Learning and Unlearning
(Un)learning Whiteness and Developing Social Justice Projects in Physical Education: Resolving the Weaknesses of Our Bias Denial in Teaching Sports Activities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Steve Raven
Research undertaken within the UK’s education system has shown that the whitewashed Physical Education (PE) curriculum’s primary mode of teaching through social interaction is systemically racialised, which, in turn, racially constrains access to the profession. Using a critically informed qualitative approach to map and explore a terrain of whiteness across the domain of PE, the study investigated whitely thinking’s role in racialising the PE professional pathway. Using data from semi-structured interviews with white PE students and their academic course leaders at English universities, the paper maps experiences of engaging with social justice projects regarding their racial knowledge and empathy. The fieldwork demonstrates the expression of whitely thinking, producing layers of racialisation within the context of the PE space. The term constrained inclusion is introduced to further understand the role of individuals in racialising social interactions. Moreover, although the participants say they do not see race, the analysis shows they continue to think in whitely ways. The participants cognitively adopted a “cloaking” of whitely thinking to hide their engagement with racism(s). Frequently, the teaching content of PE courses was shown to align with the course team's preferences, reflecting both an issue of staff (lack of) diversity and those housed within the confines of being-white usually do not examine the costs of a racialised society. The paper proposes to disrupt the profession's self-perpetuating dominant whiteness, using a strategy of active and actionable anti-racism curricula activities.
The Effects of Task Characteristics on Students’ Performance Calibration of Sport Skills in Physical Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Athanasios Kolovelonis
Students tend to overestimate their learning and performance in educational settings including physical education. Examining factors associated with students’ calibration, which is the degree of correspondence between estimated and actual performance, can shed light to this phenomenon. This study explored students’ performance calibration in sport skills in relation to task characteristics. Three experiments were conducted examining students’ calibration in tasks representing different conditions of the same sport skill (i.e., basketball shooting) including variations in shooting position (Experiment 1) and shooting distance (Experiment 2) and in tasks from different sports (i.e., basketball and soccer; Experiment 3). Participants in three experiments were 388 fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade students. Calibration accuracy and bias indexes were calculated based on students estimated and actual performance in sport skill tests (i.e., basketball shooting, basketball pass, and soccer pass). In all experiments, the majority of students overestimated their performance. Students were less accurate in the most difficult task suggesting the presence of the hard-easy effect. Students with higher performance were more accurate compared to students with lower performance. Some variations in calibration with respect to gender also emerged. No differences were found across tasks in the magnitude of calibration error. Moreover, almost half of the students were consistent in the direction of calibration and most of them were overestimators. These results expanded calibration research in physical education confirming students’ tendency to overestimate their performance, providing evidence regarding generalization of calibration across tasks, and informing interventions for improving students’ calibration of learning and performance in physical education.
Professional Touch in Teaching and Learning Fitness: Embodied Skills, Ethics and Experiences of Female Fitness Instructors
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dominika Czarnecka
Multi-dimensional fitness gyms constitute important cultural spaces where bodies are touched in a specific manner and for specific purposes. They are also spaces where instructors use touch, imbuing touch practices with specific meaning and initiating their own creative uses of touch. Thus, fitness clubs appear to be the right environment to examine the role of touch in teaching and learning fitness practices. Touch has been positioned both as a social practice and sensory experience. While many different types of touch may occur within the space of a gym, this paper focuses solely on ‘professional touch’. It is understood in relation to two interconnected spheres: 1) the ethics of touch, and 2) professional know-how. Professional touch always starts from the client’s need, is justified by the context, and associated with professional identity. The aim of this presentation is to explore professional touch used by female fitness instructors in teaching and learning movement practices from their perspective. The study discusses how instructors manage the use of touch in the process of transmitting tacit knowledge in productive ways. It concludes with discussing the consequences of touch deprivation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact the process has had on the work of instructors. The results of the research add complexity and a nuanced understanding of the role of professional touch in knowledge transmission, as well as in the development of professional identity in fitness instructors. This work is based on ethnographic qualitative methods, including: observant participation, interviews, informal conversations, autoethnography.
