Background: School Health and Physical Education (HPE) and sport has increasingly become a complex cultural contact zone. With global population shifts, schools need policies and strategies to attend to the interests and needs of diverse student populations. School HPE and sport is a particularly significant site as it is a touchpoint for a range of cultural values and practices related to physical activity, the body, health and lifestyle proprieties.
Purpose: While there is a high Chinese student population in Australian schools, little research has been undertaken to understand their needs, experiences and perceptions in schools HPE and sport. In addition, research in the physical activity field is accentuated by paradigms that assume and perpetuate the binary notion of cultural beliefs and practices such as ‘West’ versus ‘East’ and in association with ‘Normal’ versus ‘Problematic’ lifestyles in relation to physical activity. We argue that, without conceding the epistemological understanding of ‘difference’, policies and practices that promote diversity can remain socially unjust and superficial.
Research design: This paper focuses on two schools in Queensland. The data collection process was underpinned by critical and interpretive ethnographic methods. The participants in Sage College consisted of seven girls of whom three were in Year 8, three in Year 9 and one in Year 10. At Routledge State High, a state-owned, secular and coeducational secondary school, the cohort consisted of two girls in Year 8, one girl and two boys from Year 9.
Results: This paper draws on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital, field and doxa and the Chinese Confucianism philosophy of ‘Complementary difference’ to understand the various perceptions and experiences of young Chinese Australians in schools HPE and sport. Results invite us to seek an understanding of students’ subjectivities and disrupt the binary differences in cultural values and attributes to promote multicultural education.
Conclusion and recommendation: Moving beyond the Australia's Anglo-Celtic centred HPE and the limitations of a Western view of exclusive opposites, this paper makes an original contribution to knowledge by presenting a ‘heuristic of difference’ model that accommodates Western and Chinese perspectives in Australian HPE research. 相似文献
This study explored the influence social capital had over parental sports volunteers who are considered to be of paramount importance in the delivery of UK sports initiatives. A review of the relevant literature identifies and discusses the complexities within the debate to define social capital while human and cultural capital emerge as an essential element in the production of parental volunteers’ ability to access opportunities through a process of bonding or bridging social networks. This study used a grounded research focused on the use of semi-structured interviews and research diaries with (n = 8) study participants. The results from this study, which were analysed through a Bourdieuan perspective, suggested the process that recruits parental volunteers is exclusive; furthermore, the results show the insidious presences of the dark side of social capital, which affected the respondents by reinforcing exclusive ties and identities, which was found to exclude outsiders while reproducing a dominant social hierarchy. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the study for future practical and academic applications of social capital production within sports volunteerism. 相似文献