Youths with migration backgrounds and their experiences of physical education: an examination of three cases

While understanding young people has never been easy, migration trends make it increasingly difficult. Many classrooms have become culturally heterogeneous and teachers are often faced with pupils with diverse linguistic and cultural heritages. Current scholarship suggests that as a discipline, physical education has not adapted to this diversity. In fact, commentators have suggested that physical education alienates pupils from minority groups and that traditional practices work to maintain cultural difference. The broad objective of this paper is to provide insights into how physical education intersects with biographies shaped by migration. Drawing from a case study investigation, this paper presents interview data from three youths with migration backgrounds living in a German-speaking region of Switzerland. The cases were selected because they highlight various ways in which physical education (PE) comes to make sense for adolescents. The key arguments that we develop are that ethnicity often works at an implicit level in PE, that young people experience the effects of migration backgrounds in diverse ways, and that migrants themselves support official educational discourses that work to disadvantage people with migration backgrounds. A key implication is that in a cultural milieu in which generalisations are normal and sometimes considered desirable, both researchers and practitioners need to be wary of racialising discourses. As an alternative, it is suggested that focusing on individual processes can improve the conceptualisation and implementation of physical education pedagogies.     

Future Girls,transcendent femininities and new pedagogies: toward girls' hybrid bodies?

Media provides a material site for girls' identity formation and presents conflicting images of femininity, which challenge young women's self-expression and physicality development. The ‘problem’ with girls' physicality has not been resolved, but rather complicated by discourses of new femininities in sport, fitness and health promoted by the new economies. Girls' conscious and unconscious consumption of messages of new powerful femininities might be troubling for some girls, especially ‘Other’ girls and/or girls ‘at risk,’ whose physicality collides with the emerging image of the new girls. Therefore, in this paper, I contend that an investment in the third-wave feminist agenda is still necessary to engage scholars, educators and girls in critical conversations about media, genders, the body and identity. To this end, first I discuss the feminist reappraisal of Foucault's analysis of the body as an emancipatory socio-educational and political project for (en)gendering research on the feminine ‘docile body’ in society. Second, I highlight emerging contemporary monocultural discourses of the ‘Alpha Girl’ and the ‘Future Girl,’ powerful sporty, fit and healthy femininities that contradict discourses of the traditional feminine docile body, and I analyze the ways these new images subsume race, class, religion and disability. Finally, I conclude this article by advocating the adoption of critical media pedagogies as a potential strategy for schooling girls' hybrid bodies.     

Overcoming mistrusted masculinity: contesting ethnic minority fathers’ involvement in home–school cooperation in Denmark

This ethnographic study investigates cooperation between homes and schools in a Danish context from the perspective of ‘ethnic minority fathers’. I analyse how experiences of an ‘implicit’ mistrust can make ethnic minority fathers reluctant to cooperate with child institutions such as schools. It is argued that this mistrust is related to a hegemonic negative image of these fathers as oppressive, aggressive, and/or absent and careless. To conceptualize this mistrust, I argue for the concept of ‘mistrusted masculinity’. The analysis directs attention to the rhythms of the fathers’ everyday lives, offering examples of how the absence of some ethnic minority fathers in home–school cooperation may be explained by long working hours and ‘constraining jobs’. The research found that a ‘new role of the father’ is evident in the behaviours and attitudes of both ‘native Danish fathers’ and ethnic minority fathers.     

Critical race theory in India: theory translation and the analysis of social identities and discrimination in Indian schooling

This article examines ethical and philosophical considerations in theory translation, i.e. translating a theoretical framework from its original place to another national context. Critical race theory (CRT) was developed in the United States through significant struggle in order to analyze everyday racism. Marginalized groups have historically shared postcolonial critiques, conceptualizations of social justice, and methods for mass resistance across national borders. Through an analysis of the literature on CRT and contemporary India, this article explores whether CRT’s principles and methodology can be employed to research discrimination within India’s school system. Can CRT be sensitive to the differences in context and still retain its philosophical center? This analysis reveals that CRT may be particularly helpful in highlighting the educational discrimination experienced by Dalits via use of CRT’s social construction thesis to conceptualize caste and intersectionality to understand caste’s relationship to gender and class.     

