I am sailing—towards a transactional analysis of ‘body techniques’

In recent years there has been a growing interest in questions related to embodiment and learning. Within the field of ‘body pedagogics’ great efforts have been made to develop theory and methodology that can deal with the corporeal aspects of experience and knowledge without adopting any form of dualistic conceptions of body/mind and organism/environment. This article connects to this body of research. The purpose is to first present a synthesis of James' radical empiricism, Dewey's transactional understanding of experience and learning and Marcel Mauss' concept of ‘body techniques’ and the notion of education embedded in it. Against the background of this theoretical development, and with a Transactional Model of Analyzing Bodying (TMAB), we then show how we can analytically come to terms with different dualistic problems that research into ‘body pedagogics’ has to deal with. We use an empirical example of dinghy sailing to create knowledge about what we learn when learning embodied knowledge, and how this learning takes place. We argue that experience is an important concept for understanding the acting knowing human being, describing how experience is organized and developed and outlining how this organization can be understood as learning. We hold that situations where someone learns to embody certain knowledge are cases of overt actions, in which we can see what kinds of relations are created and how these relations become meaningful for further action.     

‘I took this picture because … ’: accessing teachers' depictions of change

Background: Achieving teacher change and the lofty goals of educational reform initiatives necessitates professional development (PD) designed to help teachers rethink their practice. A key implication for physical education, therefore, is that PD must be organized in ways that utilize teachers' voice, providing opportunities for teachers to build or extend their own capacity to engage in ongoing learning. Yet, while the desired outcome of PD is capacity-building resulting in teacher change, teachers' needs and interests remain largely ignored.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the potential of using participatory visual methods as a pedagogical and methodological tool to facilitate teacher articulation of change. Specifically, we sought to understand teachers' depictions of their own change.

Theoretical framework: The project was grounded in constructivist learning theory as the pedagogical use of visual methods provided teachers a way to understand, interpret, and think about the curriculum change and their teaching.

Participants and setting: Four physical education teachers, all female, were the participants.

Data sources: Data sources included (a) participants' digital photographs, (b) photo-elicitation interviews, and (c) field notes from observations of all PD sessions, conference presentations, and multiple lessons taught by the teachers.

Data analysis: Data were analyzed using two distinct yet overlapping processes derived from grounded theory: open and axial coding.

Findings: Visual methods allowed participants to articulate three distinct changes as a result of the curriculum development PD process: (a) changes in practice, (b) changes to interpersonal working relationships, and (c) intrapersonal changes. First, the use of visual methods allowed these teachers to identify four multidimensional student learning-focused changes to their teaching practice: outcomes based instruction, increased and differentiated practice, deliberate focus on the affective domain, and assessment to document learning. Second, changes to interpersonal working relations as a result of the curriculum development were documented. These changes provided the initial forum for collaboration as well as solidarity among the teachers to complete a defined task. Third, empowered by their increased skills and knowledge, these teachers experienced intrapersonal changes as they embraced their roles as teachers, professionals, and leaders. All four teachers expressed increased sense of self as a result of their changes in curriculum, assessment, and approach to teaching.

Conclusions: These teachers accomplished a great deal as they departed from what they knew well to try new practices and strategies. The use of visual methods documented this complex process. This study has several implications for the use of visual methods. The first is their value as a way for teachers to discuss their own learning and reflect on their practice. Second, the use of photographs and associated photo-elicitation interviews served as a valid research tool which successfully accessed teachers' implicit learning. Finally, a combination of methodologies provided different, yet complimentary information about teachers' depictions of change.     

‘I just want to be me when I am exercising’: Adrianna's construction of a vulnerable exercise identity

This study explores the social and dynamic aspects of the concept ‘exercise identity’. Previous research, mainly in psychology, has documented a link between exercise identity and exercise behaviour. However, the process of identity formation is not straightforward but rather something that can change with time, context and interaction with others. Subsequently, the present work is informed by a social constructivist approach that views exercise identity as a social product and the formation of it as a social process. Our case study of ‘Adrianna’ examined through a biographical narrative analysis how such an identity may be constructed through interaction and over the life course. Three themes were identified; Adrianna's relationship to (1) significant others, (2) her body and (3) sociocultural norms and expectations. Reflecting this fluidity of exercise identities, we suggest the alternative concept ‘vulnerable exercise identity’ to better understand the subtler dynamics of exercise identity formation and development. Adrianna's case is presented as a ‘recognizable story’, representative of the struggle many people face when trying to become more physically active in contemporary western societies.     

