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A mixed method systematic review of primary school based interventions to promote physical activity and/or reduce sedentary behaviour.
Get PDFEvidence confirms few children engage in the recommended 60 minutes of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and
highlights a decline in participation from around 5 to 7 years. Children
spend approximately 40% of their waking hours at school and form early
health behaviours in childhood; primary schools are therefore an important
setting to promote physical activity. This systematic review was conducted
to ascertain the effectiveness of school based physical activity interventions in 5–11 year old children
Boundary crossing ahead: perspectives of entrepreneurship by sustainability educators in higher education
Get PDFThe study provides a novel investigation of university sustainability educators and evaluates their knowledge and perspectives of entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of communities of practice. This study offers key insights into how entrepreneurial education can positively impact upon sustainability educators behaviors and practices. This study explores, through a UK and European semi-structured survey of sustainability educators, three key research questions. Firstly, how an entrepreneurial or an enterprising approach contributes to solving sustainability problems? Secondly, the extent to which sustainability education programs in universities are making reference to enterprise/entrepreneurship? The study found that sustainability educators had mixed, but predominantly negative or absent, attitudes towards entrepreneurship and its perceived value towards sustainability. The results indicate that far greater collaboration and interaction is required between the disciplines to support this evolution to enhance their potential to collaborate and exchange best practice. Thus the University sectors strategic decision makers need to take responsibility for developing and encouraging such conversations
Meeting report: IUPS and ADInstruments 2017 Teaching Workshop
Get PDFEvery 4 yr, the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) Teaching Workshop is held as a traditional satellite event of the IUPS Congress. The 2017 satellite workshop was held August 5–8, 2017 in Búzios, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The workshop provided an opportunity for discussion and experiences in physiology teaching for educators at various levels, graduate students, and undergraduate students. This report describes the workshop activities and reports the participants' perceptions of this event. For evaluation of perception, an anonymous questionnaire was sent by e-mail to all participants, addressing nine items: appropriate topics, time of activities, poster session, congress venue, registration fee, attention of the organizing committee before and during the event, social event, and food. Responses were ranked according to a five-point Likert scale. Of the 145 participants, 77 answered the questionnaire. The participants' perception was positive, noting in particular opportunities to share knowledge, space for reflection of teaching practice, contact networks for future, exchanges of experience, and collaborations in research in physiological education
Environmental sustainability and sport management education: bridging the gaps
Get PDFAlthough sport management higher education has recognized the need to include environmental sustainability in curricula, little is known about the scope and content of environmental sustainability curricula. This study conducted an inventory of environmental sustainability courses offered in sport management programs. A questionnaire was distributed to 553 faculty members from North American higher education institutions. Additionally, a panel of experts were interviewed about the benefits, drawbacks and challenges of including sustainability in a sport management curriculum. Findings reveal that very few programs currently have stand-alone courses dedicated to environmental sustainability in sport. There are significant barriers to adopting environmental sustainability in sport as a stand-alone course and as a module, which certainly makes developing stand-alone coursework a long-term process. However, these challenges have not stopped many programs from incorporating these topics into their programs of study in other creative ways. The paper suggests ways to overcome barriers and integrate environmental and sport management education
Conclusion: Post-match recovery and analysis
No full textThis concluding chapter reflects on the themes that have been identified in the book
and sets out some thoughts on those that relate to the future nexus of diplomacy and
sport. It begins by revisiting, in light of arguments presented in this book, the reciprocal benefits of investigating international sport and researching the reconfiguration
of diplomatic practice. From there, it focuses down on the key themes developed
through the book; namely conceptual issues relating to diplomacy, patterns of public
diplomacy and the sports boycott as a diplomatic tool. This forms the basis for an
assessment of the trajectory of sport as a dimension of the diplomatic framework.
