Data assemblages,sentient schools and digitised health and physical education (response to Gard)

Michael Gard raises some important issues in his opinion piece on digitised health and physical education (HPE) in the school setting. His piece represents the beginning of a more critical approach to the instrumental and solutionist perspectives that are currently offered on digitised HPE. Few commentators in education, health promotion or sports studies have begun to realise the extent to which digital data surveillance and analytics are now encroaching into many social institutions and settings and the ways in which actors and agencies in the digital knowledge economy are appropriating these data. Identifying what is happening and the implications for the concepts of selfhood, body and social relations, not to mention the more specific issues of privacy and the commercialisation and exploitation of personal data, requires much greater attention than these issues have previously received in the critical social research literature. While Gard has begun to do this in his article, there is much more to discuss. In this response, I present some discussion that seeks to provide a complementary commentary on the broader context in which digitised HPE is developing and manifesting. Whether or not one takes a position that is techno-utopian, dystopian or somewhere in between, I would argue that to fully understand the social, cultural and political resonances of digitised HPE, such contextualising is vital.     

Some possible effects of behaviour management training on teacher confidence and competence: evidence from a study of primary school teachers in Hong Kong

This study aims to explore the relationships between the extent and perceived quality of teachers’ experience of training in behaviour management (BM), and their awareness of the nature and extent of behavioural problems among school students, and their confidence in their own competence to deal with such problems. Teachers (n = 183) from Hong Kong primary schools were surveyed. The results showed that gender, age and whether teachers have received training had no significant influence on teachers’ awareness, conception and confidence regarding BM. A negative correlation was found between teachers’ levels of satisfaction in relation to their training experiences and their perceptions of the level of problematic behaviours among students, and the impact of students’ problematic behaviour on their teaching. A positive correlation was found between teachers’ levels of satisfaction in relation to their training experiences and their confidence in their own competence to deal with students’ problematic behaviour.