Young People's Voices in Physical Education and Youth Sport

Mary O'Sullivan, Ann MacPhail, Mary O'Sullivan, Ann MacPhail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134010608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

How do children and young people experience and understand sport and physical activity? What value do they attach to physical education and physical literacy? This important new book attempts to engage more directly than ever before with the experiences of young people by placing the voices of the young people themselves at the centre of the discussion. As the need to listen to young people becomes increasingly enshrined in public policy and political debate, this book illuminates our understanding of an important aspect of the everyday lives of many young people.

With contributions from leading researchers and educationalists from around the world, the book draws on a diverse range of methodological and theoretical perspectives to demonstrate how we can better understand the unique perspectives of young people, how teachers and coaches can respond to and engage with the voices of young people, and how young people can be afforded opportunities to shape their education and leisure experiences. The book presents a fascinating range of case studies from around the world, including the experiences of African American girls and masculine sporting identities in Australia, and addresses both theoretical and policy debates. Young People's Voices in Physical Education and Youth Sport is essential reading for any serious student or professional with an interest in PE, youth sport, sports development, sports coaching, physical activity and health, education or youth work.

1
Introduction

Re-visioning young people’s voices in physical education and sport

Mary O’Sullivan and Ann MacPhail

The purpose of this book

The main purpose of this book is to focus on the voices and experiences of children and adolescents in various physical activity settings by exploring their understandings and experiences of physical education, physical activity and sport in their lives. It is anticipated that, by encouraging young people to share how different contexts contribute to their learning about, and involvement in, physical activity we may be in a better position to acknowledge and address how such contexts can most effectively work together to motivate young people to choose active lifestyles.

The intended readership is postgraduate students and academic researchers, while not dismissing that certain chapters will be valuable supplementary reading for undergraduate students interested in understanding what physical education and youth sport mean to contemporary young people in various places around the world.

The omission of ‘listening to’ young people’s voices from the title of the book is deliberate. We wish to avoid the notion that the authors who have contributed the chapters are interested only in ‘consulting’ young people, i.e. conversing with young people about what their experiences in physical education and youth sport are like from their perspective. Rather, with reference to Rudduck and McIntyre’s (2007) use of ‘participation’, authors develop such consultation with a view to encourage young people’s authentic involvement in opportunities for decision making, investment and participation around issues of direct interest to their lives – that is, lived experiences.

The chapters in this book convey the general consensus that teachers, facilitators, coaches and researchers strive to provide young people with authentic experiences in physical education and youth sport that meet their changing needs and interests, with the ultimate goal being to encourage more young people to be more physically active and to adopt a healthy lifestyle. The deconstruction of the term ‘young people’s voices’ differs between the chapters due to the different populations, contexts and cultures the authors report, as does the deconstruction of healthy lifestyles. The degree of young people’s voices and the extent to which they are consequently consulted vary according to the particular project and the needs and capacities of the young people involved. While all chapter authors appreciate the value of consulting young people and understanding their voices with respect to their experience in physical education and youth sport, examples are included that report how consulting with young people about their physical education and youth sport experiences has informed the development of effective and equitable practices. There are also examples of young people engaged as co-researchers and as researchers in shaping their own and others’ experiences and policies around physical education and sport (see the chapters by Oliver, and Enright and O’Sullivan in this volume – Chapters 3 and 10, respectively).

The chapter authors present a diversity of theoretical traditions and methodological approaches that can be used to focus on young people’s experiences in physical education, physical activity and sport. The different theoretical traditions addressed in the text include constructivism, feminism, poststructuralism, queer theory and typologies of student participation. The methodological approaches include the use of narratives, ethnography, visual methods and a variety of participatory action research strategies that critically engage students with sport and activity artefacts in their lives.

As editors we sought scholars across several countries who were researching different target populations of young people and/or different research methodologies about different aspects of sport, health, physical education or physical activity more generally. The authors discuss the findings from their research on different racial, ethnic, gender and socio-economic class groups, including urban and rural students in Australia (Lee), young people in New Zealand (Burrows, Pope), African-American and Mexican-American girls (Oliver), and Caucasian students in the United States (Cothran). Other voices shared include those from economically disadvantaged adolescent girls from an Irish secondary school (Enright and O’Sullivan), disengaged youths’ involvement in sport and physical activity interventions in the UK (Sandford), boys’ views of physical education and sport in Australia (Hickey), an Irish teenage boy’s engagement with physical education as a student with a special educational need (Meegan), and the marginalization of Canadian young adults from physical education and sport on the basis of sexuality, gender, physical dis/ability and body shape/size (Sykes).

