Although sport is widely utilised as a tool for personal development, capacity building, and fostering peace, there are still numerous theoretical gaps in our knowledge about how sport influences individuals’ identities, and how this translates into their everyday lives. Within the academic literature there has been seemingly little focus placed upon participants’ emotional and embodied accounts of their sport-for-development (SfD) experiences. This paper uses phenomenologically-inspired theory to explore individuals’ lived experiences of a SfD course, and their descriptions of the social interactions and feelings of confidence they encountered, in order to address this lack of experiential data. An ethnographic methodology was used to collect data through four sports leadership course observations, and cyclical interviews over 4–10 months with eleven course attendees, plus individual interviews with five tutors. Participants’ understandings of their course experiences and the subsequent influence these understandings had on their lives were described through their use of the term confidence. A further phenomenological and sociological interrogation of this term enabled confidence to be seen as being experienced as a ‘frame’ and ‘through the body’ by participants. This study provides original conceptualisations of confidence in relation to participants’ SfD experiences, as well as important discussions regarding the role of emotions and embodiment in understanding the impact of SfD on participants’ everyday lives.

The purpose of this study was to privilege the views of both pupils and staff in one school's adoption of the Daily Mile Challenge (DMC). Listening seriously to the views of pupils, who are often the unheard subjects in whole school exercise interventions, the aim was to understand the meanings derived from the requirement to practice the DMC. Data are drawn from non-participant observations, 4 individual teacher interviews and 4 pupil focus groups with a total of 12 students. In order to understand the function of the DMC to its participants, a sociocultural position was adopted using Dewey's ends-in-view to analyse the data. This process revealed that complete adaptation of the DMC in name and form created an indeterminate space both for the teachers and pupils; an in-between space of not-classroom, not-break-time, not-running and not-a-mile. This allowed the DMC to be completed when teachers could fit it in to their teaching, which was not on a daily or a regular basis. This inbetween negotiated space formed the overarching landscape of the DMC. For the teachers, promoting purpose through moving in an orderly fashion was characterised by looking-like the DMC. Within this end-in-view the pupils had to find an acceptable way to take a moving break. Rather than address unfounded concerns about fitness and risks of obesity the DMC in this school has inadvertently highlighted an important need; for pupils to have an outside break from pressurised classroom performances and have more opportunities for quality social interactions.

The focus of this study was to understand undergraduate students' experiences of gymnastics and dance education within the scrutiny of modular learning in Higher Education. A phenomenological position was adopted in order to understand the wholeness of students' experiences whereby identities are constituted through their lived lives. This allowed us to understand the students' identities as relational to the learning and assessment context and their lives within and beyond university. Open-ended interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of students who consented to share their experiences. Data was analysed using Merleau-Ponty's theorising of identity as an embodied cohesion or habit between prepersonal and personal existence. This is revealed through opaqueness and transparencies of consciousness which in this study were revealed through the seven identities of the participants; Negotiating and surviving White space, Strategic masculine competitor, Seeking reassurance, Racially strategic to be unique, Seeking dependence to achieve, Strategically insular and Willing explorer. These identities help to shed light on the tensions Higher Education students may experience when confronted with new learning situations in which they are to be assessed. We concluded that getting to know students, and the opacities and transparencies of their identities, could be of great value in shaping their being as students. In striving to understand the habitual behaviours of students, it is possible to understand how the subject-matter being taught might be received by students within the wider context of their being in the world .

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