The Social Science of Sport by Bo Carlsson Susanna Hedenborg

Author:Bo Carlsson, Susanna Hedenborg [Bo Carlsson, Susanna Hedenborg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138082915
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 1. BA (Hons) Sport and Social Sciences programme at the University of Bath.

Second, and predicated upon consumerist expectation, exists the troublesome notion among our student body that effort and energy are all that is required to buy a ‘first-class degree’, a product. Such sentiments clearly rub against (although do not necessarily have to) forms of sporting knowledge that could promote democracy or foster socially just knowledge and understanding within society as a whole. We have found it very hard, within a highly competitive marketplace for students, to remain true to such values while at the same time serving a student body who, at university open days where they make choices about which universities to attend, ask questions about employability, about potential income post-graduation and about how we will aid them plug into an existing political and economic order (or more accurately, their parents ask these questions). We also find it increasingly difficult to ensure diversity within the classroom when the possibilities of a higher education (at least in the UK) are increasingly foreclosed for anyone other than the middle/upper-classes.111

In our efforts to overcome – or negotiate – these tensions we have engaged in, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, active relationships with employers. This has been through the establishment of an industry panel with whom we discuss issues related to assessment, course content and whom provide placement (and often graduate employment) opportunities for our students. To enhance the employability of our students we position ourselves as a programme that will not produce clones or a production line of potential employees (e.g. an ‘off the shelf’ PE teacher, sports development worker, sports marketer, policy-maker or coach) that will be productive and functional and enter into an existing corporate order. Rather, we argue, that the Bath social science sports graduate will be one who will not only be relevantly skilled in the employment pathway that they choose (through defining optional choices within the curriculum that lead to certain career trajectories) but will be students who have engaged in transformative (as opposed to processual) knowledge and thinking, who have undertaken critical learning (as opposed to followed an instrumental logic that celebrates the bottom line), who have at the heart of the subject matter broad values of democracy and who have engaged with critical sporting pedagogies that draw attention to the production of knowledge and subjectivities and that link learning with social justice and social change.112 We aim for the curriculum to be one that provides the educational conditions that allow for behaviour to unfold, and that offers skills for thinking critically about knowledge production (and we have been overwhelmed with the support we have received from employers who have heralded the approach and the transferable and creative skills which our students bring to the workplace) and resources for creatively realizing and disseminating this knowledge. We have, for instance, been resourced to procure digital technologies to develop a Connected Learning Lab that will provide skills for twenty-first century employability. This, we hope, is far from just

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