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Full-Text Articles in Education
Reframing Quality And Impact: The Place Of Theory In Education Research, Jan Wright
Reframing Quality And Impact: The Place Of Theory In Education Research, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
The various research assessment exercises in UK, New Zealand and now Australia have motivated discussions around the nature of ‘quality’ and the purpose of educational research. To a certain extent this is also a discussion about theory, although the word is unlikely to be mentioned, in that terms such as ‘value free’, ‘neutral’, ‘critical’, ‘practical’, ‘transformational’, ‘evidence-based’ all invoke particular ontological and/or epistemological positions, that are and can be contested. One of the questions educational researchers face in the context of such exercises, though again implicit, is what value is attributed to robust theoretically informed research and which theoretical positions …
Re-Conceiving Ability In Physical Education: A Social Analysis, Jan Wright, L. Burrows
Re-Conceiving Ability In Physical Education: A Social Analysis, Jan Wright, L. Burrows
Jan Wright
In this paper we explore how ‘ability’ is currently conceptualised in physical education and with what effects for different groups of young people. We interrogate approaches to theorizing ability in physical education that draw on sociological and phenomenological ‘foundations’ together with notions of ability as ‘physical’ and ‘cultural capital’ drawn from the work of Bourdieu. We also look to data we and others have collected across a number of empirical projects to ask: where do we find talk about what we might identify as ‘ability’ in the context of physical education and sport; how is it talked about? and in …
A Social Semiotic Analysis Of Knowledge Construction And Games Centred Approaches To Teaching, Jan Wright, G. Forrest
A Social Semiotic Analysis Of Knowledge Construction And Games Centred Approaches To Teaching, Jan Wright, G. Forrest
Jan Wright
Games centred approaches (GCA) such as TGfU, Game Sense, Tactical Games are widely promoted as alternatives to traditional forms of teaching games within physical education. Despite a growing body of empirical research and a considerable theoretical literature, there are no analyses in the GCA literature, of interactions in actual lessons. In this paper we argue that social semiotics provides the tools for such an analysis. We give an example of how such an approach might be used by analysing questioning, as exemplified in the GCA literature and teacher resources, for the ways it constructs knowledge and interpersonal relations. We argue …
"Measure Your Belly": New Zealand Children's Constructions Of Health And Fitness, L. Burrows, Jan Wright, J. Jungersen-Smith
"Measure Your Belly": New Zealand Children's Constructions Of Health And Fitness, L. Burrows, Jan Wright, J. Jungersen-Smith
Jan Wright
The expansion of health as a concept, repeated expressions of nation-wide concerns about young people’s health and the accompanying information explosion about health and fitness have worked together to support versions of physical education that explicitly address health issues. The conflation of health with physical education is not however unproblematic. In this paper we explore some of the consequences of the relationship between health, fitness and physical activity through an examination of the students’ responses to questions relating to health and fitness in the New Zealand National Education Monitoring Project. We demonstrate that the children responding to the NEMP tasks …
Prescribing Practices: Shaping Healthy Children In Schools, L. Burrows, Jan Wright
Prescribing Practices: Shaping Healthy Children In Schools, L. Burrows, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
Current concerns in New Zealand and abroad about the health and well-being of young people have generated a raft of government-sponsored and educational policies and practices geared towards the production of trim, taut and fit subjects who choose wisely from the range of risky ‘options’ available to them in avowedly new and changing times. These initiatives yield consequences for children and young people who are increasingly being urged, in Foucault’s terms, to conduct “…a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being…”(1997, p. 225) in an effort to ‘become’ the imagined healthful, …
The Construction Of Gendered Contects In Single Sex And Coeducational Education Lessons, Jan Wright
The Construction Of Gendered Contects In Single Sex And Coeducational Education Lessons, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
With the 'linguistic turn' in contemporary social theory there has been an increased interest in looking more closely at pedagogical practices in physical education as they construct social relations. Initially, and within a rather different theoretical framework this took the form of counting the number and kind of interactions teachers had with boys as compared to girls. More recently researchers have begun to look closely at how language choices construct relations of power between teacher and students and produce contexts for learning. This paper examines how these contexts may be very different for girls as compared to boys in single …