“I Didn't Do Nothin'”: The Discursive Construction of School Suspension

This article examines the issue of school suspension by looking at the sociocultural factors that influence a teacher's decision to remove a student from the classroom. The authors use ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to study how disciplinary moments are constructed by teachers and students in an urban high school in the Midwest. The analysis of classroom observations, videotaped lessons, and interviews from a longitudinal study at this multiethnic high school shows that suspensions frequently occur in the absence of any physical violence or blatant verbal abuse. Rather, suspensions are often preceded by a complex series of nonviolent events when one disruptive act among many is singled out for action by the teacher. This study has implications for current debates about zero-tolerance policies that disproportionately affect students of color for their misbehavior in school. Our analysis suggests that removing a student from class is a highly contextualized decision based on subtle race and gender relations that cannot be adequately addressed in school discipline policies.     

Desegregation and Multicultural Education: Teachers Embracing and Manipulating Reforms

The purpose of this paper is to examine the remnants of desegregation curricular reforms in a small urban district. This study documents the affects of various policies that were implemented to create equity and equality in urban, multi-racial and socio-economically diverse classrooms. These reforms were created due to a court desegregation order that demanded the district take multiple steps to raise the academic achievement levels of students of color in the district. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory to examine issues of interest-convergence and the effects of court-ordered desegregation initiatives, the researcher documents how teachers have come to terms with two major curricular changes that work in conjunction with other curricular reforms. Research that considers the affects of large-scale policy initiatives on classroom practices is necessary to further current conversations on successful reform implementation.

‘We need a woman,we need a black woman’: gender,race, and identity taxation in the academy

In 1994, Amado Padilla used the phrase ‘cultural taxation’ to describe the extra burden of service responsibilities placed upon minority faculty members because of their racial or ethnic background. In this paper, we expand upon Padilla's work and introduce the concept of ‘identity taxation’ to encompass how other marginalised social identities (such as gender, race and gender, and sexual orientation) may result in additional non-academic service commitments for certain faculty. Using qualitative interviews with faculty members at a large, public university in the Midwest, we examine identity taxation involving gender and the intersection of gender and race to demonstrate how women faculty (in general) and women of colour (specifically) feel their gender and racial group memberships influence their experiences in academia.     

‘Trying to find the extra choices’: migrant parents and secondary school choice in Greater Manchester

This article, based on qualitative research in Greater Manchester, examines the experience of migrants in navigating the education system, and in particular in choosing secondary schools for their children. There has been extensive research on the process of choosing schools since the policy reforms of the 1980s, but none has examined how the process of choosing a secondary school is impacted by the material and affective impact of migration. The article argues that migrants’ experience is embedded in gendered, classed and racialised processes and that, despite the heterogeneity of the category, migrants often face particular barriers in negotiating the school system. Nonetheless it also explores the importance put on education by the migrants who were interviewed and the active labour they engage in to try and achieve the best results for their children.     

车轮跑在110m栏辅助练习中的运用研究

根据车轮跑练习与110m跨栏跑的技术比较,两者在极限性、爆发性发力以及髋关节为轴的高速摆动都有很大的相似性,建议把车轮跑划入110m跨栏跑的辅助性练习中,并应贯穿于整个训练的始终。     

Racism as Policy: A Critical Race Analysis of Education Reforms in the United States and England

Abstract

Critical race theory (CRT) views education as one of the principal means by which white supremacy is maintained and presented as normal in society. The article applies CRT to two real-world case studies: changes to education statutes in the state of Arizona (USA) and the introduction of a new measure of educational success in England, the English baccalaureate. The analysis highlights the globalized nature of neoliberal education reform and its fundamentally raced and racist character.