Matthew Atencio

The distinction of risk: urban skateboarding, street habitus and the construction of hierarchical gender relations

This paper explores gendered relations and identities which evolved amongst street skateboarders. Drawing from Bourdieu, we suggest that various social fields such as ‘skateboarding media’, ‘D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) culture’, and ‘lifestyle/action sports’ overlapped and worked to maintain gendered divisions within street skateboarding based upon the logics of individualism and embodiment. Masculine habituses were most closely associated with risk‐taking behaviours and technical prowess; they became significantly rewarded with social and cultural capital. Conversely, women’s habituses were considered as lacking in skill and aversive to risk‐taking. Women thus came to be positioned as inauthentic participants in the street skateboarding social field and were largely excluded from accessing symbolic capital. Corporate‐sponsored and supervised skate events which were explicitly set up to be gender inclusive provided a strong counter to ‘street’ practices. These ‘All Girl’ events were considered ‘positive’ and ‘empowering’ spaces by the women in our study. We explore how these spaces might work alongside women‐focused niche media forms in order to support resistant femininities and practices which might underpin more egalitarian gender relations in street skateboarding.

Complexity Theory: Supporting Curriculum and Pedagogy Developments in Scottish Physical Education.

This paper describes how complexity theory principles relating to self-emergence and connectivity have been employed to inform our recent developmental work in Scottish physical education. We suggest that these complexity principles have purchase in postmodern times characterised by uncertainty, multiplicity and contradiction. We cite examples from the development and delivery of a developmental physical education programme in Scotland to assert that complex learning principles can be employed to structure curricular and pedagogical endeavours. These examples from practice highlight the ways in which a complexity-orientated learning approach extends beyond hierarchical, reductionist and behaviourist notions of learning, which have long held a strong foothold in the field of physical education. At the same time, we review critical questions that have been raised regarding the practicality of structuring educational practice with emerging theories, such as complexity theory.

Thinking differently about curriculum: analysing the potential contribution of physical education as part of ‘health and wellbeing’ during a time of revised curriculum ambitions in Scotland

Purpose: Following an explanation of the current policy context the paper addresses three particularly pressing challenges: the curriculum focus for physical education as part of health and wellbeing; the major implications for subject knowledge; and how translating curriculum change into professional learning and practice might feasibly occur. In analysing arguments associated with the intended curriculum focus we highlight the contrasting effects of curriculum prescription. These include times where lack of elaboration has hindered teachers in adequately grasping the scale and detail of curriculum ambitions sought and times where greater prescription has curtailed the rich diversity of experiences which are possible for pupils. In reviewing the implications for subject knowledge, the paper exemplifies how new developmental applications of change ideas could be implemented in physical education programmes in the early years of secondary schooling in ways which articulate more coherently with health and wellbeing and lifelong learning agendas than previous curriculum arrangements. In discussing how to translate curriculum change into professional learning and practice we outline how recent advances in developmental physical education have informed academic-led interventions aimed at supporting teaching communities in their professional learning. These initiatives potentially overtake some of the inertia caused through the mixed message reporting contained in official policy documents. Conclusion: Analysis of the three challenges highlighted has revealed a number of pressures on achieving sustained change in Scotland. While recognizing these pressures we are buoyed by noting the extent to which politicians and policy makers continue to recognize in qualitative terms the multi-faceted contribution of physical education to a balanced education; a position which, in effect, perceives physical education as being part of the policy solution rather than part of the policy problem. In building on this promising position, we have identified a number of key considerations about subject knowledge and pedagogical practices which require review if developmentally-informed interventions aimed at thinking differently about curriculum innovation for pupils aged 11–14 years are to be successful. In taking matters forward, we endorse the culture and cycle of experimentation and reflection which is emerging and encourage physical education teachers to continue to be active in intent in making the most of the policy opportunities which exist.

‘Ballet it’s too whitey’: discursive hierarchies of high school dance spaces and the constitution of embodied feminine subjectivities

This article investigates (i) how the structuring practices and meanings associated with dance classes at an inner‐city American high school operated as institutional spaces (re)producing ‘dividing practices’ that supported racial and classed hierarchies; (ii) how these racist structures were created and maintained relative to dominant notions of embodiment, ‘race’, social class, femininity, and dance; and (iii) the way these dominant practices and hierarchies were managed by two ‘black’ young women at the high school in order to construct particular modes of self‐governance. The analysis suggests that educators be attuned to the role that spaces play in creating particular types of ‘docile’ bodies and the strategies enacted by young people to create alternative embodied practices and subjectivities.

‘Freaky is just how I get down’: investigating the fluidity of minority ethnic feminine subjectivities in dance

This article addresses a lacuna of research into minority ethnic young women’s leisure participation by specifically focusing on the experiences and embodied subjectivities of two ethnic young women participating in dance. In the context of a qualitative research study based in an American inner‐city, post‐structural theory is used to signal the operation of intersecting racial, ethnic, gender, and class discourses and power relations. This analysis focuses on how the two young women engaged with dance cultures that were underpinned by particular dance forms; these dance forms arguably reproduced specific versions of ‘normalised’ femininity. The article then illustrates how the young women actively negotiated their dance cultures in order to construct multiple and shifting minority ethnic subjectivities. Commentary from one young woman, ‘Carrie’, indicates that she used her high school dance spaces as well as festival and club dance spaces to take up fluid white, black and ‘mixed’ subjectivities. I then investigate how a Salsa dance space provided the discursive resources through which another young woman, ‘Jenny’, constructed a proliferating diasporic identity. While Jenny identified as both black and Haitian, her hyperbolic dance performances re‐enacted various other subjectivities. These accounts demonstrate the possibility that young women can take up multiple versions of femininity in their leisure participation. These femininities reflect both alignment and resistance to dominant discourses which have ascendancy within young women’s leisure contexts.

