Non-disabled secondary school children's lived experiences of a wheelchair basketball programme delivered in the East of England

Abstract

Frequently an unquestioned belief is held in UK schools in the value of 'normalised' ability in physical education. Consequently inclusion of disabled students can be problematical. Negative perceptions of disability are rarely challenged. This study investigated the embodied experiences of 49 non-disabled secondary school pupils during a programme designed to introduce disability sport to non-disabled school children entitled 'The Wheelchair Sports Project.' Funded by a County Sports Partnership, Wheelchair Basketball sessions were delivered by trained coaches during physical education for a 12 week period. 49 pupils aged between 10 and 12 years took part in the study. Non-participant observations were completed during the programme and semistructured group interviews were completed with 24 participants pre and post project. Bourdieu's theoretical framework guided data analysis. The impact of the project on pupils' perceptions of physical disability was investigated. Prior to the project, pupils emphasized the 'otherness' of disabled bodies and described disability sport as inferior and not 'real.' Observations highlighted how pupils' experienced physical challenges adapting to wheelchair basketball. Pupils struggled to control wheelchairs and frequently diverged from acceptable behaviour by using their lower limbs to 'cheat.' Post-programme group interviews demonstrated that, due to their own embodied experiences, pupils' began to question their perceptions of the potential ability of participants with physical impairments. Pupils described high physical demands of wheelchair basketball and began to focus upon similarities between themselves and physically disabled individuals. However, participants made no reference to impairments other than physical disability, emphasizing the specificity of the effects of pupils' embodied experiences on their embodied habitus' which, although difficult to assess over the long-term, appeared to have an impact on perceptions over the short-term.3

Why ‘the best way of learning to coach the game is playing the game’: conceptualising ‘fast-tracked’ high-performance coaching pathways

“…Institutionalised cultural capital manifests itself in the forms of educational qualifications, whereas objectified cultural capital is presented in the form of cultural goods (Robbins, 1999). Encompassed within cultural capital is physical capital (Shilling, 1993), relating to the health, fitness and aesthetics of the culturally produced and corporeal body of actors (Evans et al, 2015). Finally, symbolic capital consists of "esteem, recognition, belief, credit, confidence of others" (Bourdieu 2000, p. 164) and is the accumulation of agents possessing all other species of capital which can then be converted into symbolic capital for securing agents' positions of social standing within the social space.…”

Technology of concentrated training as one of ways to optimization students’ basketball trainings

“…Results of students' functional tests proved the data of other reseraches [20,22]: basketball trainings positively influence on students' health. We also proved the fact that for assessement of students' ability to play basketball it is purposeful to use records of observations [26,30].…”

“…Basketball facilitates harmonious development, complex and comprehensive influence on organism, health strengthening [11,20,22,32]. Great variety of basketball movements facilitates nervous system and muscular-skeletal apparatus's strengthening, metabilism improvement, all organism's systems' functioning [12,26,30].…”

A level playing ‘field’? A Bourdieusian analysis of the career aspirations of further education students on sports courses

“…For Bourdieu (1984), a field is considered a social space within which there are some consistencies in cultural norms and practices. He identified a number of capitals that are at stake within fields, including economic (wealth, financial and material assets), cultural (including 'tastes' of knowledge, lifestyles and education), social (such as social connections), symbolic (relating to prestige or honour), and physical/corporeal (the health, fitness and aesthetics of the culturally-produced body) (see Thorpe, 2009;Evans et al, 2013).…”

“…The term hexis has previously been applied in relation to the process by which the habitus becomes embodied. Hexis refers to the manner in which repeated engagement with lifestyle-based practices of consumption and behaviour becomes culturally and symbolically imprinted upon the body through deportment, in both a corporeal sense (relating to physical capital), and in the presentation of the self (Shilling, 2003;Evans et al, 2013).…”