Clive C. Pope

The jagged edge and the changing shape of health and physical education in Aotearoa New Zealand

Primary Objective: This paper critically examines the influence neoliberalism has had on education in general and health and physical education (HPE) in particular in Aotearoa New Zealand. Main Outcomes and Results: Two of the most significant changes fall under the rubric of provision. First, recent government strategy has seen the amalgamation of colleges of education with universities and an associated pressure to rationalise professional programmes to academic options. For many teacher educators this widespread re-ordering of job descriptions, coupled with institutional responses to a national drive towards literacy and numeracy attention, has placed several HPE initial teacher education programmes in a precarious position. The second change has been the marked appearance of agencies and organisations that have assumed a right to deliver parts of curriculum and co-curriculum within many schools. Conclusions: While HPE has retained its status as a component of the most recent National Curriculum of Aotearoa New Zealand, a casting eye across the education landscape would reveal a series of changes that are having direct and indirect influences on this area of learning. These acknowledged changes, among others, are gradually eroding the political and professional autonomy of HPE.

A School—University Collaborative Journey Toward Relevance and Meaning in an Urban High School Physical Education Program

The promise and potential for collaborative teams of school and university colleagues to address substantive issues in physical education were the focus of an international conference and a series of high-profile articles in the late 80s and early 90s. However, school-university partnerships have seldom focused on school reform. Few scholars address secondary school physical education, save for the occasional article describing its eminent demise. Successful implementation of innovative practices, such as curricular and instructional revisions, requires significant investments in teacher development. This paper details a specific collaborative effort in physical education that makes a case for systematic long-term commitments to improve young peoples physical education experiences. Stories from a 4-year collaborative highlight the complexities and challenges faced by any subdisciplinary group that commits to connecting professional preparation and practice for the benefit of our respective constituencies.

How an exchange of perspectives led to tentative ethical guidelines for visual ethnography

Qualitative research, especially visual ethnography, is an iterative not a linear process, replete with good intentions, false starts, mistaken assumptions, miscommunication and a continually revised statement of the problem. That the camera freezes everything and everyone in the frame only complicates ethical considerations. This work, jointly authored by the researcher, the Research Ethics Committee (REC) chair and an informed outsider, walks the reader through the ethical challenges the researcher experienced seeking REC approval to conduct a visual ethnography of a secondary school’s rowing event. Eventually, the researcher found the challenges and ambiguities of informed consent indicative of the current issues facing many researchers working with the visual medium. The account fleshes out a procedural ethics and ethics in practice dichotomy and ends with the researcher and REC chair retrospectively contemplating the iterative ethics of visual ethnography. We conclude our conversation by proposing five tentative guidelines for visual ethnography researchers and their research ethics committees.

The physical education and sport interface Models, maxims and maelstrom

Within many school contexts physical education and sport have historically been positioned as polemic, and while there has been plenty of rhetoric about physical education as well as sport within education, there has seldom been engaged debate or discussion about the relationship between physical education and sport in school settings. This article revisits Elizabeth Murdoch’s heuristic of five conceptualizations for the physical education and sport interface (Murdoch, 1990), reflecting that two decades have passed and neither physical education nor sport are what they used to be. Murdoch’s interface invites teachers and coaches to apply policy, practices and pedagogies that have influenced the relationship of physical education and sport at a local level. While focusing on the policy and pedagogy of sport and physical education in a New Zealand context, this article draws on similar trends and issues at an international level to reaffirm the global relevance of the issues and challenges being raised. Attention is drawn to the need to keep pace with and satisfy the ever-increasing needs and wants of the next generation of young people. It behoves teachers and coaches to present young people with sport experiences that are full and enriching, based on sound maxims that help students understand how sport can strengthen a culture.

Society Gets the Individual It Deserves: Engaging Learners for the Flat World.

Historically the individual and society pendulum has swung back and forth between individuals and conformity and individuals and community. Individuals and society are mutually dependent yet conflicts of interest have shown how one has sometimes flourished at the expense of the other. As the world and society changes, learning must follow so individuals or groups can participate in society. And because participation in society inherently involves learning physical educators and kinesiologists (among others) need to address how we can assist students to be engaged learners who transform experiences into fruitful knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and beliefs and give meaning to their lives. The paper will situate learning and in particular, student engagement, as a vector for the pervasive change and the associated profound challenges that will be presented to individuals and society this century. Student engagement, particularly at a philosophic level, has essentially been ignored within our field.

