Girls with learning disabilities and ‘football on the brain’

Abstract

In this article, we explore the footballing experiences of girls with learning disabilities. We situate our article within an after‐school football initiative that sought to forge a partnership between Bryant Park Special School and Liberty High Specialist Sports College, both based in different suburbs within one city in the north of England. We ask the following question: How are after‐school football initiatives, designed to enhance football opportunities and links between special and mainstream schools, being experienced by a range of stakeholders? In seeking to explore this question, we offer a series of critical non‐fiction narratives that capture the different ways in which a number of girls with learning disabilities, a male football coach and the male head teacher of a special school experience the realities of the football initiative. These tales illustrate not only the practical challenges of attempting to enhance football opportunities but also the theoretical challenges of exploring intersectional discourses concerned with girls, learning disability and girlhood.

Notes

1. This strap line features on a postcard produced as part of a Special Olympics Great Britain advertisement campaign. The insert to this postcard reads ‘It’s not about what Baljinder can’t do, it’s about what she can do’.

2. Sport England, Disability Survey 2000.

3. Schell, ‘Socially Constructing the Female Athlete’; Hardin and Hardin, ‘Performance or Participation’; Hargreaves and Hardin, ‘Women Wheelchair Athletes’.

4. Howe, ‘From Inside the Newsroom’; DePauw, ‘Social–Cultural Context of Disability’; Barton, ‘Disability, Empowerment and Physical Education’, ‘Disability, Physical Education and Sport’; Fitzgerald and Kirk, ‘Physical Education as a Normalizing Practice’; Berger, ‘Disability and the Dedicated’.

5. DePauw, ‘The (In)Visability of DisAbility’; Ruddell and Shinew, ‘The Socialization Process’; Anderson, ‘Adolescent Girls’ Involvement’. It should be noted that with the exception of a few studies, including Macbeth and Magee, ‘Captain England? Maybe One Day’ and Macbeth, ‘Restrictions of Activity’, football and disability remain at the margins of research.

6. Deal, ‘Disabled People’s Attitudes Towards’; Roman, ‘Go Figure!’.

7. Abbott and McConkey, ‘The Barriers to Social Inclusion’.

8. Redley, ‘Understanding the Social Exclusion’, 489.

9. Siedentop, ‘Junior Sport’, 395.

10. Fitzgerald and Jobling, ‘Student‐Centred Research’; Stride, ‘We Want to Play Football’.

11. Azzarito and Solomon, ‘A Reconceptualization of Physical Education’; Oliver, Hamzeh, and McCaughtry, ‘Girly Girls Can Play’.

12. Brah and Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’

13. Erevelles and Mutua, ‘“I Am a Woman Now!”

14. Barone, Aesthetics, Politics and Educational Inquiry, 28.

15. DePauw and Gavron, Disability Sport.

16. Thomas and Smith, Disability, Sport and Society; Thomas, ‘Sport and Disability’.

17. Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs; Brownlee and Cureton, Disability and Disadvantage.

18. Thomas and Smith, Disability, Sport and Society.

19. Sport England, The Equality Standard.

20. Shaw, ‘Touching the Intangible’.

21. The Football Association, The Football Development Strategy 2001–2006.

22. The Football Association, The Football Development Programme Disability Football Strategy 2004‐2006. The Ability Counts scheme has a commitment to ensure opportunities are made available in all aspects of football regardless of a person’s race, culture, religion, gender, ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity and social class.

23. For further discussion on the additive approach refer to Flintoff, Fitzgerald, and Scraton, ‘The Challenges of Intersectionality’.

24. The Football Association, Football for Disabled People Strategy Update.

25. The Football Association, National Game Strategy 2008–2012, Women’s and Girls’ Football Strategy 2008‐2012.

26. Harding, The Science Question, 173

27. Christensen and James, ‘Childhood Diversity and Commonality’; Smith, ‘Children as Social Actors’.

28. O’Sullivan and MacPhail, Young People’s Voices; Oliver, Hamzeh, and McCaughtry, ‘Girly Girls Can Play’.

29. Barnes and Mercer, ‘Breaking the Mould’, 7.

30. Hill, Prout, and Tisdall, ‘Moving the Participation Agenda’; Wright, ‘Researching the Views’.

31. See for example, Wright, ‘Researching the Views’; Nind, ‘Conducting Qualitative Research’; Gunter and Thomson, ‘Learning About Student Voice’.

32. Connor, Urban Narratives; Brown, Dodd, and Vetere, ‘I Am a Normal Man’; Owens, ‘Liberating Voices Through Narrative’.

33. Bruce, ