False Uniqueness: the Self‐Perception of New Entrants to Higher Education in the UK and Its Implications for Access – a Pilot Study1

A central tenet of contemporary education policy relates to the desire to extend higher education (HE) provision to less advantaged groups (‘widening participation’). Our paper contends that a key behavioural obstacle to widening participation lies in the erroneous belief that persists among potential entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds as to their capabilities of succeeding within the HE environment – a perception that serves to deflate application/recruitment rates from such groupings. We test this ‘false uniqueness’ thesis using a sample of 127 new UK undergraduates, finding that students drawn from lower social class backgrounds consistently underestimated their abilities vis‐à‐vis the overall cohort.     

Assessing alumni success: income is NOT the only outcome!

Institutions may be interested in using alumni career success as evidence of institutional effectiveness, but the current study suggests that using income as the sole outcome may not be entirely capturing the occupational experience of graduates. Utilising data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that there are two distinct components of job satisfaction for arts graduates: intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic satisfaction. The results of ordinary least squares regression analyses for these two factors provide some relationships concerning demographic and occupational characteristics with these two areas of satisfaction. In considering overall job satisfaction, intrinsic satisfaction may play a larger role in how alumni perceive their career outcomes and success.     

Changing personal epistemologies in early childhood pre-service teachers using an integrated teaching program

This study investigated changes in pre-service teachers' personal epistemologies as they engaged in an integrated teaching program. Personal epistemology refers to individual beliefs about the nature of knowing and knowledge and has been shown to influence teaching practice. An integrated approach to teaching, based on both an implicit and explicit focus on personal epistemology, was developed by an academic team within a Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood). The teaching program integrated content across four units of study, modelling personal epistemologies implicitly through collaborative reflexive practice. The students were also required to engage in explicit reflections on their personal epistemologies. Quantitative measures of personal epistemology were collected at the beginning and end of the semester using the Epistemological Beliefs Survey (EBS) to assess changes across the teaching period. Results indicated that pre-service teachers' epistemological beliefs about the integration of knowledge became more sophisticated over the course of the teaching period. Qualitative data included pre-service teachers' responses to open ended questions and field experience journal reflections about their perceptions of the teaching program and were collected at the end of the semester. These data showed that pre-service teachers held different conceptions about learning as integration, which provided a more nuanced understanding of the EBS data. Understanding pre-service teachers' epistemological beliefs provides promising directions for teacher preparation and professional enrichment.     

CEOs and domestic tribunals—The rights and risks of penalising athletes for off-field misconduct

Modern sports management necessitates the use of disciplinary systems to both dissuade and to penalise athletes who engage in off-field misconduct. Athlete misconduct threatens the financial viability of a club or sport, team morale and the image of the sport in the eyes of the public. Domestic Tribunals or penalisation through a Chief Executive Officer are the most commonly utilised methods for dealing with athlete misconduct. Each method concerns the law of contract to involve certain legal rights and risks. This article examines both methods with a view to informing sports officials of the legal rights and risks associated with the penalisation of athletes for offences of off-field misconduct.     

Gender,Class and Outdoor Traditions in the UK and Norway

ABSTRACT

We report on three projects and an accompanying critical research agenda designed to establish and evaluate a new pedagogy in Australian physical education based on the sport education curriculum model first published by Siedentop et al. [Siedentop, D., Mand, C. & Taggart, A. (1986) Physical Education: Teaching and Curriculum Strategies for Grades 5‐12 (Palo Alto, Mayfield]. The projects, involving over 80 schools throughout Australia, are set in a context featuring an amalgam of postmodern youth culture, governmental inquiries and reports and the continuing difficulties facing physical educators in their workplaces. Against a backdrop of subject marginatyia, the projects’ findings have lent support to the proposition that it is dysfunctional programme structures (rather that deficits in teaching skills) that are most to blame in denying teachers access to significant subject matter learning targets. Our work presents evidence that the student‐centred, extended‐unit sport education curriculum model has the potential to be responsive to these challenges. It is conducive to ongoing school‐based professional and curriculum development, has led to widespread programme restructuring, has improved outcomes for many lower skilled students and has generally produced positive results for aspects of students’ social development. However girls tend still to be dominated by boys in particular sports. The model is positively affecting the career expectations of pre‐service students. As the model is already diffusing rapidly in Australian schools, there is a need to identify issues and chart an educational course for any further development.     

Moving bodies beyond the social/biological divide: toward theoretical and transdisciplinary adventures

In this paper I call for ‘new forms of thinking and new ways of theorizing’ the complex relations between the biological and social in sport and physical culture. I illustrate the inseparability of our biological and social bodies in sport and physical culture via the case of exercise and female reproductive hormones. Inspired by feminist biologists and philosophers of science such as Lynda Birke and Elizabeth Grosz, I describe my current research project in which I am seeking to create space for female exercisers' (as distinct from female athletes) voices about their embodied experiences of exercise-associated amenorrhea. I offer reflections from my ongoing study and reveal a number of dilemmas that emerge as I consider how we might bring biology—and particularly hormones—back into conversations about women's moving bodies in non-reductionist and non-determinist terms. I conclude by advocating the need for more transdisciplinary approaches to help us move toward more multidimensional understandings of the body in sport and physical culture.