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Full-Text Articles in Education
What Does A ‘Sociocultural Perspective’ Mean In Health And Physical Education?, Kenneth P. Cliff, Jan Wright, D. Clarke
What Does A ‘Sociocultural Perspective’ Mean In Health And Physical Education?, Kenneth P. Cliff, Jan Wright, D. Clarke
Jan Wright
Chapter Intention: • To explore the discourse of ‘sociocultural perspective’ and its representations in Health and Physical Education curriculum; • To explore sociocultural perspective alongside the emphasis of critical pedagogies and critical inquiry; • To consider possibilities and limitations to embedding a ‘sociocultural perspective’ in teaching practices.
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 …
Analysing Sportsmedia Texts: Developing Resistant Reading Positions, Jan Wright
Analysing Sportsmedia Texts: Developing Resistant Reading Positions, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
[Extract] The American educator Darryl Siedentop includes in his definition of a physically educated person the capacity to be 'involved critically in the sport, fitness and leisure cultures of their nations' (in Tinning 2002: 338). David Kirk uses the term physical culture to refer to the meanings, values and social practices concerned with the maintenance, representation and regulation of the body through institutionalised forms of physical activity such as sport, physical recreation, and exercise (Kirk 1997). He argues that in the process of their engagements with physical culture, young people do not merely 'participate' in physical activities, they are also …
"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 …
Critical Inquiry And Problem-Solving In Physical Education, Jan Wright
Critical Inquiry And Problem-Solving In Physical Education, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
[Extract] Whether they agree that we are now in a period of postmodernity, late modernity or high modernity (Kirk 1997), social commentators do agree that we live in times characterised by profound social and cultural changes which are recognisable globally but reach into the everyday lives of individual. The nature of these changes is in large part attributed to enormous advances in technology which have allowed for the rapid processing and transmission of information within and across countries and cultures. On one hand, the greater accessibility of information from a larger range of sources has exposed different points of view …
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, …
Social Class, Femininity And School Sport, Jan Wright, Gabrielle O'Flynn
Social Class, Femininity And School Sport, Jan Wright, Gabrielle O'Flynn
Jan Wright
This paper examines the relationship between the discursive and material practices associated with school sport and physical education and the formation of particular classed and gendered subjectivities; and how these, in turn, impact on young women’s potential life chances. In so doing, the paper will attempt to go beyond an understanding of ‘subjectivity’ as formed in relation to cultural and institutional discourses, to engage with the notion of ability or ‘embodied capacity’ as a form of physical capital (Shilling 1993) which has particular salience in a consumerist ‘performance’ motivated market economy and which is differentially made available in schools. This …
Physical Activity In The Lives Of Young Women And Men: Embodied Identies, Jan Wright, Gabrielle O'Flynn, David C. Macdonald
Physical Activity In The Lives Of Young Women And Men: Embodied Identies, Jan Wright, Gabrielle O'Flynn, David C. Macdonald
Jan Wright
The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex and diverse positions particular young women and men take up in relation to the moral imperatives of the healthism discourse. We do this through a discussion of the ways in which they talk about their own and others’ bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted with them over the course of a year. These interviews were conducted as the major component of a longitudinal qualitative study, funded by the Australian Research Council, which investigates the place and meaning of physical activity and physical culture in young …
Disciplining The Body: Power, Knowledge And Subjectivity In A Physical Education Lesson, Jan Wright
Disciplining The Body: Power, Knowledge And Subjectivity In A Physical Education Lesson, Jan Wright
Jan Wright
Extract: In recent years there has been a move in feminist and social theory towards an interest tin the body as a social and cultural site. The dominant discourses in Western society have traditionally, emphasized the body as a physical and biological given, to be understood like other 'natural' phenomena, through empirical investigation. Philosophical, feminist and poststructuralist discussions around the body (Foucault 1979, Foucault 1981, Bartky 1988, Bordo 1990, Grosz 1994) have demonstrated how our knowledge of the body and the body itself is constituted in specific cultural and historical circumstances and in the context of particular relations of power. …
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 …