The effect of abusive leadership by coaches on Division I student-athletes’ performance: The moderating role of core self-evaluations

The aim of this study was to increase our understanding of the harm of abusive leadership on followers’ performance. Student-athletes (N = 145) at a US institution completed surveys. The authors used hierarchical regression analysis and an independent samples t-test to assess the hypotheses. Consistent with core self-evaluations theory, results revealed that core self-evaluations moderate the negative relationship between abusive leader behavior and student-athlete performance, such that the negative relationship is weakened for those with higher, rather than lower, levels of core self-evaluations. Results further indicated that women student-athletes are likely to have lower levels of core self-evaluations than are men, thus highlighting the potential increased impact that abusive leadership may have on women and their performance. Implications of these findings for research, theory and practice on abusive leadership and performance are discussed.     

‘Why am I putting myself through this?’ Women football coaches’ experiences of the Football Association's coach education process

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the provision of formal coach education. However, research has repeatedly demonstrated how coach education has had a limited impact on the learning and development of coach practitioners. To date however, these investigations have avoided female coach populations. Ten women football coaches who had recently completed various association football coach education courses participated in this study. Following the interpretive analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews the findings revealed high levels of gender discrimination and inappropriate cultural practice. The women's experiences are discussed in line with the Bourdieuian notions of social acceptance, symbolic language and power. The women coaches provided a number of recommendations for future coach education provision, which in turn, may help to improve the experiences for those women who participate in the coach education process.     

A Kantian view of Suits’ Utopia: ‘a kingdom of autotelically-motivated game players’

In this paper, I engage the debate on Suits’ theory of games by providing a Kantian view of Utopia. I argue that although the Kantian aspects of Suits’ approach are often overlooked in comparison to its Socratic-Platonic aspects, Kant’s ideas play a fundamental role in Suits’ proposal. In particular, Kant’s concept of ‘regulative idea’ is the basis of Suits’ Utopia. I regard Utopia as Suits’ regulative idea on game playing. In doing so, I take Utopia to play a double role in Suits’ theory of games. First, it highlights the primary condition of possibility of game-playing, namely, the lusory attitude. Second, it provides a normative criterion that serves as a critical principle to evaluate instances of game playing and as a counterfactual assumption that makes game playing possible. I provide further support for my Kantian interpretation of Suits’ Utopia by bringing to light the anthropological assumptions upon which Utopia is built. In doing so, I argue that both Suits’ theory of games, in general, and his Utopia, in particular, lay out the conditions of possibility of game playing, not an analysis on the life most worth living.     

‘You Had to Cover Nadia Comaneci’: ‘Points of Change’ in Coverage of Women’s Sport

Abstract

In the 1970s, women’s sport underwent significant change in the United States resulting in an increase of participation opportunities and funding at the interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and international levels. Yet, media outlets continued to ignore women and, at best, portray them in gender stereotypical ways. Considering the lack of progress for women in sports media coverage, this study employs sport historian Jaime Schultz’s ‘points of change’ framework in order to identify those moments that constituted an ideological shift in the process of covering women’s sport. Drawing upon oral history interviews with journalists who wrote about women’s sport in the 1970s and 1980s, this research provides a deeper look into how journalists experienced and addressed the shifting gender ideologies of the time period. Journalists’ memories, accompanied by their articles, reveal how media practitioners negotiated meanings about femininity and athleticism in response to events that challenged deeply embedded assumptions about gender and its intersections with ethnicity, race and sexuality. This exploratory research, thus, identifies several ‘points of change’ – or points of struggle, conflict and resistance – and calls for a re-periodization of the history of women’s sports coverage.     

‘Where do I go from here?’: learning to become activist teachers through a community of practice

Background: Student-Centered Inquiry as Curriculum (SCIC) is an activist approach [Oliver, K. L., and H. A. Oesterreich. 2013. Student-Centered Inquiry as Curriculum as a Model for Field-Based Teacher Education. Journal of Curriculum Studies 45 (3): 394–417. doi:10.1080/00220272.2012.719550] inspired by years of research with youth. It was designed as a means of listening and responding to youth in order to better facilitate students’ interest, motivation, and learning in physical education settings. While we have a strong and growing body of activist research with youth in physical education, SCIC as a specific approach to working with youth is in its infancy; thus, there is a need to further explore the challenges teachers/researchers face learning to use this approach to teaching.

Purpose: This study explores how educators, in different contexts, learn to use an activist approach called SCIC, in order to better facilitate students’ interest, motivation, and learning in physical education and physical activity settings.

Research setting and participants: Participants included a university professor, a college instructor, a postdoctoral student, a doctoral student, and a pre-service teacher. Data were collected between January and May 2016.

Data collection and analysis: Data collection included weekly field notes and debriefings following observations, teacher artifacts, weekly collaborative group meetings, and two individual interviews per teaching participant.

