Promoting Growth
Aarhus University
Featured Reaching Out Through ParticipACTION: Canadian Federal Support of the Fitness Promotion Organization, 1971-2000 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zachary Consitt
Between 1971 and 2000, the Government of Canada invested in the national fitness promotion organization, ParticipACTION. Its mandate was to advertise the benefits of healthy and active lifestyles for Canadians, young and old. ParticipACTION developed creative public service announcements and community events to get Canadians moving in simple ways such as walking, running, swimming, or biking in the workplace, school, home, or park. Canadians were encouraged to reach the standard set by Scandinavian countries through the popular advertisement comparing a thirty-year-old Canadian to a sixty-year-old Swede plus fitness competitions between Saskatoon, Canada, and Umeå, Sweden. The federal government invested in ParticipACTION to reduce healthcare costs caused by a sedentary lifestyle and increase Canadians’ workplace productivity by encouraging the public to participate in fitness activities. Fitness governance fell within provincial authority in Canada, but the federal government found a way around jurisdictional boundaries using ParticipACTION. By financing their operating budget, the federal government maintained an arm’s length relationship with ParticipACTION to promote their message of a healthy active lifestyle without interfering in provincial rights. For nearly thirty years, ParticipACTION’s logo and message became widely recognizable across Canada and motivated millions to leave their homes to get active together. By the end of the century, ParticipACTION was forced to close after the federal government severely reduced its funding in favour of high-performance sport. This paper analyzes the federal objectives to invest in ParticipACTION, the organization’s creative marketing strategy, and the influence of the organization on a generation of Canadians.
Moving with Identity and World-building in Early Childhood Education and Child and Youth Care View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicole Land, Shemine Gulamhusein
Amid fields - postdevelopmental early childhood pedagogies and radical child and youth care - that resist the image of the rational, individualized subject grounded in humanism and endemic of anthropocentrism, we take the intersections of autonomy, movement, sport, physical education, and identity as a space of collective experimentation toward living well together with young people. Children and youth are re-creating body narratives and curricula beyond the bounded self, cracking the individualist legacies of autonomy. In our ongoing research, we take seriously how children and youth are inventing immersive acts of moving as identity and world-building. Within Nicole’s project, a collaborative action research project with toddlers and preschoolers in an early childhood education classroom, we ask “how do we get to know moving” and find that moving unfolds alongside identity, where to move is an activity that produces situated moving cultures that demand localized pedagogical responses. In Shemine’s community-engaged research project with immigrants and refugees, we further our understanding of how community leaders lean on recreational pursuits to overcome systemic oppression, pre- and post- migration trauma, and in-between identities. Taken together, our research grapples with questions of autonomy and movement amid education and recreation contexts, following how identity becomes intertwined with moving and sporting cultures anchored in a commons that disrupts inherited conceptions of individualized human autonomy, and draws us toward rethinking identity amid the rich ethical and political swirls that animate movement and bodies.
Internship at All Cost? : Potentials and Pitfalls in Employability-based Course Programs in Sport Science Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristian Thomsen, Simon Lonbro
In this case study we aim to highlight the potentials and pitfalls in the content and construct of curriculum-based internship programs of higher education in Sport Science at a Danish University. Firstly, we analyzed one hundred student assignments concerning student reflections on relevant work tasks, perceived barriers, possibilities, and learning outcomes in their eight- week internships. Secondly, in a following focus group interview, the student statements were compared with the perspectives from five labor market representatives from (1) sport organizations, (2) sport clubs, (3) schools, (4) private companies, and (5) municipalities and regions. We found a robust association between applied knowledge, skills and competencies reported by students and the focus group attendants. However, we highlight the importance of distinguishing between generic and education-specific knowledge, skills and competencies. In addition, we emphasize the prominence of a transparent course program in order to explicit the actual and intended interplay between on and off campus activity, as well as coordination, early dialogue and collaborative engagement between placement supervisors, students and educational institution supervisors. Employability, student autonomy and the acquisition of research-based knowledge are essential aspects of academic education and university policy. However, if they are not well balanced, there is a risk that one aspect will disavow the other. Specifically, when research-based, theoretical teaching on campus is converted into carefully structured placement activities in practice, student incapacitation and an inappropriate narrowing of academia might occur. This must be considered in the development and settlement of employability-based course activities at the universities.
