Equity and Difference in Physical Education, Youth Sport and Health

A Narrative Approach

Fiona Dowling, Hayley Fitzgerald, Anne Flintoff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135126605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Educazione fisica

Issues of equity remain an essential theme throughout the study and practice of physical education (PE), youth sport and health. This important new book confronts and illuminates issues of equity and difference through the innovative use of narrative method, telling stories of difference that enable students, academics and professionals alike to engage both emotionally and cognitively with the subject.

The book is arranged into three sections. The first provides an overview of current theory and research on difference and inequality in PE, youth sport and health, together with an introduction to narrative forms of knowing. The second section includes short narratives about difference that bring to life the key themes and issues in a range of physical activity contexts. The third section draws upon a selection of narratives to offer detailed, practical suggestions for how they might be used in, or inform, teaching sessions.

This is the first book to explore issues of equity through narrative, and the first to examine the pedagogical value of a narrative approach within PE, youth sport and health. With contributions from many of the world's leading equity specialists, it will be invaluable reading for all students, scholars and professionals working in PE, youth sport, health, sports development, gender studies and mainstream education programmes.

Part I

Theoretical perspectives

1
Theorizing difference and (in)equality in physical education, youth sport and health

Anne Flintoff and Hayley Fitzgerald

Introduction

On a daily basis we are bombarded with messages and stories about difference and inequality. A TV news report highlights increased levels of poverty endured by people living in an unfamiliar, third world country; a radio interview on International Women’s Day features the continuing pay gap between women’s and men’s salaries; a national billboard campaign urges us to rethink our views and prejudices towards disabled people in society; or an article in a local newspaper reports on the rise in unemployment for immigrant young men. Differences and inequalities are felt locally and globally; they are all around us, although we may not always be aware of them. This chapter is about difference and inequality and specifically why they matter for understanding young people’s experiences of physical education (PE), youth sport and health. As teachers, coaches or others working with young people, we are involved in hundreds of decisions and interactions, some made on a moment-by-moment basis, that will determine who gets made to feel different, who learns and experiences success and, conversely, those who don’t. Whilst everyone should have an equal right to achieve educational or sporting merits, or to be healthy, the reality we know is somewhat different.

Think about some of the young people with whom you have worked and reflect upon how you relate to them in ‘different’ ways. Are they, for example, like James? He is growing up in an urban, working-class suburb, has a dual-heritage background, and lives with his mum and two older brothers. James loves playing one-on-one basketball and has even constructed an improvised basketball net onto a nearby telegraph pole so he can play with his friends. Or do you perhaps more easily recognize Anna? She has used a wheelchair since an early age and lives with both parents in a wealthy, rural green-belt area. After being collected from school by her mum, she is often ferried to an assortment of clubs and activities. Or does Matt remind you of a young person you’ve known? He lives in a working-class part of a large city with his dad and three sisters. For them, space is tight; they only have two bedrooms and Matt sleeps in the lounge. When Matt’s dad is at work he often has to look after his sisters. Even though these three young people have different kinds of lives, this shouldn’t matter to their learning and everyday experiences of PE and sport.

Young people like James, Anna and Matt live in an increasingly differentiated world, where socio-economic, and other inequalities associated with disability, gender, ethnicity or religion, structure their experiences. In democratic societies, education and sports systems have developed with the political goal of seeking to contribute to a more equal distribution of wealth and knowledge. Specific policies abound seeking to promote equality, drawing on well-known mottoes such as ‘Sport for All’. More recently, the discourse has turned to ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive education’, reflected, for example, in the Every Child Matters agenda in the UK and No Child Left Behind in the USA. However, whilst there is much talk of inclusion in policy and practice, how much actual change is there? Armstrong and Barton (2007: 5) contend that much of the discourse has become ‘an empty signifier’ – there may be a lot of talk, but with little change in practice. After all, how often do we actually reflect on what inclusion in youth sport or education means? How do we include James, Anna, Matt and all the other pupils in PE when we know that their social backgrounds and health behaviours can be so diverse? Is it possible to counteract such differences? This book aims to shake up the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of this policy rhetoric, and help you to see the complexities behind the realities of striving towards providing positive educational experiences in PE, sport and health, irrespective of social and cultural background.

