Is gender equality in brain damage ‘progress’ for women and sport?

This commentary sits within a context of growing cultural concern over brain damage that occurs in many of the Western world’s most popular, profitable and prized sports. After laying out evidence demonstrating this point, we discuss the increasing inclusion of women within sports which involve regular and routinised brain injuries. We problematise this apparent ‘progress’ with the title of our commentary. In particular, rather than offering some simplified yes/no answer, we argue that in light of the five decades of social scientific scholarship documenting the various harms produced by performance impact sports, working toward gender equality in brain damage is a nonsensical outcome. So, while there is clear evidence from academic gender studies that progress has been made toward tackling issues of exclusion and various forms of discrimination against women and girls in performance sport spaces, there has not been concomitant progress made in tackling the ways bodies and brains are often broken down, damaged and sometimes destroyed during participation in such sports. We do not suggest that consenting adults should be prohibited from enjoying impact sports and our aim with this commentary is not driven by a paternalistic, patriarchal belief which reflects historical notions around sportswomen being the ‘fairer’ sex, nor that responses to sport-acquired brain injury should be sex- or gender-specific. Rather, we conclude by suggesting that the emerging science on sport-acquired brain injuries should serve as an important inflection point to those leaders, organisers, practitioners and scholars working in this area to reconsider how we imagine, promote and structure sport - for everyone

Engaging with issues of emotionality in mathematics teacher education for social justice

This article focuses on the relationship between social justice, emotionality and mathematics teaching in the context of the education of prospective teachers of mathematics. A relational approach to social justice calls for giving attention to enacting socially-just relationships in mathematics classrooms. Emotionality and social justice in teaching mathematics variously intersect, interrelate or interweave. An intervention, usng creative action methods, with a cohort of prospective teachers addressing these issues is described to illustrate the connection between emotionality and social justice in the context of mathematics teacher education. Creative action methods involve a variety of dramatic, interactive and experiential tools that can promote personal and group engagement and embodied reflection. The intervention aimed to engage the prospective teachers with some key issues for social justice in mathematics education through dialogue about the emotionality of teaching and learning mathematics. Some of the possibilities and limits of using such methods are considered

Going ‘meta’: using a metadiscoursal approach to develop secondary students’ dialogic talk in small groups

This paper reports on a year-long research study: four teachers of English, their Year 8 (13–14 year old) classes (110 students) in urban, secondary schools and a university teacher educator investigated the contexts for students to develop dialogic, exploratory talk in small groups. Assuming a Vygotskyan perspective, the study adapted a pedagogic model from an earlier project, endorsing a structured approach to talk, with ‘ground-rules’ and reflection. The study investigated how this guided model might intersect with other aspects of classroom culture, practice and identity to effect sustained development in students? use of exploratory, dialogic talk. The project involved research collaboration cross-school, including students exchanging formative feedback on videotaped talk. Qualitative research methods comprised comparative discourse analysis of audio and videotapes of representative group talk; semi-structured lesson observations; and sequential teacher and student interviews. The study concludes that practising a structured model and reflecting on discourse had a liberating effect on the majority of students, enabling experimentation with different forms of dialogic talk and identities. Shifts in discourse, confidence and identity positioning were particularly marked in ‘lower-attaining’ students of lower socio-economic status. Teachers’ metadiscoursal reflection resulted in changes in teacher?student relationships and classroom talk characterised by tentativeness, permitting knowledge to be contested