Framing Cross-Cultural Ethical Practice in Adapt[ive] Physical Activity

ABSTRACT

Academics and practitioners are often at a loss when it comes to understanding the ethical socio-political and cultural contexts that invade the world of adapted physical activity. Ethical practice is situated in the local and the specific. In this article we highlight the reality that both academics and practitioners need to be ever mindful that the cultures surrounding the education, sport and rehabilitation components of adapted physical activity are distinctive environments that vary across the globe. Because of the cultural diversity surrounding adapted physical activity, we set out an embryonic framework for ethically thinking about practice in our field. Ultimately, we hope that this framework will go some way to illuminate questions of situated ethical importance that are becoming increasing conundrums within adapted physical activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Adapted physical activity
• disability
• ethical framework
• professional practice

Notes

1. Professional practice is defined as “a coherent, socially organized activity with notions of good practice within the practitioners’ understanding and skillful comportment. A practice has shared understandings about goals, skills and equipment and is continually being worked out in new contexts” (Benner, 1997, p. 50).

2. “Human science aims at explicating the meaning of human phenomena (such as in literary or historical studies of texts) and at understanding the lived structures of meanings (such as in phenomenological studies of the lifeworld)” (van Manen, 1997, p. 4).

3. For this article we have adopted the following understanding of ethics: Ethics relates to the values underpinning human conduct, the rightness and wrongness of actions, and the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of actions. “A good is something we judge to be worthwhile to have, achieve, attend to, or participate in” (Higgins, 2010, p, 239).

4. The dignified self is a state of physical, emotional and spiritual comfort, with each individual valued for his or her uniqueness and his or her individuality is celebrated. Dignity is promoted when individuals are enabled to do the best within their capabilities, exercise control, make choices and feel involved in the decision-making that underpins their care. (Fenton & Mitchell, 2002, p. 21)

5. For full details on the suffix “-ive,” see The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990 edition, Vol. 1, p. 1122).

6. Nelson (1995) described a (counter)story as a story in which the moral self-definition of the teller can be redefined by “undermining a dominant story, undoing it and retelling it in such a way as to invite new interpretations and conclusions” (p. 23).