Taken together, the chapters highlight the different approaches, methodologies and populations that contribute to such a growing literature base of young people’s experiences and engagement with sport and physical activity. Each chapter strives to provide evidence of young people’s understanding of, and experiences in, sport and physical activity while some provide insights into students’ experiences as researchers and co-researchers. Authors also report the challenges of giving young people a voice in favour of merely reporting research undertaken with young people and the implications of the research projects highlighted for future research, policy development and programme development.

Organization of the book

The book is divided into three sections, as described below.

Exploring student voice in different settings

The first section explores student understandings and experiences in different settings, such as school physical education and school sport, as well as the role of physical activity as part of their lives.

The first chapter, Chapter 2 by Jessica Lee, explores the voices of 20 Australian young people, recruited from three very different schools, on their experiences in physical education, sport and physical activity as they move through school and beyond school. While epidemiological data show decreasing levels of activity by adolescents Lee argues that these studies do not assist in identifying solutions to this problem as little or no attention is given to how class, gender, school and location shape their engagement with physical activity over time. The chapter shares findings from longitudinal data (three years) of the Life Activity Project (LAP) about young people’s engagement with physical education, sport and physical activity as part of the total biography of their lives. The longitudinal nature of the project is positioned within a poststructural perspective and captures young people’s voices during a number of important transitions in their lives (secondary school to college or work, from living at home to moving to new towns and/or to living with a partner or friends). Lee shares interesting data about the physical activity patterns of these young people, from the intersection of school, gender and social class, and the implications of these findings for health promotion policy.

In Chapter 3, Kimberly Oliver draws on 13 years of activist research in the United States to highlight how intersections of gender, race and sexuality influence how girls experience their bodies and how they experience physical activity. The chapter shows ways of collaborating over time with girls as co-researchers, in developing a language of critique and possibility that allows them to challenge cultural practices and messages that limit their health and physical activity participation. Oliver uses innovative research methods (magazine exploration, photo critique and inquiry-based projects) to learn about the girls’ perspectives, such as what African-American girls view as fashionable. From another project she describes how she worked with Mexican-American adolescents to create games to enact alternative possibilities to being physically active as ‘girly girls’. The last section of the chapter describes how, using photos, young students were encouraged to name and change the inequities that prevented them from being physically active at their elementary school.

In Chapter 4, the last of the first part of the book, Donetta Cothran discusses students’ perspectives of the purposes of physical education programmes in the United States, and the implications for their meaningful engagement with physical education. While much of the research in this area has been qualitative in nature, Cothran includes a number of different studies that have used mostly quantitative techniques (e.g. Q-sort methodology, attitudinal survey research and critical incident recall). In the chapter, she examines students’ values of physical education, how those values are met, or not met, by different curricula and how students attempt to shape the curriculum through their actions. The first section of the chapter summarizes five student value patterns (Playful Friends, Competitors, Friendly Learners, Cooperative Learners, Social Comparison) and how students experience the same curriculum quite differently, and often related to gender, race and ability. The later section of the chapter outlines the conflicting values between the teacher’s educational mission for the curriculum and the students’ greater concern for fun and friends. Data from students has highlighted how they have at times resisted, accommodated or redefined their school experience. Cothran recommends an authentic role for students in the design of physical education curricula, ensuring multiple goals could be met simultaneously and creating a curricular path of mutual worth.

Multiple identities of adolescent populations

The second part of the book includes four chapters that highlight the multiple identities and perspectives of adolescent populations, and include disaffected youth, a student with a special educational need, boys and male adults reflecting on their experiences of ableism, heterosexism and body discrimination in school physical education, and students who were marginalized during physical education because of their sexual or gender identity, physical disability or the size and appearance of their body.

