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Drawing upon data generated by 303 young male footballers employed in 21 professional clubs in England and Wales, this article explores some key aspects of players' masculinities, identities and engagement with education. Although many players described their educational experiences in largely negative terms, some aspired towards averageness, or middling, which is often central to working-class identifications with education. Other players found education 'easy,' engaged in effortless achievement and had begun to internalize elements of the neoliberal achievement ideology. The propensity for players to engage in copying and pasting from the work of others, and to regard their courses as being almost impossible to fail, was consistent with neoliberal ideologies of credentialism and performativity. The findings suggest that a more nuanced understanding of young footballers' education is warranted, and their aspirations and experiences can at least be partly understood as responses to the prevailing neoliberal learning environments which they inhabit.

The burden of sports injury in soccer is high, and return to sport outcomes following injury are often poor. This is compounded by a current lack of understanding surrounding the factors that may optimize psychological readiness to return to sport. Consequently, in the present study, we aim to further our understanding of these issues by examining the role of perceived social support in predicting psychological readiness to return to sport. In doing so, we extend previous research by examining whether reinjury anxiety is a mediating factor in this relationship. A sample of 150 previously injured soccer players (mean age = 25.32 y) completed measures of perceived social support, reinjury anxiety during rehabilitation, and psychological readiness to return to sport. Mediation analyses showed that reinjury anxiety partly accounted for the positive relationship between perceived social support and psychological readiness to return to sport. These findings suggest that injured soccer players with higher perceptions of social support will experience less reinjury anxiety during rehabilitation and, as a consequence, will be more psychologically ready upon return to sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of a research project investigating the use that Distance Education (DE) students at university make of the learning materials that are supplied to them. The research is based on a survey of 998 DE students enrolled in ten undergraduate subjects spread across all five Faculties at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in New South Wales, Australia. CSU is Australia's largest DE provider of higher education. The project addressed the following questions: (1) The extent to which DE undergraduate students use their learning materials; (2) The extent to which students undertake the learning activities that are often incorporated in learning materials; (3) The extent to which students obtain learning materials beyond the printed learning materials, especially their use of library facilities and the internet to research topics in their study programs; and (4) The way in which DE undergraduate students approach their study and the study strategies that they adopt. The paper reports the major conclusions from the survey. It was found that the majority of students read most or all of the learning materials that were sent to them. They relied heavily upon the prescribed textbooks, did some additional reading as recommended, to a limited extent carried out additional reading beyond that recommended, and worked through the provided learning materials in a methodical manner. They generally completed, in their minds if not always on paper, the study tasks embedded in the learning materials. Those students that read less and paid less attention to study tasks tended to study in a way that was focused on passing assessment tasks. Overall the study provides a strong argument for the retention of printed learning materials as students seem to work well with them, and the more effectively students use them the better they seem to perform.

This paper explores teachers' educational values and how they shape their judgements about physically active learning (PAL). Twenty one teachers from four primary schools in Norway participated in focus groups. By conceptualising PAL as a didaktikk approach, the findings indicated that teachers engaged with PAL in a way that reflected their professional identity and previous experiences with the curriculum. Teachers valued PAL as a way of getting to know pupils in educational situations that were different from those when sedentary. These insights illustrate how PAL, as a didaktikk approach to teaching, can shift teachers' perceptions of pupils' knowledge, learning, and identity formation in ways that reflect the wider purposes of education. The paper gives support to a classroom discourse that moves beyond the traditional, sedentary one-way transfer of knowledge towards a more collaborative effort for pupils' development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sports clubs (PSCs) are potentially effective settings for health promotion; however, their role within policy is unclear. Potential reasons include lack of awareness about existing provision of health and wellbeing (H&W) programmes and adequacy of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices. This review aimed to: (i) map the provision of H&W programmes delivered by PSCs in the United Kingdom (UK), and (ii) explore current M&E practices of PSCs and consider the policy implications of this. Websites from eight professional sport leagues were hand-searched for programmes and impact reports. Suitable programmes were quantified, whilst impact reports were analysed via inductive documentary content analysis. Results identified 176 H&W programmes and 36 impact reports, as well as 43 H&W impact statements, but only 14 of these were aligned to specific H&W outcomes. The H&W aims of programmes were typically vague, measurement tools were rarely used, and evaluations were usually anecdotal case studies and based on engagement figures, which may not only limit the potential uptake of these programmes but also the relevance of PSCs to public policy. Further research is thus needed to build a stronger evidence base for the use of PSCs as vehicles of public health promotion and policy, and to better address the challenges faced when seeking to monitor and evaluate PSC programmes effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]