Can textured insoles improve ankle proprioception and performance in dancers?

With the aim of determining both the acute and the chronic effects of textured insoles on the ankle discrimination and performance ability of dancers, 60 ballet dancers from the Australian Ballet School, aged 14–19 years, were divided into three groups (two intervention groups and a control group), age- and level-matched. In the first 5 weeks (weeks 1 to 5), the first intervention group (GRP1) was asked to wear textured insoles in their ballet shoes and the second intervention group (GRP2) was not given textured insoles to wear. In the next 5 weeks (weeks 6 to 10), GRP2 was asked to wear the same type of textured insoles and GRP1 did not wear the textured insoles. The control group (CTRL) did not wear textured insoles during the whole 10 weeks. All participants were tested preintervention, after 5 weeks and after 10 weeks for ankle discrimination score (AUC scores). Dance performance was assessed by 5–7 dance teachers. Pre-to-post change in AUC scores was significantly greater for the groups wearing insoles than for the controls (P = .046) and the size of pre-to-post changes did not differ between the two intervention groups (P = .834). Significant correlation was found between ankle discrimination score and performance scores, using the textured insoles (r = .412; P = .024). In conclusion, the stimulation to the proprioceptive system arising from textured insoles worn for five weeks was sufficient to improve the proprioceptive ability and performance ability of ballet dancers.     

‘Tours of Imperialism’: Cricket and Cultural Transfer in South Africa, 1880–1910

Abstract

Few can deny the significance of sport in today’s South Africa. The sporting structures upon which this is based were first introduced to the country by the British in the late nineteenth century. In line with policies of cultural imperialism, sports such as cricket were promoted at this time as part of a wider political agenda that encouraged the adoption of an ‘English’ way of life in the region. Sports tours, most notably cricket, were a fundamental part of this cultural transfer between the ‘Mother Country’ and her colonies in Southern Africa. To underpin the study of transnational linkages and transfer in African sports, this paper will offer an historical overview of how ‘British-styled’ sport arrived in South Africa and how the early cricket tours between England and South Africa were constructed to promote distinct political and cultural connections. This paper will explore the early development of cricket in South Africa and investigate its symbiotic link to British imperialism and colonialism via the first tours and sporting exchanges that took place. The origins of the game in South Africa will be examined as well as its development up to 1910 (the date of Union in South Africa) as the site of a constructed transnational 'brotherhood' between Britain and its most coveted African colonies.     

Managing physical education lessons: an interactional approach

Physical education (PE) lessons involve complex and dynamic interactive sequences between students, equipment and teacher. The potential for unexpected and/or unintended events is relatively large, a point reflected in an increasing amount of scholarship dealing with classroom management (CM). This scholarship further suggests that unexpected and disruptive events negatively impact on learning and can have deleterious effects on teacher health. Despite considerable potential for these kinds of events, many PE lessons occur in structured, organized ways. The broad purpose of this paper is to consider how classroom action becomes ordered in PE contexts. To this end, an interactional approach is put forward including the specific analytic concepts of directives, epistemic authority and deontic authority. To exemplify the approach, the micro-dynamics of a situation in which a group of students are building a human pyramid is examined. The examination draws attention to: how the teacher engages in a series of interactions with the students to move the sequence forward; how the students themselves achieve order through their interactions with one another; and how the characteristics of the activity help to organize the students' behaviors and limit possibilities for action. The discussion is located against a backdrop of current CM scholarship. Reference is also made to two aspects of social context: the increasing prominence of managerial discourse in educational arenas and the significance of student-centeredness in pedagogical theory. Both aspects appear to influence how order can be achieved in PE today. The analysis raises issues related to pedagogy, management and authority which are addressed in the final two sections of the paper.     

Visual body pedagogies: how anti-oppressive education informs the teaching and learning of sporting bodies

In this article, the authors borrow from anti-oppressive education theory for its potential to disrupt how students visually conceive sporting bodies and to problematize the teaching and learning of these bodies within undergraduate physical education (PE) programs. Fourteen photo stories produced by students enrolled in PE programs at two universities were analysed using a semiotic approach to excavate the emergent themes of sporting bodies from the narratives. Relying on Kumashiro's anti-oppressive educational theoretical framework, the authors found that most of stories reified discursive practices that (re)produce gender oppression in sport. Despite these findings, the authors also discovered anti-oppressive pedagogies are useful for teaching against the body oppressions conveyed in the photo stories. How anti-oppressive education informs other areas of PE should be examined in the future.     

Different Disciplines Require Different Motivations for Student Success

This article reports an investigation of undergraduate motivation to learn. A Likert-type rating scale measure of motivation incorporated the general motivational dimensions identified by previous investigators, as well as a systematic theoretical framework that is more novel, and attempts to acknowledge the role of discipline-specific factors in motivation to learn. The motivation questionnaire was evaluated by measuring its success in explaining the academic achievement of biology, history, computing, planning, anthropology, geology, food science and nutrition, and education students (n = 380) in standard university assessments. The findings reveal that student performance is better explained by within- than across-discipline indexes of motivation, probably because some types of motivation lead to success in some disciplines but failure in others. Furthermore, items based on the theoretical framework developed to underpin the questionnaire (which distinguishes outcome from process incentives) were also found to explain more variation in student performance than general motivation items. Some practical implications of the findings are considered.     

The management of quality in the University of Ulster

The setting of standards for teaching is identified as central to any system of quality assurance for teaching and learning. The paper describes a number of initiatives which have been taken at the University of Ulster to identify and develop quality in teaching. They include a project to identify teaching skills through consultation with expert teachers; the use of quality circles of staff and students to specify standards for teaching; the use of student feedback on teaching; the introduction of a distinguished teaching award; the assessment of teaching competence when staff are selected; the introduction of a unit-based in-service teacher training course; and the encouragement of self and peer evaluation using an appraisal schedule. Quality assurance for support services is considered and finally the University's initiatives are related to total quality management and BS 5750.     

Record Values and Surviving Glacial Moraines

Estimating the number of glacial advances from surviving glacial debris can, amazingly enough, be cast as a records problem for which there is a substantial statistical literature. As a result, instructors may illustrate method of moments and maximum‐likelihood estimation techniques with an interesting problem in the physical sciences.