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- Arnegård, Johan, 1958-
(författare)
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Upplevelser och lärande i äventyrssport och skola
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The physicality of sports and outdoor life offers great opportunities for intensive experiences – participants ”feel” the happening in their bodies. As well as looking upon physical activity mainly as something instrumental, as for example in competitive sports and exercise culture, other aspects can also be central, for instance the pure joy of movement. The existential or expressive side of physical activity is examined in this doctoral thesis.In order to study such experiential quality more thoroughly, the author’s attention turns to adventure sports participants, as they appear to have a capacity for becoming highly involved and seeking very intense experiences. Who is involved in adventure sports? Why are they engaged in a sport that demands such great hardships and risk-taking? What do they get out of it? The overall objective of the thesis is to shed light on adventure sports as a practice and to discuss the educational significance of flow and other experiential qualities in adventure sports and in schools.The analyses are based on three empirical sub-studies. The first began with a questionnaire that 161 adventure sports participants responded to. This was followed by an interview study of eleven men and three women, all of whom had extensive experience in adventure sports. The categories of sport were evenly divided between climbing, off-piste skiing and hang gliding.In the second sub-study a detailed investigation of climbing was carried out. A notable sportification has brought about a very clear and interesting change in parts of this activity. Six traditional/adventure climbers and six sport climbers were interviewed, of which half were men and half women. All the climbers were experienced and very much involved in their sport.The aim of the third sub-study was to seek an answer as to whether pupils have experiences in their daily school life that are similar to those of adventure sports participants. An ESM (Experience Sampling Method) investigation was carried out with 60 pupils in compulsory school year nine (corresponding to UK schools’ year eleven) from four different schools. The pupils’ parents answered a special parent questionnaire including questions about academic and professional backgrounds, living conditions, habits, interests, attitudes and leisure time activities.The results were analysed taking into consideration the phenomenological perspective and structuralistic or more correctly expressed the cultural sociological perspective. Mihály Csikszentmihályi’s theoretical argument on optimal experiences, which in turn is based on the flow concept, constitutes the phenomenological foundation. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept apparatus and theories were used to closely examine the participants’ backgrounds, life histories and current living situations.The study shows that a preference for adventure sports is clearly linked to the participants’ backgrounds and earlier life experiences. A behavioural pattern is incorporated and developed into an embodied capacity to master a practice, a result of a long learning process. Participants were clearly concordant in these respects. Participants emphasise the abundant opportunities for intensive experiences that arise from adventure sports. It is a matter of something multidimentional: the active body, outdoor life in natural surroundings, exacting and clear goals, total focus, and about exercising control. This approach presents a model for identification of content qualities, which together create the dynamics that form the meaningful rewards that result from participation in adventure sports. The dimensions include flow experiences, but also go beyond them.The deep sense of presence, the physical involvement, the fact that they can choose the path and increase the degree of difficulty themselves – and simultaneously counter this new challenge with increased capacity so that they are engaged at the ”right level” – also provide favourable conditions for a stimulating and successful learning experience.The observation was made that it was primarily in the practical and aesthetic subjects that school pupils had the same deep feeling of presence together with a meaningful and pleasurable holistic experience as the adventure sports participants had. Here they were actively involved with their hands or with their whole bodies, and they could make their own choices and be in control of the activity, which for most pupils led to a strong feeling of satisfaction.
