Teacher or coach? How logics from the field of sports contribute to the construction of knowledge in physical education teacher education pedagogical discourse through educational texts

The main purpose of this paper is to focus attention on educational texts as central conveyers of discourses of sport into physical education teacher education (PETE) and by extension into physical education (PE). A considerable volume of research suggests that sport and games continue to be dominant elements of curriculum and practice in contemporary PE. Given the issues of masculinity, physicality and performativity resulting from such continuing sport-focused PE practice, it is relevant to question how such practices are discursively produced or reproduced. In this regard, one area has received only scant attention, namely the potential influence of educational texts used in PETE. Using the theoretical frameworks provided by Michel Foucault, Basil Bernstein and Norman Fairclough, this paper considers educational texts as important contributors to the discursive construction of knowledge in PETE, and thus also as a central resource for studying—and challenging—those discourses that influence on the PE teachers' perceptions of PE and their choices when it comes to the organisation of the PE class. This paper is based on a thorough examination of Danish PETE course documents listing educational texts prescribed by teacher educators for PETE programmes in Denmark. Several of the prescribed educational texts are published by private organisations with sporting interests, such as Team DK and The Sports Confederation of Denmark. This paper conducts a discourse analysis of these texts in order to illuminate how specific social rules regulate their content and involve specific constructions of the learner, the teacher and the relation between them. The paper's findings underline the need for an increased awareness among those who engage in PE practices of the ways in which discourses shape our thinking, and of the potential dangers that lie in the transfer of particular meanings and values as they are constructed in educational texts.     

一类修正的Bernstein算子的点态逼近估计

利用经典的Bojanic-Cheng分解方法,结合分析技术,研究了修正的Bernstein算子对一类绝对连续函数的逼近,得到比较精确的收敛阶和渐近展开式.     

Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.     

Seeing epistemic order: construction and transmission of evaluative criteria

This paper focuses on formative assessment in the field of higher education. It examines Bernstein’s work on vertical discourses and knowledge structures with the view to deepening understanding of the concept of assessment for learning. The first part of the paper draws on Vygotsky’s work on concept development and Bernstein’s work on knowledge structures to explain why ‘generalisation’ and ‘hierarchy’ are central in knowledge acquisition. It then explores Bernstein’s claim that, within the vertical discourse, different knowledge structures (hierarchical and horizontal) afford greater or lesser visibility of their epistemic structure, and thus of their evaluation criteria of what counts as a legitimate text. The second part of the paper investigates the ways epistemic expectations are signalled through the practice of evaluation to first‐year university students in a professional education course and proposes that markers do not offer students stuffiest access to recognition rules necessary for producing legitimate texts in the future. Drawing on Maton’s distinction between semantic gravity and semantic density, the paper offers an example of how markers could recast what is present in students’ work to offer students access to key ordering principles in vertical discourses.     

Framing pedagogic relations within the boundaries of Foundation Degree Sport and Coaching qualifications

Changes to the relations between sport-education and employment labour markets have resulted in the increasing diversity of how academic and vocational skills, knowledge and practices are valued within the micro-level of qualifications. The implications of this are particularly felt by further education (FE) sport-lecturers in the UK, who are required to select, transform and transmit messages from both vocational education policy and the sport-industry sectors. To illustrate the implications of these changing relations, the paper offers insight into the experiences of one FE sport-lecturer, Janet (all names are pseudonyms), who, as part of her professional development, engaged within a process of reflective practice that focused on her pedagogic interactions within a Foundation Degree in Sport Coaching (FdSC). Drawing upon a Bernsteinian informed analysis we illustrate how Janet attempted to use a range of pedagogical strategies to frame the selection, transmission and evaluation of academic skills. This process supported students to begin recognising the value of academic skills and assimilate these with the more established vocational skills within the FdSC qualification. The experiences of Janet are then used as a starting point from which to discuss how the possibilities of change to pedagogic relations within the FdSC may be encouraged, developed and enacted across the vocational sport-education sector. We suggest that institutions and stakeholders responsible for shaping higher education sport-qualifications should consider how lecturers are supported in the framing of pedagogical relations that enable academic skills and practices to be integrated and valued within FdSC curricula.     

Habitus and social class: a case study on socialisation into sports and exercise

According to Bourdieu, habitus is an important, and class-specific, foundation for behaviour. However, he hardly explained how the habitus is acquired. Based on Bernstein's elaboration on the various contexts in which group-specific behavioural principles are acquired, this article demonstrates how young children of two divergent social classes obtain their habitus underlying their sports and exercise behaviour. Although children in both groups acquire a habitus in which sports and exercise play a role, there are striking differences which arise largely out of differences in the impact of socialising agents. Within the higher social class, there is a clearly defined group, namely the nuclear family, which explicitly controls and regulates the children's exercise behaviour. These children learn specific skills at specific places. In the lower social class, the habitus is influenced by the extended family, the physical education teacher and peers, resulting in a broad range of less strictly ordered activities, undertaken at different places. These findings offer a valuable contribution to insight into class-specific socialisation processes, resulting in the acquisition of a specific habitus.     

Research assessment as a pedagogical device: Bernstein,professional identity and Education 1 in New Zealand

Recent restructuring of research funding for New Zealand’s higher education institutions is ‘outputs‐driven’. Under the Performance Based Research Fund, units of assessment of research quality are individuals, every degree teacher receiving a confidential score of A, B or C (if deemed ‘research active’) or ‘R’ (‘Research Inactive’). Despite its relatively high number of A and B rated individuals, Education’s collective ranking was low. I interviewed staff and draw on Bernstein to explore how this process affects professional identity formation, a process involving engagement with changing ‘official’ external identities. I overview Bernsteinian concepts, historicise Education’s changing official identities and illustrate how these enabled and constrained participants’ self‐definitions before, during, and immediately after, the quality evaluation. The imposition of audit culture reproduces old theory/practice binaries.     

一类组合公式及B—型算子矩量

给出几组组合公式,由此得出Bernstein算子、Bernstein—Kantorovich算子、Durrmeyer—Bernstein算子和修正 Durrmeyer—Bernstein算子矩量及中心矩量的计算公式。     

一种C~2连续的三次样条插值方法

利用Bernstein多项式构造一种C~2连续的三次样条插值,证明其存在唯一性与一致收敛性,并给出误差上界的估计．与传统算法比较,避开了求解方程组的困难．     

Learning one’s place and position through play: social class and educational opportunity in Early Years Education

Drawing on the theoretical work of the British sociologist Basil Bernstein, this paper documents how learning is structured and organised through play in three Early Years Education (EYE) settings catering for children aged three to five in England, UK. Its data address current issues raised within EYE research relating to ‘quality and high returns’ and ‘school readiness’ for compulsory education. The analyses reveal that multiple forms of play are evident in all three settings; however, they are afforded very different status and value in each, influenced by the assumptions practitioners [in this paper practitioner is used because this is what those working in the nursery settings viewed themselves as. Although we acknowledge that early childhood educator is perhaps a more common term in certain countries] make about children and their families’ knowledge and resources for learning. The effect of such processes is the reproduction of social class and cultural hierarchies inside EYE settings, reflecting those longstanding in wider UK society. Despite the best intentions of policy-makers and practitioners, EYE play as currently configured does not provide equal opportunities for all.