In Chapter 5, Rachel Sandford, Kathleen Armour and Rebecca Duncombe investigate youth voice in education research, providing examples of ways in which participants’ voices, particularly those of disaffected youth in the UK, have been sought and heard in the growing number of research projects involving disaffected youth. The significance of youth voice in public discourse is explored with an admittance that, although researchers have taken young people’s views into account in evaluation studies, these are often tokenistic due to young people’s contributions being directed, structured and limited by external, adult-led research agendas. The authors present four selected projects, an overview of the methodologies employed and a brief illustration of how disaffected youths’ voices have been used to articulate key issues or themes in the dissemination of findings. The chapter concludes by providing an example of one potential research approach that may allow for a genuine representation of young people’s voice.

In Chapter 6, Sarah Meegan presents the experiences of James, a 16-year-old Irish wheelchair user, as he attempts throughout a school year to participate in mainstream physical education. The research is grounded within the theoretical framework of negotiating the curriculum, looking to explore if, and how, James’ participation in physical education impacted on inclusive curricular practices through student and teacher negotiation. Meegan discusses four key themes that provide insight into the physical education experiences of James, identifying instances where her observations appeared to contradict James’ recollection of events. The methodological challenges of conducting ethnographic research in presenting the voice of an adolescent with a special educational need within a physical education setting are considered before noting recommendations for future research practice.

In Chapter 7, Christopher Hickey focuses on the engagement young males have alongside hypermasculine sporting discourses in the context of schools, and the particular curriculum practices of sport and physical education. Acknowledging that the methodological foundations of his inquiries into masculinity, sport and education are best characterized within the paradigmatic lenses of phenomenology, Hickey acknowledges the place of the researcher in the research process, and the relationship between researcher and participant. Using data collection methods associated with narrative inquiry, Hickey draws on Foucault’s work on how we develop a sense of self. Reporting from different data sets compiled across a number of studies, Hickey highlights some of the drivers that produce certain sensibilities and practices around masculinity for young boys involved in the Australian Football League’s introductory programme, for men reflecting on incidents or events that had shaped their lives 15 years earlier and for a 12-year-old boy sharing his understandings of a footballing identity. The chapter concludes with implications for (pedagogical) practice through which young males can locate and articulate alternative ways of being and doing.

In order to identify some continuing and changing patterns of discrimination in physical education Heather Sykes introduces, in the final chapter in this section, reflective and retrospective voices of Canadian adults who self-identified as a sexual or gender minority, having a physical disability and/or having a socially undervalued body shape/size. The chapter focuses on their experiences as students who were marginalized during physical education because of their sexual or gender identity, or the size and appearance of their body. Theoretically, the chapter explores how discourses about the body in physical education contribute to particular forms of ableism, heterosexism and body discrimination within students’ experiences of schooling. The chapter focuses on adults ‘looking back’ on their physical education experiences as an invitation to dialogue about the continuation of physical education to create situations in which students who embody some form of queerness have to engage in difficult emotional and embodied negotiations. The chapter also focuses on ‘looking sideways’ at physical education by highlighting people with non-mainstream and critical perspectives about physical education. Sykes concludes by reporting revisionist histories of sex, sexology and queerness that could extend the line of inquiry offered in this chapter.

Theoretical frames and methodological approaches

The third and final section of the book explores the contributions of different theoretical frames and methodological approaches to data collection with and by young people, and how these can enrich our understandings of what engagement with physical education, health and sport means to them.

In Chapter 9, the first of this section, Lisette Burrows shares data from her New Zealand study of 9- and 10-year-old children from two very different schools, to make sense of what she calls the ‘health and physical activity imperatives’ that infuse their lives. She discusses how and why theoretical concepts from poststructuralism are useful tools in informing our understandings of young people’s engagement with, and resistance to these discourses. She discusses the key Foucauldian concepts (such as power, knowledge, subjectivities, technologies of the self, and discourse) that underpin her poststructural inquiry, and how they can influence the kinds of research methods used to interrogate and illuminate young people’s understandi...

Table of contents

• International studies in physical education and youth sport
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Exploring student voice in different settings
• Part II Multiple identities of adolescent populations
• Part III Theoretical frames and methodological approaches
• Epilogue
• Index