Physical education at preschools: practitioners’ and children’s engagements with physical activity and health discourses

This paper focuses on one aspect of a qualitative study concerned with investigating the place and meaning of ‘physical education’ to practitioners and children at three preschools in Scotland. We examine the ways in which the participants engaged with discourses related to physical activity and health in order to construct their subjectivities. Fourteen practitioners and 70 children participated. Research methods employed were observations, interviews with adults, a group drawing and discussion activity with children, and interviews with children. Both the adults’ and children’s talk illustrated the dominance of neoliberal, healthism meanings that position individuals as responsible for their own health. While the children’s talk primarily centred on health as a corporeal notion, the practitioners tended to talk about physical activity and health in both corporeal terms and in relation to the self more holistically. The practitioners also talked about physical activity as a means of regulating children’s behaviour.     

Risk Reduction: Recontexualizing Health As a Physical Education Curriculum

While there is sufficient evidence to suggest that physical activity is inversely related to lifestyle diseases, researchers are far from being certain that this evidence extends to children. Nevertheless, the school physical education curriculum has been targeted as an institutional agency that could have a significant impact on health during childhood and later during adulthood if individuals could be habituated to assume a physically active lifestyle. The purpose of this article is to examine the recontextualization of biomedical knowledge into an ideology of healthism in which health is conceived as a controllable certainty and used as a pedagogical construction to transform school physical education. Using a Foucauldian perspective, we explore how the atomized biomedical model of chemical and physical relationships is constructed, reproduced, and perpetuated to service and empower the discourse and the practices of researchers and scholars. In this process the sociological or cultural aspects of public health are marginalized or ignored. As a result of this examination, alternative approaches are proposed that engage the limitations of the biomedical model and openly consider the insights that are available from the social sciences regarding what participation in physical activity means to individuals.     

Values and Health Education: a critique of individualism

Contemporary health education and promotion programmes are criticised for their confused and equivocal value positions. Where any recognisably distinct moral stance is discernible in current approaches, this is typically supported by an appeal to some form of individualistic ethics which has its roots in the traditional medical model of health and illness. It is argued that value‐neutral and information based strategies should be replaced by programmes with clearly articulated and rationally supported value foundations. The hidden curriculum of individualism in health education is attacked on the grounds that it fails to acknowledge the structural inequalities in society which effectively determine the health of individuals. In its place a social model of practice, incorporating an analysis of the socio‐economic determinants of health and illness, is recommended, and this is supported by appeals to utilitarian ethics and to social morality and justice.     

Individualization,the new political spectrum and the functions of adult education

The ambivalences of individualization have triggered a new discourse on social policy. The central themes in this discourse are the promotion of social integration and participation. This new political discourse has thwarted the old left‐right continuum and given rise to a new political spectrum. On one side of this new political spectrum are political perspectives that emphasize integration, solidarity, community. The authors call these collectivistic perspectives. On the other side of the spectrum are perspectives that interpret individualization as the triumph of freedom of choice for individuals. The authors call these the individualistic perspectives. They then describe the spectrum between collectivism and individualism in detail and link each perspective to programmes in adult education typical of such a perspective. In conclusion, the authors summarize their own position in respect of the mission of adult education.     

Meritocracy,deficit thinking and the invisibility of the system: Discourses on educational success and failure

Socio‐ethnic stratification and segregation processes present in Flemish society are reflected in the everyday school environment. Pupils with a different socio‐ethnic background than the dominant majority and middle class seem to be confronted with a lot of difficulties in this school system. The dominant meritocratic discourse frequently applies a deficit thinking perspective to frame educational success and failure, focusing on deficiencies originating outside of the school. In this paper we analyse newly collected survey data (N = 11,015 pupils) and a large amount of qualitative data (from pupils, parents, teachers, principals) to answer our two main research questions: (i) how is educational success/failure defined, and (ii) how is educational success/failure explained? The factor analyses as well as the qualitative analyses illustrate how the idea of meritocracy relates to individualistic features such as effort, merit and competence. However, the findings also reveal that this individualistic approach goes hand‐in‐hand with a focus on the family environment and ‘culture’ which seems to limit individual agency to a large extent. In these discourses, pupils, parents and even teachers are presented as being largely determined by their direct social environment with almost no regard for social inequalities within the educational system. The paper ends with a discussion on how processes of victimization and the denial of systemic bias, influence educational trajectories and proposes a different approach to multiculturalism and the appreciation of cultural background and specific family resources as positive elements in these trajectories.     

