Sports History: What Can Be Done?

Abstract

In the early 1980s, Redman (1984) reported that sports history is ‘alive and free and growing in academe’ (p. 38). A few years later Park warned that sports history was in a ‘descending spiral’. This article analyses the rapid turn around in the fortunes of sports history and its ongoing decline over the last decade in the curricula of university departments of physical education. While changes within physical education, including its scientisation, fragmentation and specialisation, partly account for the shift, sports historians too must take responsibility. In many instances they have failed to convince their colleagues that sports history is a scholarly pursuit; nor have they encouraged sufficient numbers of undergraduates. Three approaches are suggested here to help ‘rescue’ sports history. First, sports historians should pay greater attention to the intellectual history of sport and its interrelationships with physical education. Second, they should engage the intrinsic historicity of science and forge new relationships with those scientific subdisciplines which constitute physical education. Third, sports historians should oblige their students to see themselves as actors in the processes of intellectual and social change.     

Evidence‐based practice: triumph of style over substance?

This feature examines the success of evidence-based practice (EBP) and the associated Cochrane Collaboration. It seeks to identify critical success factors associated with the way that both initiatives have been marketed. The simplicity of the original message used by each initiative allowed for subsequent assimilation of nuances and variants. Two implications for health librarians are highlighted; recognition that EBP is simply the embodiment of one world view and that many others may make a useful contribution and the need to craft a simple message capturing the unique selling points of the profession. To create a unique contribution health librarians require a detailed picture from market research of user information needs.     

Knowing your students in large diverse classes: a phenomenographic case study

The problem which this paper addresses is the difficulty of knowing students in large diverse classes in pedagogically useful ways. The paper discusses how the phenomenographic methodology can be employed to address this problem. It describes how phenomenographic studies and their results can enable teachers to ‘know their students’ at a collective level in terms of a set of qualitatively distinct idealised types rather than at a personal level of individuals with their particular characteristics, and demonstrates the pedagogical utility of this kind of knowing. The means used to describe the approach and to demonstrate its utility when teaching large classes is to present, as a case study, a phenomenographic investigation into the learning practices among students in a large, diverse cohort of entrants to an engineering programme in South Africa. General principles are drawn from the case study and are discussed as they apply to the teaching of large classes.