employed. First, in the results section, the main sport convention is identified as being competitiveness. Secondly, it is argued that as a consequence of the main convention for sport there are limited possibilities for the realization of social goods such as health. The possibilities of sports clubs combining the convention of competitiveness with others is discussed, considering the former as substantial for practice and discussing whether the latter is mere rhetoric.

Duct tape, icy hot & paddles: narratives of initiation onto US male sport teams

Abstract: In the United States, initiation or hazing activities in high school and university sport are increasingly being recognized as a serious issue facing coaches and sport administrators. These events include humiliation, degradation or abuse of new team members, presumed to enhance team bonding. This study is grounded in Waldron and Krane's conceptual framework linking social goal orientation and overconformity to team norms. We conducted focus group interviews with nine former male high-school athletes examining their hazing experiences. A narrative approach to the data analysis was used to provide a comprehensive account of their combined experiences. The data were integrated into monologues describing experiences of being hazed, one positively perceived and one negatively perceived experience. A third monologue presents the perspective of the athlete doing the hazing. These stories highlight the perceived rationale and acceptance of hazing, the emotional toll of being hazed and the power dynamics that all...

Do as we do and not as we say: teacher educators supporting student teachers to learn on teaching practice

Abstract: This paper reports data from a larger study into the ways in which Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students engaged in professional learning during teaching practice (TP) in Ireland. The study comprised one umbrella case study of Greendale University, schools and PETE students that consisted of five individual cases: tetrads of PETE student teacher, cooperating teacher (CT), University tutor (UT) and School Principal (SP). Each tetrad was defined as a unique community of practice located within the wider structures of school, education and university policies on teacher education. Data were collected over one academic year using qualitative research methods and grounded theory as a systematic data analysis tool. Findings indicate that in each of the five cases, support for PETE student learning was, to some degree, dysfunctional. In particular, it became evident that there were two conflicting teacher-learning curricula in operation. The official curriculum, expressed in policy and by SPs, UTs...

Inhabiting different bodies over time: narrative and pedagogical challenges

Abstract: Over the life course our ‘real’ bodies change and we come to inhabit them and know them and ourselves in different ways. Of course, just how we learn to inhabit different bodies in the flesh and give meaning to them over time is a complex relational process that has consequences for our being in the world. Central to this process is the role of narrative. Culture provides people with a menu of narrative forms and content from which they selectively draw in an effort to line up their lived experience with the kinds of stories available to organize and express it to themselves and others. This narrative menu operates as a key resource in linking the sensorial materiality of the body to wider social structures that shape the meaning making process at the individual and group level. As such, narrative resources can be both enabling and constraining when the individual confronts bodily change. In this article, we explore the ways in which narratives as an embodied act infuse the flesh and help give meaning to ...

Still ‘more of the same for the more able?’ Including young disabled people and pupils with special educational needs in extra-curricular physical education

Abstract: Writing over a decade ago, Penney and Harris examined extra-curricular physical education (ECPE) provision in state schools in England and Wales and focused, in particular, on issues of inclusion, equality and equity. They concluded, among other things, that ECPE provision was highly gendered, characterised by a disproportionate emphasis on traditional team games and competitive sport and provided a limited number of opportunities to only a minority of pupils. Although Penney and Harris were less concerned with reflecting upon how the content, organisation and delivery of ECPE may come to impact the involvement and experiences of young disabled people and those with special educational needs (SEN), their analysis nevertheless has important implications for understanding this largely under-explored and neglected aspect of research. In this paper, therefore, we draw upon some key aspects of Penney and Harris's analysis to examine the extent and ways in which physical education (PE) teachers have endeavoured...

New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment

Abstract: This paper introduces the contents of the special issue whose authors, in our view, together demonstrate the need for transdisciplinary study of body pedagogies focussed on embodiment, emplacement, enactment and subjectivity. We celebrate theoretical and methodological diversity in the social sciences while calling for border crossings between the disciplines and perspectives of the social and bio-physical sciences in the interest of better understanding how social and cultural reproduction occurs both within schools and beyond them.