Talking T-shirts: a visual exploration of youth material culture

Readers should also refer to the journals website at http://www.informaworld.com/rqrs and check volume 2, issue 2 to view the visual material in colour. The author completed a visual ethnography, first to explore the sport experiences of high school students taking part in New Zealand’s major rowing competition, the Maadi Cup. Additionally, the project set out to explore the process and potential of using photographs as representations of such experiences. The core of this research project was based on spending 10 days and nights at the regatta site, living the everyday life of rowers and rowing. The compressed time frame required the convenience of digital photography and video. In addition to the obvious artefacts of rowing, there is a notable influence of material culture. Part of the rowers’ everyday practice included this cultural production represented through the wearing and trading of T‐shirts. Despite its highly competitive nature, this regatta is important to young people as an opportunity to socialise and explore individual identities. For many of these students, Maadi is both grueling and gregarious. True, it is important for them to participate as competitors, but these objects of material culture (e.g. T‐shirts) help us understand how these young people communicate the wider meanings of being rowers.

Kaupapa Mäori Research, Supervision and Uncertainty: “What’s a Päkehä Fella to Do?”

In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have seen a welcome burgeoning of researchers and graduate students adopting Kaupapa Maori as a preferred methodology. Over recent years, appropriate ways to conduct research with Maori and within Maori communities have evolved. As a supervisor working within an institution where Kaupapa Maori has established a high profile, I have found myself in the role of supervisor to several Maori students. Furthermore, as a Pakeha New Zealander I have in recent years, discovered myself standing on tricky ground, learning and appreciating this methodology and its associated world view. How can a white, male, middle-class supervisor contribute to the conduct of Kaupapa Maori and the growth of Maori graduate students? Such an experience has revealed a different way of knowing, far removed from the “colonial gaze” that has marked much of my own research. Grant (2005) has recently described the act of supervision as an uncertain practice marked by a plethora of contradictory and competing discourses. Between such discourses are spaces that Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2005) has termed “tricky ground”. Such a term is pertinent because it highlights the complexity, uncertainty and shifting nature of not only the ground upon which researchers work, but also the individuals and communities who perform the research, the epistemologies and understandings they hold, the practices they indulge in and the effects such research can have on the participants. Russell Bishop (1996) has argued that storytelling is a culturally appropriate way of empowering participants and I will employ this strategy to share my experiences as a supervisor working on tricky ground.

The policy and practice of implementing a student–athlete support network: a case study

ABSTRACT In an effort to address difficulties experienced by elite athletes wanting to pursue tertiary education High Performance Sport New Zealand initiated the ‘Athlete Friendly Tertiary Network’ (AFTN) in 2010. Whilst a number of tertiary institutions across New Zealand have since agreed to implement this policy, it is not yet known whether this implementation has actually resulted in these institutions fulfilling its promise to New Zealand’s high-performance athletes. The current research project therefore sheds light on this previously unexplored area using the case study of one New Zealand University. Framed within interpretive phenomenology, and drawing upon interviews conducted with current elite athletes, this study examines the lived experiences of this university’s high-performance student–athletes and questions whether the AFTN is in fact assisting these individuals to engage in a student–athlete dual career. Results suggest that despite the implementation of the AFTN policy, these student–athletes still face difficulties in combining both their academic and athletic pursuits. Specifically, whilst all participants acknowledged receiving some form of support to complete their studies alongside their sporting requirements, difficulties resulting from long absences away from their place of study, inflexible sporting demands and a lack of flexible course delivery options compounded athletes’ struggles. Additionally, despite the university embracing the guidelines set out by the AFTN policy, an apparent lack of awareness and understanding amongst front-line teaching staff has meant that it is yet to fully meet its obligations under this agreement, thus suggesting the importance of clear policy communication throughout sporting and university infrastructures.

Seeking connection and coherence in sport pedagogy: minding gaps and contemplating a core

Three decades after Daryl Siedentop announced sport pedagogy to be the forgotten sport science, the seven articles in this special issue collectively present sport pedagogy as an emergent field of research and practice. Each contribution presents one or more foci that invite attention to what and how we conduct our research, the political backcloth of research, the issues and challenges that accompany research programmes and where attention must be afforded to ensure an optimistic future for the field of sport pedagogy. As a field we must look beyond as well as within. Just as it is important to revisit what we consider to be the core of our discipline, it is also valuable to look beyond and across our discipline to ensure vibrant and progressive research.

My dirty story about gardening: a visual autoethnography

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to promote visual autoethnography as a tool to explore and represent the captive qualities associated with gardening. Design/methodology/approach – Visual autoethnography is presented as a method to explore the personal meaning of gardening. Visual autoethnography allows the writer to enmesh narratives of memory, sensual experiences and the self with images that amplify personal meaning. Findings – The garden is a sensual landscape offering potential for personal expression and the vagaries of the human spirit. Despite its prominence as a leading leisure time activity in Aotearoa New Zealand gardening has received little serious scrutiny. What does this tell us? Is there a need to restore meaning or at least bring meaning to the fore of garden conversations be they personal, agreed, shared, reinforced or not? Originality/value – While research into gardens and gardening has largely focussed on the other, this paper explores meaning through the self. The meaning of ga...