Healthying physical education - on the possibility of learning health

Background: As part of the annual activities at the British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference, the Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group (SIG) organises a so-called Invisible College, where a Scholar Lecture is delivered by a researcher who has made a significant contribution to the field. This paper is the 2018 Scholar Lecture.

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to discuss two concepts and the relations between them – health and learning.

Key concepts: In the paper, the metaphor of the swimmer in the river, as introduced by Antonovsky, is used in order to go beyond individualistic, dualistic and instrumental notions of health and education. I argue for a move away from a notion of teaching young people how to be healthy through the deployment of ready-made educational packages, towards acknowledging health education as a societal responsibility, where it is recognised that sociocultural and economic contexts afford diverse opportunities to be healthy and to learn to live healthy lives, however these are construed.

Discussion and conclusion: Rather than confining health and health education to the prevention of premature death and disease, I discuss health, in relation to learning, as always being in the process of becoming. The health resources for living a good life can then be found in the ‘river’, with the ‘swimmer’, and in the relation between the ‘river’ and the ‘swimmer’. In this way, health can manifest itself in many different ways. I ask why we even attempt to talk about health in the singular when talking about different diseases. Is health rather a plural? Is it even a noun? Or is it something we do – a verb? If the latter, health education can be conceived of as a practice – ‘healthying’ – rather than a fixed, static outcome set up by research and public health policies as something to achieve in education.     

Excessive Picking in Prader-Willi Syndrome: A pilot study of phenomenological aspects and comorbid symptoms

Skin picking constitutes a minor diagnostic criterion for Prader-Willi syndrome and is considered to be a syndrome specific behaviour and part of a behavioural phenotype. This study surveyed different aspects and patterns of skin picking as well as related picking and pulling behaviours and compulsive and impulsive-aggressive symptoms. Parents of 37 individuals with PWS, aged 12 to 30 years, participated by completing questionnaires specially designed for the purpose of capturing specific features relevant to the clinical PWS picture. Two-thirds of the sample displayed skin picking with a frequency ranging from chronic to transient, episodic symptoms. Many individuals with skin picking also exhibited comorbid picking behaviours and individuals with excessive skin picking also had additional problems with frequent tantrums and violent outbursts.     

Knowing in primary physical education in the UK: negotiating movement culture

This paper aims to understand how pupils and teachers actions-in-context constitute being-a-pupil and being-a-teacher within a primary school physical education (PE) movement culture. Dewey and Bentley's theory of transaction, which views organism-in-environment-as-a-whole, enables the researcher to explore how actions-in-ongoing activities constitute and negotiate PE movement culture. Video footage from seven primary school PE lessons from a school in the West Midlands in the UK was analysed by focusing upon the ends-in-view of actions as they appeared through the educational content (what) and pedagogy (how) of the recorded PE experiences. Findings indicated that the movement culture within the school was a monoculture of looks-like-sport characterised by the privileging of the functional coordination of cooperative action. Three themes of pupils' and teachers' negotiation of the movement culture emerged U-turning, Knowing the game and Moving into and out of games. This movement culture required teachers to ensure pupils looked busy and reproduced cooperative looks-like-sport actions. In fulfilling this role, they struggled to negotiate between their knowledge of sport-for-real and directing pupils towards educational ends-in-view within games activities. Simply being good at sports was not a prerequisite for pupils' success in this movement culture. In order to re-actualise their knowledge of sport, pupils were required to negotiate the teacher's ‘how’ and ‘what’ by exploring what constituted cooperative actions within the spatial and social dimensions of the activities they were set. These findings suggest that if PE is to be more than just the reproduction of codified sport, careful adjustment and consideration of ends-in-view is of great importance. Without regard for the latter there is potential to create significant complexity for both teachers and pupils beyond that required by learning and performing sport.     

INTENSE MINORITIES AND THE PATTERN OF PUBLIC OPINION

Data from seven Swedish Election Studies were analyzed to testthree hypotheses about aggregate public opinion. Various facetsof public opinion, including a balance measure of direction,five measures of intensity, percentage don't know, and percentageneutral, were found to be highly stable across time. In mostinstances, the majority was more intense than the minority.Changes in public opinion could not be predicted from the relativeintensity of the majority and the minority in the election threeyears before.     

Four different assessment practices: how university teachers handle the field of tension between professional responsibility and professional accountability

Higher Education - Various efforts have been made in higher education in Sweden to meet the demand for more transparent governance and increased efficiency and quality. The purpose of this article...     

Testing method for objective evaluation of cross-country ski poles

The aim of the study was to develop an objective classification method for cross-country ski poles. A test device was designed to expose different pole models to maximal loading and impact tests. A load cell measured the axial forces in the pole shafts, and a laser distance meter measured shaft deflection when a load was applied via the wrist strap. In the loading tests, each shaft reached a plateau where no more force could be transferred. This maximal force transfer (MFT) value was a characteristic measure for flexural rigidity and thereby also strength. The developed test method enables a loading that is more similar to real-life skiing than a standard three-point bending test. Results show that the introduction of shaft indices for buckling strength is beneficial for comparison purposes. The MFT is a relevant parameter used in the characterization of poles.     

Stimulating positive emotional experiences in mathematics learning: influence of situational and personal factors

The study aims to assess the relative importance of a large number of variables for predicting students’ positive-activating emotions during mathematics learning. Participants were 668 first-year upper secondary school students from 33 schools of different sizes and locations. Two questionnaires were distributed, one assessing students’ perceptions and beliefs about their learning situation in mathematics in general, and the other assessing the characteristics of a particular mathematics lesson and the students’ emotional experiences during this lesson. Single-construct and multivariate models for predicting students’ emotions were computed. The results show that the multivariate models were the most efficient, predicting as much as 59 % of the variance in students’ emotional experiences. The two most important constructs were students’ type of motivation and perceived degree of learning, which together predicted 48 % of the students’ emotions. Single-construct models predicted, at most, 36 %. The relative and absolute predictive ability of different motivational constructs are reported. The relationships between constructs and their implications for teaching are discussed.