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| 2. |
- Bäckström, Åsa, 1966-
(författare)
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Spår : Om brädsportkultur, informella lärprocesser och identitet
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today’s society is subject to an increased importance of aesthetics and an increasing individualism. New trends are adopted early by young people, which make it interesting to focus on how identity is formed and meanings are constructed in a youth culture context and in relation to ongoing societal processes of change.The purpose of this dissertation is to interpret and analyse the construction of meaning within the skateboard and snowboard communities in the social and cultural contexts. In particular, this dissertation is about the relationship between three levels, cultural, practice and individual. The title “Traces” alludes to four analytical themes taking different tracks in the book; consumption, gender, place and identity that are reflected in different chapters. However, the individual leaves traces in culture as culture does in the individual. Furthermore, skaters and snowboarders leave actual tracks in their local geography.Theoretically the study has a culture analysis approach with a semiotic base where five theories are intertwined. Johan Fornäs contributes with his interpretation on culture as system of signs and signifying practices, Stuart Hall adds the concept of representations, Kirsten Drotner provides her argumentation regarding aesthetic practices whilst Ulf Hannerz enriches the dissertation with his discussion on transnational culture-flows and the social diffusion of culture. Roger Säljö proposes a socio-cultural perspective of learning where learning is about participation in knowledge and skills. The method used is ethnographical. The multifaceted empirical material, from field studies and interviews, Swedish skateboard and snowboard magazines between 1978 to 2002, skateboard and snowboard videos, press articles, and websites, has been triangulated. In addition, there are three personal albums of skateboarder, snowboarder and surfer Ants Neo.The study shows that there are stereotyped notions about what boarding means and what it means to be a boarder. These notions both create and are created by the boarders themselves but are also used by advertisers for products not related to board sports at all. These notions, based as they are on ideas of resistance and radicalism, serve to emphasise that boarding is masculine. Resistance takes concrete form in its attitude to organized sports and to multinational brands and in the unusual use of places in the urban environment. To be a boarder is, apart form the boarding skills required, to be also part and parcel of these attitudes.The study explains how meaning and identity are created through informal learning processes in youth culture contexts. In these group-forming processes, both the individual and the community are formulated in social, cultural and aesthetic terms.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Larsson, Håkan
(författare)
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Iscensättningen av kön i idrott : en nutidshistoria om idrottsmannen och idrottskvinnan
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to disseminate the construction of masculinity and femininity in sport and sports related research. The major research question is how sport and sports related research function, on the one hand in the production of 'women' and 'men' as objects and subjects of knowledge, and on the other as a technique or procedure for regulating men's and women's behaviour and ways of reflecting upon themselves. The interest is thus aimed at how gendered subjects are made. Of particular interest is the concept of equal opportunities between women and men in sport as a new way of creating sexual/gender difference. Michel Foucault's concept 'governmentality', roughly the relation between the histories of the practices of the self and the practices of government, serves as one important tool in this work.Empirically, the study derives from 22 interviews with teenagers and coaches in track and field athletics. The interviews comprises of three themes: 'me and other boys and girls in sport', 'the body' and 'the coach'. The teenagers' answers can simultaneousl be seen as reproducing and opposing conventional perceptions of men as autonomous and goal achievement oriented, and women as dependent and relation oriented. What historical conditions have made this situation possible?A genealogical study of the construction of sport, and of masculinity and femininity in sport and sports related research, show that a patriarchal governmentality, where young men were seen as the only 'appropriate' competitive sportsmen, have successively been transformed into a social-liberal and a neo-liberal governmentality. In patriarchal discourses, a strong emphasis is put on gender differentiation and 'seriousness' (i.e. competition and performance) in sport. The sporting subject is constructed as a decidedly masculine subject. In social-liberal discourses, an emphasis is put on social relations and fellowship, and the sporting subject is constructed as a gender-neutral (and somewhat disembodied) subject. In neo-liberal discourses, the subject is constructed as an individual, however gender-specific (and heterosexual), subject. Neo-liberal does not emphasise difference between subjects (social and physical difference) but difference inside the subject (individual). Modern power relations aim at procedures that occur inside the subject and not so much at what takes place between the subjects.The concept of gender equity between women and men has grown strong in sports discourse since the 70s. It can be seen as a practical strategy of guaranteeing women and men the opportunities to do the same things - competitive sport for instance. At the same time it performs two distinct and clearly differentiated gendered subjects, to be equalised. As such gender equity policies might be preceived as an apparatus that produces and regulates sexual/gender difference.
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| 5. |
- Meckbach, Jane, et al.
