The Girls in Sport Intervention and Research Project: Thinking Beyond the Square

Abstract

This is the second of three linked papers which report on the process and preliminary outcomes of the Girls in Sport (GiS) Project. This paper will report on how the teachers talked about the issues associated with girls' participation in physical activity and their ideas at the planning stage about how these issues could be addressed through a school based intervention. The data on which this paper is based were collected through formal interviews with executive members of staff, and focus group interviews with PDHPE/sport and non-PDHPE teachers. These were analysed for themes and compared to other literature on teachers' talk about girls' participation in physical activity, girls' interests and needs, and strategies to improve their participation and engagement in physical activity. There were a variety of explanations from the teachers and the students as to why girls were not engaged. These fell into three main themes: the structure of school sport (choice, variety, hierarchies, resources, and expertise), the environment (opportunities, stereotypes), intrapersonal and external factors (lack of skills and confidence, cost of activities and transport). From the teachers' perspectives, what the girls liked included: participating with friend/s; choice of activities; knowledgeable teachers; variety of activities, and better behaved boys. They foresaw a number of challenges to bringing about change, most of which involved the difficulties of school support and resources, rather than difficulties that resided in the female students. The issues teachers identified for girls at their schools were very similar to those identified in the literature on girls' disengagement from physical activity. The teachers had more difficulty thinking 'beyond the square', that is thinking outside existing sport structures and processes when it came to planning for changes in their school. This has been the challenge taken up by the Project team and the collaborating investigators as 'critical friends'.