An Analysis of Playground Surface Injuries

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the development of skill competence and tactical sophistication during a games unit conducted following the features of sport education provided by Siedentop (1994). One team of six players was followed through a 30-lesson season of “Ultimate.” Using Gréhaigne, Godbout, and Bouthier's (1997) formula for an efficiency index, together with a number of other measures of skill and tactical competence, it was determined that these students made significant improvements in selection and execution dimensions of the game. Furthermore, lower skilled students did not feel marginalized within their teams and believed they had equal opportunities for improvement. The key reasons for developing competence in this setting were the sufficient length of the season to allow for significant practice opportunities and the consistent team membership throughout season, which allowed all players to develop a sense of usefulness. This curriculum model provides one way students can develop skills through a system of game playing, provided sport education units are structured to prevent the more skillful players from dominating the games.     

Effective practices for creating transformative informal science education programs grounded in Native ways of knowing

There are a growing number of informal science education (ISE) programs in Native communities that engage youth in science education and that are grounded in Native ways of knowing. There is also a growing body of research focusing on the relationship between culture, traditional knowledge, and science education. However, there is little research documenting how these programs are being developed and the ways in which culture and Western science are incorporated into the activities. This study outlines effective practices for using Native ways of knowing to strengthen ISE programs. These effective practices may also be used to promote change in formal education. The authors combine an overview of current research in informal science education with personal interviews with educators engaged in ISE programs offered to youth both on and off tribal reservations as well as experts in Indigenous education. Participating individuals and programs included Native communities across the United States, including Alaska and Hawai??i. Keeping in mind that each community is unique, ISE programs that are grounded in Native ways of knowing will benefit by utilizing the effective practices outlined here as a guide for starting or strengthening existing ISE programs relevant to the needs of their communities.     

“Strictly an act of street violence”: intimate publicity and affective divestment in the New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting

On May 12, 2013, two men opened fire on a Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. This essay attends to discourses from public officials and news media following the shooting that reified what we describe as affective divestment from the suffering of historically marginalized bodies and communities. Specifically, public discourse characterized the shooting as an episode of “street violence” that did not warrant sustained national attention. Affective divestment is the consequence of rhetorical maneuvers that signal a pushing away from certain bodies by intimate publics—an estrangement at the symbolic level that has naturalized or rationalized the neglect of certain forms of suffering. Such estrangement, we argue, is a function of neoliberal logics that devalue and, at times, necessitate the suffering of disposable populations.     

In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children’s literacy pedagogy in a community setting

ABSTRACT

In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children’s literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that “knowing” is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a; Heydon and Rowsell, 2015; Kuby et al, 2015; Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of “little” (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.