Physical education teachers' career-long professional learning: getting personal

Abstract: The aim of this study was to build upon previous PE-CPD (Physical Education Continuing Professional Development) research by exploring Greek case study physical education (PE) teachers' engagement in professional learning. It is argued that in the contemporary European context, where the teaching profession is viewed as central to achieving wider learning goals, an understanding of teachers' engagement in professional learning is worthy of scrutiny; in particular an understanding of learning and contexts. The research was undertaken from a qualitative, social constructivist, situated perspective within a case study framework. In total, nine case study PE teachers (five females and four males) participated in the study. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with the teachers over a period of one year. The data were analysed using a constructivist approach to grounded theory. Evidence suggested that, for these teachers, professional learning can take place in multiple contexts and situations....

Skin pedagogies and abject bodies

Abstract: How does the beauty industry ‘narrate the skin’? What does it teach women from different cultural groups about the female body? How does skin function as a site where female subjection and abjection are produced and reproduced? In this paper we examine the skin industry pointing to its extreme commodification of the female body and to the inexcusable pressure this places on females of most age and cultural groups. We focus on two examples. Firstly, we show what the skin industry teaches girls and women about both their skin colour ‘problems’ and desirable practices of whitening and, secondarily, tanning. Secondly, we consider what the cosmetic surgery industry teaches us about female bodily ‘imperfections’ linked to certain ethnic and racial groups and the necessary ‘remedies’. Overall we show how the socio-cultural normalization of perfect skin is a product of a range of contemporary and enduring social and cultural forces overlain by complex pedagogies of power, expertise and affect.

Sport and re/creation: what skateboarders can teach us about learning

Abstract: This paper explores the role of digital media and creativity in the processes of learning that occur in groups of urban skateboarders. In particular, it examines how the production and consumption of amateur videos contribute to both skaters’ mastery of the techniques of the sport and their integration into the culture of the sport. The data come from an ethnographic study of skateboarders in Hong Kong, which included in-depth interviews, participant observation and the collection of texts and artifacts like magazines, blog entries and amateur skating videos. Skateboarders use video in a number of ways that significantly impact their learning and integration into their communities. They use it to analyze tricks and techniques, to document the stages of their learning and socialization into the group, to set community standards, to build a sense of belonging with their ‘crews’ and to imagine ‘idealized futures’ for themselves and their communities. Understanding the value and function of such ‘semiotic mediation’ in learning and socialization into sport cultures, I suggest, can contribute to helping physical educators design tasks that integrate training in physical skills with opportunities for students to make meaning around their experiences of sport and physical education.

Boys' bodies and the constitution of adolescent masculinities

Abstract: In the social transition between childhood and adolescence, boys draw on discourses of masculinity that address the male body in constituting themselves as adolescents. They make themselves as no longer children and acquire a sense of themselves as adolescents by performing bodily practices that position them within some of these discourses. Repeated personal interviews conducted during the course of several years with 14 boys from an inner city area of Oslo provide the data for analysing the way the becoming as an adolescent boy affects possible and impossible ways of becoming an adolescent male. Some boys enacted the strong body discourse while exercising in the gym, others did so through improving their technical skills in competitive sports, and still others did so in aiming to achieve a body that was able to defend itself when encountering trouble in the city centre. In positioning themselves within discourses of masculinity that address the male body, and performing practices that constitute them wi...

Urban walking and the pedagogies of the street

Abstract: Drawing upon the extensive literature on urban walking and also on almost 60 years experience of walking the streets, this article argues that there is a pressing need to re-assert the educational value of going for a walk. After a brief discussion of the social significance of the flâneur, the historic pioneer of urban walking, the article proceeds to a consideration of a variety of ways in which the walker engages with society. These are walking for religious reasons, walking as a form of political protest, walking as a shared experience with strangers and walking as a way of understanding the world around us. No attempt is made here to challenge the arguments of those who postulate the physical health benefits of walking. It is argued, however, that even if such benefits do exist, they may well be of secondary importance to the lessons that can be learned from the pedagogies of the street.

Skating in a life context: examining the significance of aesthetic experience in sport using practical epistemology analysis

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to suggest and illustrate a methodological approach for studies of learning in physical education (PE) and sport pedagogy in order to investigate and clarify the rela ...

A social history of English rugby union

Abstract: A social history of English rugby union Tony Collins, 2009 London, Routledge £19.99 (hbk), 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-47660-7 Tony Collins is best known for his detailed and meticulous historical work ...