Discussion and conclusions: The main challenge that emerged was learning how to move from a theoretical understanding of student-centered pedagogy to the practice of student-centered pedagogy. Specifically, the amount of time that was necessary to build a foundation that allowed for student and teacher understanding, respect, and comfort, negotiating teacher and student assumptions that were embedded in the status quo of physical education (PE), and the struggle to gather and use meaningful data to guide pedagogical decisions. We negotiated these challenges through our professional learning community whereby we worked to all be able to see and name what was happening in our individual classes and collectively planned what was needed to move forward through these challenges.     

‘I just want to watch the match’: a practitioner’s reflective account of men’s health themed match day events at an English Premier League football club

This study reflects on the effectiveness and delivery of a series of health themed match day events at an English Premier League Football Club which aimed to create awareness and motivate men to adopt recommended health behaviours. A range of marketing techniques and activities were adopted within a targeted space and time to increase men’s exposure to health information. The first author adopted a practitioner-cum-researcher role and was immersed in the planning and delivery of the events utilising the principles of ethnography. Data were predominately collated through observations and personal reflections logged via autobiographical field notes. Data were analysed through abductive reasoning. In general, men were reluctant to engage in health-related behaviours on match days. However, subtle, non-invasive approaches were deemed successful. Positive outcomes and case studies from the latter techniques are presented and suggestions for effective strategies that will better engage men in health information and behaviours are made.     

The Social Background of Ireland’s Pre-World War I Association Football Clubs,Players and Administrators: The Case of South and West Ulster

This paper examines the development of association football in the South and West Ulster counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, Cavan, and Monaghan in the pre-World War One era against the backdrop of the sporting ‘revolution’ and the political and social climate in Ireland at that time. While the Irish Football Association was founded in Belfast in 1880 and the game’s early growth in Ireland was centred in East Ulster, South and West Ulster were areas which were rather dislocated from the hearth of soccer in the province’s largest city, where professional structures were in place by 1894 and where senior and junior association football clubs were strongest. The origins of a number of clubs are examined and it will be shown that despite a lack of major industry and a professional structure, by the early 1900s, the game of soccer had established a strong role within society in many local communities in the area. An examination of the social backgrounds of players and administrators illustrates that leagues and cups were played on a cross-community basis in many areas and that patronage, as well as player participation and administration, came from nationalists as well as unionists.     

From ‘philosophy of sport’ to ‘philosophies of sports’? History,identity and diversification of sport philosophy

My goal in this article is to give a portrait of how modern sport philosophy, which started in 1972, developed from relatively narrow paradigmatic borders to become a diverse and multi-paradigmatic international discipline. This development has included several changes but also some continuity. I identify three main tenets that may be viable in the future. One is to focus on the traditional sport philosophical paradigm, which had an ambition to identify the essence of sport. A second option is to develop more specific approaches, focusing on single sports or types of sport, like football or climbing. A third alternative is to develop a philosophy, not only of sport but of ‘homo movens’, studying the moving human being in different environmental and socio-cultural contexts. All three options are viable and should be welcomed.     

Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’

Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given that coaches’ practices have largely been formed through relations of power that subordinate and objectify athletes’ bodies through the regular application of a range of disciplinary techniques and instruments [e.g. Barker-Ruchti, N., &; Tinning, R. (2010). Foucault in leotards: Corporeal discipline in women's artistic gymnastics. Sociology of Sport Journal, 27, 229–250; Heikkala, J. (1993). Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competing. Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 397–412; Gearity, B., &; Mills, J. P. (2012). Discipline and punish in the weight room. Sports Coaching Review, 1, 124–134]? In other words, to try to develop athlete-centered coaches capable of coaching in ways that will empower their athletes without also problematizing the discursive formation of coaches’ practices concerns us [Denison, J., &; Mills, J. P. (2014). Planning for distance running: Coaching with Foucault. Sports Coaching Review, 3, 1–16]. Put differently: how can athlete empowerment initiatives be anything more than rhetoric within a disciplinary framework that normalizes maximum coach control? It is this question that we intend to explore in this paper. More specifically, as Foucauldians, we will argue that coaching with greater consideration for athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences needs to entail coaching in a less disciplinary way and with an awareness and appreciation of the many unseen effects that disciplinary power can have on coaches’ practices and athletes’ bodies.     

Sociology of a scandal: the emergence of ‘FIFAgate’

This article examines the social forces underlying FIFAgate. Why do corrupt practices, which are often highly consolidated or even institutionalized, suddenly become scandalous? What is a scandal? Why did FIFA fall into crisis in 2015 and not before? To answer these questions, it is necessary to look at the sequence of thrusts and parries between all the parties involved. Our analysis embraces the notion that social processes are based on relationships in order to provide insights into why and how denunciations can lead to long-tolerated corrupt practices suddenly becoming compromising enough to force an organization’s leaders to implement measures that would have previously been unimaginable. We use multiple sources to examine the emergence of FIFAgate and the way FIFA overcame previous critical situations, describing how FIFA neutralized earlier allegations and developed a remarkable ‘resilience’ to scandal. Finally, we analyse the successive mobilizations whose domino effect led to the emergence of FIFAgate and the measures FIFA took to contain the scandal. Our research enabled us to draw up a new theoretical model for analysing corruption scandals.     