In this first chapter, we map how difference and inequality can be understood by drawing upon social theory in general and, more specifically, social research in the field of PE, youth sport and health, and we explore the implications of these understandings for practice. In doing so, we aim to show how social theory is useful to our everyday practices working with young people, rather than something abstract or merely something that researchers do in their dusty, university offices! In focusing on social theory, we are not forgetting that differences have also been the focus of bio-behavioural scientific theories too; for example, physiologists explain differences in men’s and women’s 100-metres times as a result of differences in males’ and females’ physiological makeup. However, in this chapter, we are concerned with social thought, and specifically the relationships between differences and inequalities. Some time ago, Willis (1974: 3) questioned ‘Why is it that some differences and not others, are taken as so important, become so exaggerated, [and] are used to buttress social attitudes or prejudice?’ Willis was talking here about sex/gender difference in sport, and how the very small, physiological differences between men’s and women’s bodies have, nevertheless, been used to support discriminatory practices against women. However, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age and religion are other categories of identity that can also result in individuals being treated inequitably.

We are particularly interested in this chapter in embodied difference – the ways in which individuals and groups get constituted and constructed as different, and unequal, on the basis of their bodies; how particular bodies become valued and celebrated, whilst others are marginalized or ignored, and how these inequalities are taken up and reproduced in everyday and institutional practices. As a teacher, sports coach or health personnel (and as researchers too), we have a professional responsibility to work positively with difference, to celebrate difference and promote positive learning environments that enable all young people to learn, to develop skills and to flourish. Yet, in practice, this is far from easy. Whilst many PE teachers claim that their main priority is for their students to have fun, which we can assume they see as a prerequisite for good learning (see Dismore and Bailey 2010; Green 2000), research shows that, for a good many children, they fail in this quest. For these young people, physical activity becomes something to be avoided rather than embraced, with many looking back negatively on their time in school PE (Beltrán-Carrillo et al. 2010; Ennis 1996; Sykes 2010). As Evans and his colleagues note:

the most that many [young people] … learn is that they have neither the ability, status nor value, and that the most judicious course of action to be taken in protection of their fragile educational physical identities is to adopt a plague-like avoidance of its damaging activities.

(Evans, Davies and Penney 1996: 167)

How is it that some young people come to develop such ‘fragile physical identities’, learning that their bodies are not valued in PE? What is the role of PE and sport in the development of such identities? How do these identities impact on young people’s choices to participate (or not) in youth sport and physical activity in out-of-school settings? What part do these identities play in young people’s adoption or rejection of particular health behaviours, in their very sense of who they are and feelings of self-worth? And importantly, what is our role as teachers, coaches and academics involved in the delivery of sport, health and PE programmes? This book aims to help you to reflect on these questions, and this chapter focuses in particular on the role of social theory for helping with this task.

What’s the use of theory?

The vast array of social theories in PE, youth sport and health may, at first, seem somewhat daunting, yet if we think of theories simply as explanations – explanations that serve to help understand the world as it currently is (and, importantly, provide pointers for how it might be improved in the future) – we can appreciate theory’s central and important role in our practice as professionals working with young people. As Evans and Davies (2004) argue, theories help us ‘unpack’ the taken-for-granted, accepted ways of doing things. The role of theory is, they suggest,

to make [practices] less self-evident and … to open up spaces for the invention of new forms of experience and pedagogy … the message is clear, in PE … we should make research and teaching more, not less complex, and ‘theory’, ideas and innovation, not our enemies but our friends [our emphasis].

(Evans and Davies 2004: 11)

Like Evans and Davies, our task here is to help you to see theoretical complexity as your friend, and as a useful tool for reflecting upon and improving professional practice. Engaging critically in theoretical explanations of difference and equity might seem a long way from the everyday practices of teachers, coaches and health professionals for some of you. However, we suggest the opposite is true. As Evans and Davies (2006a: 111) note, ‘all forms of practice are theory laden; rarely, if ever, is our thinking “theory-free”’. For example, think for a moment about how you would divide a class of 30 children into groups of four. As the teacher or leader, would you divide them to ensure a careful mix of abilities, and/or genders in each group? Or let the children choose, enabling them to work with friends? Or do you select some children to be ‘captains’, who then choose their groups? Each of these methods gets used regularly in PE or sports sessions, and each is underpinned by different kinds of assumptions about the nature of learning, behaviour management, pedagogy and so on. Each choice will also have significant consequences for the subsequent learning experiences of different children. So, when practitioners make assumptions, they are making attempts to explain things, or predict what might happen next – using what Evans and Davies (2006a) called ‘first order’ theorizing. Following Evans and Davies, our challenge in this chapter is to show the connections between this kind of theory – that helps individuals make sense of their worlds – and what might be called ‘second order’ theories, those that seek to explain the nature of power, order and control in schools, communities and society. As we will explore in more detail below and in the next chapter too, our individual experiences are always linked into macro contexts, and wider social relations. Social theories are, then, attempts to explain the relationships between individuals and social structures and relations. This is sometimes called the agency/structure debate – to what extent are we ‘free’ agents to choose the way we live our lives, or are our experiences ‘structured’ by institutions (such as schools) and social relations (such as class or gender relations)? Different theories attempt to explain this relationship in different ways.

