Shirt sponsorship by gambling companies in the English and Scottish Premier Leagues: global reach and public health concerns

While the nature of gambling practices is contested, a strong evidence base demonstrates that gambling can become a serious disorder and have a range of detrimental effects for individuals, communities and societies. Over the last decade, football in the UK has become visibly entwined with gambling marketing. To explore this apparent trend, we tracked shirt sponsors in both the English and Scottish Premier Leagues since 1992 and found a pronounced increase in the presence of sponsorship by gambling companies. This increase occurred at the same time the Gambling Act 2005, which liberalized rules, was introduced. We argue that current levels of gambling sponsorship in UK football, and the global visibility it provides to gambling brands, is a public health concern that needs to be debated and addressed. We recommend that legislators revisit the relationship between football in the UK and the sponsorship it receives from the gambling industry.     

A Content Analysis of Physical Activity in TV Shows Popular Among Adolescents

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that television has the potential to influence youth behaviors, but little evidence exists on how television depicts physical activity (PA), an important public health priority for youth. This mixed-methods study investigated depictions of television characters' participation in PA in the top 25 favorite shows ranked by a diverse sample of 2,793 adolescents. Method: Randomly selected episodes from each show were content-analyzed for PA incidents, reasons, and context and in relation to the gender and weight status of participating characters. Results: A total of 374 incidents of PA were coded across 75 episodes, with an average of 5.0 incidents per episode. Although male and female characters were equally likely to engage in at least 1 incident of PA, male characters were involved in a statistically significantly larger proportion of PA incidents than were female characters, and they were more likely to engage in PA for competitive sport. There was no statistically significant difference in engagement in PA or the proportion of PA incidents for characters coded as overweight compared with nonoverweight characters. Conclusions: Although female characters tended to be underrepresented in PA, this study reveals positive messages for how gender and weight are portrayed in relation to PA on TV.     

Enhancing Family Learning Through Exhibits

Can enhanced exhibits produce measurable increases in active family learning? Four Philadelphia area science institutions—The Franklin Institute Science Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the New Jersey State Aquarium at Camden, and the Philadelphia Zoo—have investigated the answer to this question as part of the PISEC (Philadelphia-Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative) Family Learning Project. PISEC is conducting research and exhibit development aimed at increasing the understanding of family learning in science museums and identifying the characteristics of successful family learning exhibits. The PISEC project is organized into three phases: (1) a research study to establish behavioral indicators for family science learning (Borun et al., 1996); (2) the development and evaluation of four exhibit enhancements aimed at achieving family science learning goals (Borun and Dritsas, 1997); (3) a research study comparing the frequency of learning behaviors for treatment families that have used enhanced test exhibits to control-group families that have used only the test exhibits. The results of the first two phases of this project have been discussed previously. This article describes the research study conducted during Phase 3 of the project. Results of the study show that all four modified exhibits produced significant increases in performance indicators. Using seven characteristics of successful family exhibits—multi-sided, multi-user, accessible, multi-outcome, multi-modal, readable, and relevant—as a guide to exhibit development proved to be an effective strategy for increasing active family learning.     

Voices on the Web: Student teachers negotiating identity

Student teachers studying by distance or external mode occupy a marginal and potentially isolated position with respect to the university. When undertaking a practicum experience, they individually enter a space within their placement school in which they may once more be presented with the challenge of operating from the margins. Using the Web and a 'bulletin board' facility, external Graduate Diploma in Education students were provided with the opportunity to 'chat' on-line during their recent practicum experience. The 'visible voices' of those students who participated in this Web link provide an interesting background to considerations of the ongoing negotiation within these marginal spaces by student teachers with respect to their emerging teaching identities. The extent to which the Web can provide students with a new notion of a learning community or a site for a critical or resistant dialogue and implications for broader issues concerning student 'voice' and subjectivities are considered within this article.     

Rural adolescents' reading motivation,achievement and behavior across transition to high school

The authors examined 1,781 rural students' reading motivation and behavior across the transition from middle to high school. Using expectancy-value theory, they investigated how motivational variables predicted changes in reading behavior and achievement across the transition in terms of their expectancies, values, and out-of-school reading behaviors. A repeated measures analysis of variance indicated significant increases in vocabulary, intrinsic value, and out-of-school reading, whereas significant decreases were found in attainment value. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated students' subjective expectancy for success was a significant predictor of increases in both comprehension and vocabulary scores. Students' utility value interacted with intrinsic value in predicting reading comprehension scores. In terms of change in students' reading behavior, their perceptions of intrinsic value and utility value were significant predictors. Gender interacted significantly with expectancies in predicting behaviors. Findings have implications for instructional support, particularly as it relates to reading motivation across the transition from middle to high school.     

The war of the words: The rhetoric of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ (an informal survey)

The political, military and media rhetoric of the March–April 2003 invasion of Iraq is interpreted as a phenomenon of power in relation to an understanding of culture as a site of denegation. Patterns of tautology, euphemism and equivocation are identified and their rhetorical appeal analysed in terms of the denegational structure of each of these figures. The essay is thus governed by an understanding of figuration as instrumental, not ornamental; it shows how rhetoric can be studied as a cultural phenomenon and argues by example that a pragmatics of troping is crucial to such a study.     

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

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 and CTs (also referred to as mentors), valued a PETE student who cared for pupils, had a rich pedagogical content knowledge, knew how to plan for and assess pupils’ learning, valued reflection, and was an active member of a community of practice. The unofficial but essentially more powerful enacted curriculum, encouraged PETE students to draw upon their own resources to learn pedagogical content knowledge in an isolated and unsupported manner.

The data highlight the force of the unofficial curriculum and the ways in which PETE students were guided to the core of the dysfunctional community of practice by untrained CTs (mentors) and untrained UTs. PETE students in this study learned to survive in a largely unsupportive professional learning environment and, just as theories of social reproduction intimate, indicated that they would reproduce this practice with PETE students in their care in the future.

The findings suggest that in cases similar to those studied, there is a need for teacher educators in Ireland, (in both universities and schools) to critically interrogate their personal practices and implicit theories of teacher education and to engage in training for their role. There is also evidence to suggest that PETE students in Ireland could benefit from the development of school–university partnerships that act as fundamental units of high quality professional learning. In the cases studied, this may have led to a stronger focus on the intended or official curriculum of TP, led by the revised maxim: ‘Do as we say and as we do’.