Educating women about HIV/AIDS: some international comparisons

This paper describes current trends in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It looks at issues and strategies involved in educating women about HIV/AIDS in the context of the global pandemic, focusing particularly on Canada and Vietnam. These strategies are essential steps in preventing the spread of HIV and in caring for those who have already developed AIDS. The strategies identified include the formulation of public policy within Canada, Vietnam, and the UK which would strive to eliminate inequality and discrimination, while at the same time positioning HIV/AIDS education within a gender‐sensitive perspective. Other educational strategies include teaching women how to practise negotiated safety while understanding the power dynamics within which safer sex must occur, being sensitive to local cultures and moving away from individualistic programmes towards programmes that focus on structural inequalities.     

School building design for feeding programmes and community outreach: Insights from Ghana and South Africa

This article investigates how school building design can support primary school feeding programmes in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore it argues for schools to become community “development hubs”; incorporating both local access to education and also to programmes for nutrition, ICT, health education and other services, outside of school hours. It reviews the literature on school feeding programmes. Data from field research on schools in Ghana and South Africa is used to identify the key design issues for schools delivering feeding programmes. It considers how national education policies can affect school planning and building priorities. The article concludes by calling for the evolution of a new school design model, in which the school site becomes a “development hub”, supporting children” education, associated support activities including school feeding, and importantly also, integrated community development outreach activities.     

Meaningful evaluation of sex and relationship education

Effective sex and relationship education promotes agency and targets sexual practice as it is socially produced. The aim of evaluation therefore is to contribute to good sexual health through identifying when and how education is promoting agency and changes in sexual practice. Good evaluation takes account of the complexities of the specific object being addressed—sexual practice—which is fluid and essentially social. Innovative study design and the use of rigorous and transparent methods enable evaluators to track and understand the slow, unsteady and sometimes unpredictable mechanisms of change. The data gathered (both quantitative and qualitative) require interpretation, and interpretations inform the development of sex and relationship education programmes. Randomised controlled trials do not meet these criteria of meaningful evaluation, nor do evaluations of one‐off interventions. This paper considers the role of cross‐sectional and longitudinal surveys, in‐depth qualitative studies, and reviews in evaluating whether education works, how it works, how its messages are being actively taken up and transformed by the target population, and in informing the development of future education.     

‘It's just the way it is…’ or not? How physical education teachers categorise and normalise differences

This article explores how Dutch physical education (PE) teachers discursively construct body differences between students related to gender, (dis)ability and health. Our results show how disciplinary technologies of categorisation and normalisation are embedded in two distinct discourses that our participants used: the discourse of naturalness for explaining and managing differences in gender and ability and the discourse of transformation for explaining and managing differences in health. Both these discourses produced body norms in PE as male, abled and slender. However, how the teachers managed deviance and normalcy varies per discourse. ‘Fat’ bodies that were produced as deviant through the discourse of transformation were disciplined in explicit ways. The use of the discourse of naturalness resulted in justification and naturalisation of perceived differences in gender and (dis)ability and practices such as differentiated teaching.     

Body pedagogies,P/policy,health and gender

Schools within a ‘knowledge economy’ nurture and endorse particular ‘corporeal orientations’, that is to say, ascribe value, meaning and potential to ‘the body’ (particular bodies) in time, place and space. Such processes reflect wider (national and global) socio‐economic trends. In contemporary culture, these processes increasingly celebrate particular virtues—‘flexible identities’, the manifest aspects of ‘performance’ and ‘corporeal perfection’ (usually defined as ‘the slender ideal’). Calling on the voices of a number of young women (aged 11–18) the article illustrates how these processes can intersect to seriously damage some people's health, perhaps especially those of young women and girls. The analyses suggest that the expectations of a ‘knowledge economy’ relating to the body and health enter the school system through two forms of P/policy: ‘formal’, state‐sanctioned, usually legislated education Policy; and ‘informal’, mainly medical and health institution‐based, state ‘approved’ but non‐legislated, pseudo policy initiatives often merely reflecting expectations and pressures laundered through the popular media. Together, these P/policies define not only formal education but increasingly encode other aspects of school life, in effect, making ‘pedagogy’ everyone's concern, everywhere. The article highlights the relentless and inescapable nature of pedagogical activity in the Totally Pedagogised Micro Societies (TPMS) which schools have become.     

Beyond the birds and the bees: constituting a discourse of erotics in sexuality education

A tradition of predominately feminist literature has revealed that there is a ‘missing discourse of desire’ in many sex education programmes. Building on this work, this article explores the gendered effects of this de‐eroticized and clinical form of education. It is argued that young women and men's (hetero)sexual subjectivities are differentially affected by the invisibility of desire and pleasure in this curriculum. To offer young women a sense of personal empowerment and entitlement, and young men a broader range of (hetero)sexual subjectivities, it is proposed that sex education include a discourse of erotics. This would comprise more than an acknowledgement of desire and pleasure and incorporate the embodied practicalities of these experiences. As a means of developing this discourse within sexuality programmes, empirical evidence of 17‐ to 19‐year‐olds' experiences of desire and pleasure are examined.     