Drawing on the analysis contained in this book, what this concluding chapter captures
is the increasingly entangled relationship between sport and diplomacy, where sport
can itself be considered a diplomatic act, in the contexts, for example, of interest
representation and mediation. In this sense the book has explored the rebalancing of
their relations in a number of different spatial and temporal arenas
Effects of a Motivational Self-Talk Intervention for Endurance Athletes Completing an Ultramarathon
Get PDFThis study examined the effects of strategic, motivational self-talk for runners completing a 60-mile, overnight ultramarathon using a randomised, controlled experiment. Data were collected before, during, and after an annual ultramarathon. Twenty-nine ultramarathon runners were randomly allocated to a motivational self-talk group or an alternative control group. A condition-by-time mixed ANOVA indicated that learning to use motivational self-talk did not affect pre-event self-efficacy or perceived control. A t-test and magnitude-based inference indicated that motivational self-talk did not affect performance. Nevertheless, follow-up data suggested that most participants found the intervention helpful and continued to use it six months after their research commitment, particularly in endurance events and to a lesser extent in training. Participants continued to use self-talk to cope with exertion, as well as other stressors such as blister discomfort and adverse conditions. Suggestions are offered for future research examining the effects of psychological interventions on performance in endurance events
Environmental awareness through rock climbing: connecting students to their outdoor practice
Get PDFThe BA Outdoor Adventure Education, OAE, degree at the University of St Mark and St John, Marjon, includes the development of students’ environmental awareness. To develop this, students are asked to produce an auto-ethnographic account of their participation in rock climbing in the outdoor environment. Taking Brown and Dilley’s (2012, 37) assertion that “a ‘responsible’ [outdoor] subject…is held to be a ‘knowing’ subject”, we hope this exercise provokes a development of the students’ self-awareness, environmental awareness and – crucially – self-in-environment awareness. This paper reflects on the success, or otherwise, of this exercise to encourage students to take up questions about themselves in relation to the environment they inhabit. Firstly, mention of environment as other-than-self connects with the issue of students’ cognitive knowledge of the environment. At this time, a highly apposite paper appeared in the Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, in which Robbie Nicol presented an autoethnographic account of a solo expedition by canoe and sea kayak (Nicol, 2013). Nicol recounts how a prolonged encounter with a fly during his journey piqued his curiosity, leading him to want to know about the fly, suggesting that autoethnography could act as a precursor to engagement with scientific knowledge of the environment. Second, Utsler’s (2014) emphasis on the capacity for (environmental) identities to change. Some students wrote about themselves in relation to the environment more explicitly, more consciously, than others. This seemed to be those students who were more technically competent, this accords with suggestions from Wattchow (2007, 2008) and Preston (2014) that novice participants in outdoor activities can be overwhelmed by technical demands,rendering anything beyond that immediate focus (such as ethical relations with place) unimportant. This raises questions about how we progressively address ‘the environment’ indifferent ways within the OAE degree programme in such a way that it might lead the students into developing aesthetic/cognitive/scientific knowledge of the non-human world
A critique of Forest School: something lost in translation
Get PDFThis is a critique of an approach to outdoor education experienced in the United Kingdom (UK) at Forest School. Forest School came to the UK primarily from Scandinavia, where early years education conducted in the outdoors is a widely accepted practice. In its move to the UK, however, three major issues have arisen. The first concerns how Forest School as a form of outdoor education is culturally, socially, and historically situated. This suggests that its adoption in the UK must navigate cultural differences, acknowledging that Forest School is a social construction. Secondly, the pedagogy of Forest School, relevant as it is to early years education, is undertheorised in the outdoor education literature. This especially relates to considerations of play as a central tenet of Forest School pedagogy. Thirdly, the expansion of Forest School in the UK has taken a particularly corporate turn, resulting in a rapid institutionalisation and commodification of Forest School practices. The need to situate claims made for and about Forest School in well-designed and conducted research is crucial for substantiating what can degenerate into market-based promotion. Finally, some of the very positive contributions Forest School is making to the development of contemporary practices of outdoor and environmental education are introduced. This critique is written in the spirit of engaging in robust discussion and debate around Forest School in order to see the difficulties addressed and the positive contributions continue
Models of mentoring
No full textThis chapter aims to support mentor in considering the evidence to underpin their practice. There are a number of mentoring models which a mentor could adopt in order to support the growth and development of a beginning teacher. Attempts have been made to categorise different approaches to mentoring; for example, Maynard and Furlong suggested that there are three categories of mentoring: the apprentice model, the competence model and the reflective model. The apprenticeship model argues that the skills of being a teacher are best learned by supervised practice, with guidance from imitation of experienced practitioners. David Clutterbuck's model of developmental mentoring suggests that an effective mentor wants to draw on all four of the 'helping to learn' styles. Daloz argues that a combination of high challenge and high support needs to be offered by one as the mentor for a beginning teacher to learn effectively and to 'grow'