Where inequality lives in the body: teenage pregnancy, public pedagogies and individual lives

Abstract: This paper is concerned with how inequality is lived in the body. I have written elsewhere about how teenage pregnancy-as both a public discourse and an individual experience—provides a compelling example of the ways that inequality is carried in bodies, minds, and hearts. The aim of this paper is to revisit my earlier analysis and consider more recent US media representations and political rhetoric about teenage pregnancy. I examine how two films—Juno and Precious—function as public pedagogies that orient young women to their bodies, sexuality, and maternal subjectivities in ways that continue to cultivate class and race inequality. I then consider an individual young woman's effort to make her pregnancy her own as a means to better understand the complex relationship between public discourse, culture, and subjective experience. By combining these two multiple levels of analysis, I wish to extend and complicate the way we conceptualize the formation of subjectivities.

Dancing across the page. Narrative and embodied ways of knowing

Abstract: Dancing across the page. Narrative and embodied ways of knowing Karen Nicole Barbour, 2011 Bristol, Intellect £19.95 (pbk), 187 pp. ISBN 978-1-84150-421-6 In calling her book ‘Dancing Across the Pa...

Gender, visible bodies and schooling: cultural pathologies of childhood

Abstract: In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems. The first concerns the issues and difficulties involved in studying how children think about their bodies, in the schooling setting. The second involves an attempt to bring together a series of phenomena around which gendered media and social panics are being constructed in the UK and elsewhere. I discuss the problems concerned with the practicalities of studying children's bodies in a setting in which the body is effaced. I argue that the problems arising from this effacement are compounded by children's embarrassment about their bodies, particularly in a situation in which bodies are supposed to be invisible. Related to this, I argue that children's and young people's bodies that are made visible in schools and other public or semi-public arenas are rendered pathological by that very visibility. I suggest that we can see all these metaphorically pathological bodies in terms of a failure of or resistance to the disciplinary institutions of the school a...

A meditation in which consideration is given to the past and future engagement of social science generally and critical physical education and sports scholarship in particular with various scientific debates, including the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and contemporary manifestations of biological determinism

Abstract: My purpose in this paper is to consider the relationship between, on the one hand, critical social science and, on the other hand, existing and emerging sciences of the body. Taking my lead from the sociologist, Steve Fuller, I discuss the ways in which some social scientists, both within and outside physical education and sport, have engaged with the idea of an ‘obesity epidemic’, generally falling between the distant poles of naive acceptance and ideological rejection. Using new and emerging forms of biological determinism as a second example, I describe the colonising tendencies of particular medical and biological sciences, such that robustly social understandings of the body and less instrumental approaches to physical education are, in some senses, at risk. A future social science of the body needs to be more scientifically literate in order for the excesses of science to be managed or tamed. In other words, the job of the social scientist is to be able to speak more than one language.

Understanding teachers: the potential and possibility of discourse analysis

Abstract: Understanding the ways in which teachers make sense of what they do and why is critical to a broader understanding of pedagogy. Historically, teachers have been understood through the thematic and content analysis of their beliefs or philosophies. In this paper, we argue that discourse analysis (DA) involves a much finer-grained analysis of the ‘lifeworlds’ of teachers and, in our view, provides a more detailed canvas from which inferences can be made. Our argument is structured in four parts. We begin by locating DA within the physical education (PE) literature and discuss what others have referred to as its relatively modest use. Following our location of DA, we outline a conceptual framework that we regard as useful, which contains six interrelated principles. We then introduce the idea of interpretive repertoires, which we consider to have particular explanatory power as well as being a sophisticated way to represent the subjectivities of PE teachers. Finally, we discuss the methodological strengths of interpretive repertoires. The paper concludes with a discussion on the theoretical and practical merits of adopting DA to analyse problems within PE.

Using discursive strategies, playing policy games and shaping the future of physical education

Abstract: This paper presents a critical analysis of the representation of physical education (PE) in the 1992 Senate inquiry into ‘Physical and Sport Education’ in Australia. Analysis focuses specifically upon how and why a new professional discourse, fundamental motor skills (FMS), gained a privileged position in the inquiry, the inquiry report and in subsequent PE policy and practice across Australia. This paper examines the complex policy processes and power-relations underpinning the progressive legitimisation of the FMS discourse, and identifies subtleties and variations in the expression of the discourse. Attention is drawn to the strategic appropriation of established professional discourses and utilisation of crisis discourses in establishing and gaining support for the FMS discourse. The analysis reaffirms policy arenas as sites of contestation but highlights that they are simultaneously sites of possibility for PE professionals who are prepared and able to use discursive resources in strategic ways. The ...