Understanding the rationale for preschool physical education: implications for practitioners' and children's embodied practices and subjectivity formation

This paper provides an overview of selected academic research literature that underpins contemporary preschool physical education. We highlight and interrogate diverse rationales and beliefs that serve to influence and structure preschool physical education in various forms. We speculate as to how preschool practitioners and children might engage in specific practices relative to these discourses. Our consideration of preschool physical education discourses relies upon a Foucaultian analysis of the major techniques of power and also raises possibilities of conceptualising subjectivity formation through his concept of the ‘technologies of the self’. Discourses related to motor skill development, play and physical activity, in particular, appear to be prevalent in the selected literature, along with a related pedagogical discourse concerning ‘structure and freedom’. These sometimes competing discourses arguably underpin competing agendas reflecting those who advocate supporting childrens free play and those who propose more structured and interventionist practices in relation to young childrens physical activity. We conclude that these diverse approaches lend themselves to interpretation and negotiation in the context of preschool physical education, with specific consequences for the embodied experiences and subjectivities of preschool practitioners and children.

Complex and nonlinear pedagogy and the implications for physical education

There is increasing support to describe and examine the teaching of game skills in physical education from a complex and nonlinear perspective. The emergence of game behaviours as a consequence of the dynamic interactions of the learner, the game environment and the task constraints within the game context highlights the nonlinear and complex nature of how learning of game skills can occur. While there is increasing recognition that teaching and learning should be seen from a complex and nonlinear perspective, the challenge is to provide teachers with ideas on how to deliver lessons and activities that are underpinned by specific pedagogical practices from this perspective and in alignment with emerging curricular guidelines. In this paper, key features of complex and nonlinear pedagogy are discussed and exemplified through a Singaporean PE context. Practical implications are shared on how lessons/activities (soccer) based on aspects of complex and nonlinear pedagogy can be delivered in the school.

Translating change into improved practice: Analysis of teachers' attempts to generate a new emerging pedagogy in Scotland

In Scotland, substantial changes in the management of education at national, local authority and school/community levels are afoot. Central to future improvements are how teachers translate curriculum guidelines, with an increased focus on health and wellbeing and holistic learning experiences, into constructivist inclined pedagogical practices. Through reviewing semi-structured interviews and planning conversations, this article reports on five teachers’ attempts to introduce new teaching approaches in primary school physical education programmes. Each of the teachers had completed a new Postgraduate Certificate in Physical Education, which aimed to help teachers understand more about developmentally appropriate physical education. We investigate their responses in trying to cultivate an emergent pedagogy with a greater emphasis on creating pedagogical opportunities that are inclusive and clearly connected with national educational priorities. Findings illustrate the diverse ways in which teachers used their professional development experiences as the basis for engaging with curriculum policy and the means by which they implemented new practices and knowledges in their schools.

Using a complex and nonlinear pedagogical approach to design practical primary physical education lessons

This paper describes several practical activities that reveal how complex and nonlinear pedagogies might underpin primary physical education and school sport lessons. These sample activities, involving track and field, tennis and netball components, are designed to incorporate states of stability and instability through the modification of task and environmental constraints that challenge students to learn about movement. These activities challenge students individually and collectively to learn in relation to the cognitive, social, emotional and physical domains. Within these conditions, students are expected to ‘self-organise’ in order to take responsibility for their learning; this approach links with recent calls for a more expansive version of physical education supporting the holistic and lifelong development of physically active individuals. We further suggest that teachers using constraints-led pedagogies require high levels of capacity as they must draw upon their judgement, knowledge and teaching skills to appropriately facilitate and ‘scale’ dynamic learning contexts.

The place and meaning of the field of PE in Turkish young people's lives: a study using Bourdieu's conceptual tools

This paper draws on Bourdieus notions of habitus, social field, and capital to provide a more complex examination of the place and meaning of physical education in Turkish young peoples lives. Two secondary schools comprised of students from quite distinctive social, cultural, and geographical locations were involved in the study. Collected data from several focus group discussions, individual interviews, and class observations was analysed in relation to the themes of ‘social class’, ‘gender’, and ‘students’ positions within the social field of ‘physical education’. The findings demonstrate how the national Turkish physical education (PE) curriculum became interpreted and deployed by each school in distinctive ways. Both schools promoted disciplinary and performance-based physical activities in the PE social field, even as they used different physical activities and had different reasons for privileging these types of activities. Physical education was used by the middle-upper-class school to reify and enhance the symbolic, cultural, and social capital of young people, who were regarded as future intellectual, business, and government leaders within Turkish society. In comparison, the school based in the poor suburb used physical activity as a means to create ‘good’ and ‘productive’ citizen-subjects. However, in using particular physical activities to create certain types of subjects with institutionally valued habitus (including physical ‘abilities’ and personal and social attributes), both schools ended up privileging only a few select young men and women whose physical capital was commensurate with the discursive requirements of the social field. From this perspective, we argue that both schools authorised certain individuals (mostly young men) who were able to take up ascendant positions because they could most easily convert their physical capital into social and cultural forms. These students were most able to determine acceptable forms of embodiment and could dictate patterns of use in the physical education classroom. In many instances, their dominance worked to prevent most of their peers from fully participating in PE.