‘I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as aboriginal games’: a figurational account of how Indigenous students experience physical education

This article is about how Indigenous students from Year 7 to 10 at three government schools in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) experience PE. The research question being, how do Indigenous students experience PE at the schools selected for the research? A process oriented approach was used to answer this question. In particular, figurational sociology was chosen because of its usefulness in interpreting sociological problems processually. The idea of the figuration or configuration was utilized to represent human power relationships, as well as systems and processes. The study also drew upon the complimentary figurational concept of habitus. An accompanying methodology sympathetic to figurational sociology reconstructed the macro and micro levels of the figuration studied. This figuration being the PE provision across the three sites. The macro level depicts the contemporary social structure or ‘rules’ of the figuration and the micro level the individuals that exist within this social structure. Data were collected over a two year period using semi-structured interviews, school websites, school based documentation and wider ACT Education and Training Directorate system level documents. The research found that Indigenous students experience almost entirely Eurocentric PE that lacks acknowledgment of their own culture. The PE provided is an example of ‘superior’ knowledge characteristic of dominant groups. The research also showed that the habituses of key players such as principals, Health and Physical Education curriculum writers and teachers were pivotal as long-term processes in upholding Eurocentric PE content. The findings suggest that for Indigenous perspectives to be included in PE as stipulated in national level documentation, policy directives alone are inadequate. For meaningful change to take place alteration at the habitus level of the mentioned key players has to occur and such change requires a multi-faceted approach.     

A critical analysis of the conceptualisation of ‘coaching philosophy’

The aim of this paper was to critically review existing literature relating to, and critically analyse current conceptualisations of, ‘coaching philosophy’. The review reveals a bewildering approach to definitions, terms and frameworks that have limited explanation and reveal a lack of conceptual clarity. It is argued that rather than provide clarification and understanding the existing literature conflates coaching rhetoric and ideology with coaching philosophy and serves to reproduce existing coaching discourse rather than explain coaching practice. The paper problematises the unquestioned assumptions currently underpinning ‘coaching philosophy’; namely the overemphasis of coaches' agency and reflexivity, the downplaying of the significance of social structure on coaches' dispositions and the acceptance that coaching practice is an entirely conscious activity. The paper argues for an alternative philosophy of coaching that uses philosophic thinking to help coaches question existing ideology, and critically evaluate the assumptions and beliefs underpinning their practice.     

From the kids to ‘The Kids’ – the development of negative social capital I a Little League Baseball organization

Abstract

Based on extensive fieldwork within a youth baseball league in the American Southwest, this paper has two goals. First, I make a conceptual distinction between the dark side of social capital and what I term “negative social capital.” Second, I detail how negative social capital developed and was deployed within the Valley City Little League, with an emphasis on origins and the consequences for both the individuals involved as well as the league as a whole. I also examine how negative social capital was able to develop in a child-centered voluntary organization, an anomaly within extant research on negative relationships in such organizations.     

‘I was there from the start’: The identity-maintenance strategies used by fans to combat the threat of losing

On-field performances are a key, yet uncontrollable, determinant of team identification. In this research, we explore how fans of a new team, with an overwhelming loss to win ratio, maintain a positive social identity. Qualitative data gathered from 20 semi-structured interviews were used to address this research objective. Our findings indicated fans use social creativity and social mobility strategies to help preserve a positive and distinctive group identity. In the absence of success, fans evaluated the group on dimensions that reflected positively on, and emphasised the distinctiveness of, group membership. Fans also sought to increase their status in the group to increase the positivity of this association. We use these findings to extend understanding of social identity theory and provide recommendations for sport organisations with unfavourable performance records. Recommendations are themed around highlighting the unique nature of the group and favourable status comparisons between members of the in-group.     

Spectators’ points of attachment and their influence on behavioural intentions of women’s national football games

Research on women’s football is still, especially in Asia, scarce. The purpose of this research has been to investigate the underlying points of attachment of women’s football spectators and how these influence future behaviour. The points of attachment scale – drawing on social identity theory – developed previously has been modified for the research setting to detect whether they are general determinants or country-specific indicators. Research was conducted in two countries, namely Japan and Germany. Surveys were conducted at two friendlies of the national team in each country (Japan: n = 607; Germany: n = 597). Attachment with the team, coach and women’s sport were defining overall attachment best. Intention to attend matches of the national team was significantly predicted by football attachment and previously attended games, while intention to attend matches of the league was significantly predicted by attachment with the coach and attended league games in the past.