Gender equality in German universities: vernacularising the battle for the best brains

We examine how global pressures for competitiveness and gender equality have merged into a discourse of ‘inclusive excellence’ in the twenty-first century and shaped three recent German higher education programmes. After placing these programmes in the larger discourse about gender inequalities, we focus on how they adapt current global concerns about both being ‘the best’ and increasing ‘gender equality’ in locally specific ways, a process called vernacularisation. German equality advocates used ‘meeting international standards’ as leverage, drew on self-governance norms among universities, used formal gender plans as mechanisms to direct change, and set up competition to legitimate intervention. This specific incremental policy path for increasing women's status in German universities also mobilised the national funding agency and local gender equality officers as key actors, and placed particular emphasis on family friendliness as the expression of organisational commitment to gender equality.     

自媒体视域下大学生思想政治教育的话语权分析

随着自媒体的诞生与发展,传统思想政治教育的话语权逐渐受到挑战,教育主体的话语权威逐渐被消解,传统、单一的教学方式逐渐被多元化、新潮的自媒体兼容,教育者的传统话语表达方式无法适应自媒体环境,这一系列原因都造成了当前大学生思想政治教育话语权的困境。在自媒体环境中,如何提升思想政治教育的话语权成为亟待解决的问题。     

Counselling in a Discursive World

Dominant psychological theories receive ongoing criticism for their reliance on deficit-based models of human being and an adherence to individualistic notions of social action. Recent offerings from the fields of discursive psychology and community psychology provide counsellors with alternative conceptual and practical resources for strategic engagement. This paper briefly introduces both areas and suggests how they may contribute to counselling in educational settings. An example is given showing how discourse works through language to construct and inform accounts of school exclusion. The primary question for each of us, counsellors and community members alike, is whether prevailing constructions promote (or discourage) the mental health of school communities.     

At the Threshold of Architecture

In structuring the programme of our interior design studio, we questioned two assumptions that are central to the discourse of modern architecture: the site being empty of its unique traits, images, stories; and the user being devoid of human subjectivities, perception, imagination, memory. The two projects we relate here, titled Interpretations and (Dis)connections, address threshold/boundary conditions. Throughout four stages of Interpretations, we tried to challenge the concepts of ‘empty space’ and ‘universal man’ either by leaving site as well as user outside of our construct or capitalizing specifically on their entire load. (Dis)connections, on the other hand, was based on interpretations of a film, a reference outside the functional paradigms of architecture. Themes/constructs/patterns identified in the film generated design ideas, then programmes, sites and, finally, designs through a sequence of transitions and transformations. This entire process enabled the reconsideration of relations between building/site and building/user and other provided possibilities for questioning the boundaries of the discipline of architecture itself.     

In-service training programmes for mathematics teachers nested in transnational policy discourses

Results in mathematics on international knowledge surveys like Programme for International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study have become one of the most important factors for the perceived success or failure of schools and even entire education systems in the policy arena. In this article, we explore the complex recontextualising processes that occur when translating educational policy into actual programmes for teachers’ education. First, the transnational education policy discourse(s) of teachers’ in-service training with a focus on mathematics will be explored. Second, we examine how this transnational discourse is recontextualised in a national policy discourse resulting in a national reform programme for in-service training of mathematics teachers in Sweden. In a third step, concrete teacher training courses in mathematics are examined. The result shows a convergence between the official policy discourse and the pedagogic recontextualising field in terms of a broad teaching repertoire and peer discussions about reflections on certain common objects of learning.     

新时代高校辅导员思想政治教育话语能力提升路径研究

高校辅导员是高校思想政治教育的骨干力量,辅导员的思想政治教育话语能力是决定高校辅导员开展思想政治教育工作成效的重要因素,在新时代背景下研究如何提升高校辅导员思想政治教育话语的能力,对进一步增强辅导员对大学生开展日常管理和思想教育的手段和媒介运用的效果、推动辅导员专业化队伍的建设,都具有现实的研究意义.     

The body made flesh: embodied learning and the corporeal device

Over recent years there has been growing appreciation of the body’s corporeal significance in how children learn in educational settings. ‘The body’ has been conceptualised from a variety of perspectives that we characterise as: ’the body without flesh’, ‘the body with fleshy feelings’ and ‘the body made flesh’. We reflect on these perspectives with reference to the model of embodied action used in our ongoing research on relationships between education and disordered bodies, outlining what they might differently offer in terms of understanding body/mind/culture relationships. We suggest that Basil Bernstein’s notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’, may provide one way of better conceptualising such relationships avoiding some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. If, as sociologists or school practitioners, we are to address the agency of ‘the body’ in cultural reproduction and better understand how the corporeal realities of children influence their sense of position, value and self, then we will need to deal with both the ‘physical’ and the ‘phenomenal’ universes of discourse, and the ‘somatic mediations’ of lived experience. This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation currently receives.