An important part of our discussion will be a consideration of the language and concepts used to ‘talk about’ differences and inequalities. As Penney (2002a) notes, concepts such as equal opportunities, equality, equity, inclusion and difference are all commonly used in contemporary discussions about PE, sport and health, often interchangeably, and yet their meanings are contested and vary across different contexts and over time. As our theoretical understandings develop and become more sophisticated, so too do our conceptual frameworks. We will say more about different concepts below, and also discuss the importance of language in more detail in the next chapter.

In Part II of this book, we present different experiences across a variety of PE, youth sport or health settings through the use of narratives or stories. Whilst at first glance these might be viewed simply as individual accounts, we argue instead that they illuminate links between subjective experience and social structures; how individual identities are based upon the ‘choices’ available to us in the social and cultural contexts in which we live. So, if you have read this far, we urge you not to skip this chapter and move onto what might be viewed as the more interesting ‘stories’ that follow in Part II. By reading to the end of this chapter, we hope you will appreciate the various ways in which difference and inequalities have been explored in social research in PE, youth sport and health and be able to reflect upon how these competing ways of knowing have influenced your values and practice. Rather than thinking that theory is something to be avoided, we hope you will see its importance and use in critically assessing your, and others’, practice, and for providing pointers towards better, more equitable practice in the future. If professionals do not confront their value-laden practice they may unwittingly produce and reproduce inequalities.

‘Waves’ of theory: theorizing difference in PE, youth sport and health

We have organized the chapter under what we have called three ‘theoretical trajectories’ or ‘waves’ of social thought: categorical, relational and postmodern/poststructural. Like Macdonald (2006), we recognize that the terms used to describe different strands of social thought are numerous and somewhat ‘slippery’. For example, ‘theories’, ‘perspectives’ or ‘paradigms’ all say something about our preferred view of the world, the nature of reality and how we should go about our research practice. We have chosen to use ‘theoretical trajectories’ here specifically to suggest a broad ‘direction of travel’ that acknowledges the ‘fuzziness’ at the boundary edges, and to encapsulate the idea that theories are always fluid and changing. Flintoff and Scraton (2006) have suggested it might be useful to think of theories as ‘waves’, where new ones do not totally replace existing ones but, like waves in the sea, grow out of and contain aspects of the wave that started further out from the shoreline. Whilst different explanations and concepts have developed to address new and emerging questions, nevertheless, these do not totally replace existing ones, and many of the ‘old’ questions remain equally relevant to contemporary life. It is impossible to do justice in this chapter, or indeed this book, to the extensive theoretical and empirical work that has addressed issues of difference and inequality in PE, youth sport and health (e.g. see Benn et al. 2011; Evans et al. 2004; Houlihan and Green 2011; Kirk et al. 2006; Penney 2002b; Wright and Harwood 2009). Instead, in the next section, we map out some of the defining features of the three theoretical trajectories, identify what they offer to our understanding of difference and equity, and explore their use in practice. Ultimately we hope, of course, that your professional curiosity will be sufficiently aroused such that you will be motivated to read the increasingly available literature on social class, age, ethnicity/‘race’, disability, gender and religion in PE, youth sport and health.

Difference, what difference?

It is not surprising that debates about how best to research, theorize and write about ‘difference’ in social life have been complex. At issue is not just the development of ‘better’ theory but, as we have argued above, the implications for ‘better’ practice that emerge from this different engagement. This chapter and the following ones explore some of these complexities. As Penney (2002a) and Figueroa (1993), amongst others, have noted, how differences are conceived and w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical perspectives
• Part II Stories of difference and (in)equality
• Part III Engaging with narratives
• Index