(författare)
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Ett ämne i rörelse : Gymnastik för kvinnor och män i lärarutbildningen vid Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet/Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan under åren 1944 till 1992
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For almost 200 years the University College of Physical Education and Sports in Stockholm (former Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics; GCI later GIH; Stockholm College of Physical Education and Sports) has been educating PE teachers - and still does. In the very beginning and throughout the first 100 years, gymnastics was a major part of the studies at the insti-tute, and also in ordinary schools. Early gymnastics were invented by Per Henrik Ling, the father of the Swedish Ling gymnastics, and later devel-oped by his son, Hjalmar Ling. The part of the Ling system called peda-gogical gymnastics, consisted of “daily gymnastic training exercises”, which showed how gymnastics should be taught and performed.The aim of this thesis is to follow and describe gymnastics as a subject and its development at the PE teacher-training programme at GCI/GIH. Special attention is placed on the movement part without apparatus (the floor exercise) for male and female students. The time period studied is 1944 to 1992. The thesis consists of two separate empirical studies, with a shared interview study of 12 former teacher educators participating in both studies. Besides the above-mentioned interviews, the methods used are document analyses and visual analyses. Triangulation is used in order to follow the changes of the subject’s content, figuration and representation.The first empirical study investigates the institution of gymnastics’- col-lective memory, its content and legitimacy. This is done by looking at what time was allotted to the subject in relation to other subjects, and also which concepts were used in relation to floor exercise. The interviews deal with the objectives of the subject and what kind of influences the former teacher educators came in contact with. From a semiotic approach, the second study deals with visual analyses of film sequences, with floor exercises performed by male and female students. (See enclosed CD). The film material comes from the Institute’s events. The content and composition of the film se-quences are analysed, and the representation of the movements is inter-preted by semiotic discourse analyses. The interview study deals with the former teacher educators’ pedagogical view of the formation of the gymnastics.The results show that in 1944 the subject gymnastics took approximately 40% of the total study time. In 1992 the time allocated for gymnastics has been reduced to approximately 9%. From the 1940s to the 1970s, two separate gymnastics discourses existed, one male and one female, expressed in the movement content and in the figuration of movements. The male discourse was maintained almost intact, without any changes. The female discourse, on the other hand, was continually changed and developed over the actual period of time, strongly influenced by rhythmic and dance. When co-education was implemented in the late 1970s, a new culture of body movements was developed – which was unisex. Between 1949 and1970 in the film material, the masculine discourse was represented by the body image of a systematically trained and disciplined body, executing corrective gymnastics exercises, according to an instrumental way of looking at physical training. The smooth, healthy looking young body image of a woman, executing rhythmical aesthetical gymnastics, according to existing values, characterised the feminine discourse. There seems to have been aesthetics fostering rationality that ruled the female gymnastics. In 1985 the representation of the body image changed, and focus on the performance of the movements disappeared. The objectives of the subject have changed from the collective, corrective and/or aesthetical form of gymnastics to a gymnastic discourse where the attention of simplifying the movements, the individual and the social climate in the group are central.Finally, the findings show that four factors have influenced the changes and development of the subject and the teacher-training programme. Firstly, changes in society in terms of equality, gender roles and a changed role of the PE teacher. Secondly, the impact of the sport discourse outweighed the status of the gymnastics discourse and its legitimacy. The cultivating val-ues, in terms of the aesthetical schooling for the female students, disap-peared. Thirdly, the striving for research-related instructions in the teacher-training programme, (urged by the state from 1977) affected both time al-lotments for gymnastics and sports and the relation between theoretical and practical courses. Finally, over the years, the subject gymnastics has been strongly influenced by different scientific discourses: first the medical dis-course, followed by the physiological discourse and from the1980s and on, by the social scientific (pedagogical) discourse.
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| 6. |
- Redelius, Karin
(författare)
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Ledarna och barnidrotten : Idrottsledarnas syn på idrott, barn och fostran
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An important premise for the study is the pedagogic importance of sports, that children and youth via sports and its leaders consciously and unconsciously incorporate and teach themselves skills, habits and knowledge as well as norms and values. Another premise is that sports leaders, like other teachers and leaders, work in a time where new conditions prevail for children’s upbringing and for the role as a leader. What should be conveyed to children today is not obvious but seems to be dependent on the individual fosterer’s idea on what the role should mean. This is truer for sports leaders, for example, than teachers since the sports movement does not have a prescribed curriculum. The perspective of the study is cultural-sociological and gender-theoretical. In the analyses, Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts, habitus, capital and field, performed the functions of research tools. A descriptive purpose of the study was to increase the knowledge of who the children and youth leaders of the sports movement are and their views of and valuation of sports, the task and the children. Through studying what the sports leaders are bearers of in terms of personified and symbolic capital, the purpose of the study was also to analyse what was encouraged in the sports environment where many children and young people spend a great deal of their leisure. The analyses were based on an empirical material consisting of questionnaire replies from 525 sport leaders and in-depth interviews with 18 leaders. In addition, more than 1,600 future teachers and youth recreation leaders replied to a questionnaire form. Who the sport movement’s child and youth leaders are cannot be generally answered. It is partly dependent on which sport it is, partly which gender the leader has. The sport leaders’ attitudes to differing aspects of the children’s sports activity varied and various leader groups confronted each other. The leaders primarily appreciated the relations with the children. However, they did not appreciate the parental intervention, children and youths who did not behave themselves and the high demands which leadership signifies. Through sports the leaders primarily wanted to give the children physical and social upbringing. They wanted to educate children to be creative and independent individuals but emphasized at the same time a conscientious ideal. The study showed that differing types of symbolic capital dominate in children and youth’s sports activity and that different leader groups emphasize various values. What is understood as valuable seemed more to be related to the logic of different sports than to gender and the fact that the activities were for children. It is not possible to tell in general how children are fostered and influenced through sports. The results indicate, however, that seriousness dominated over playfulness and that success and achievement are highly valued.
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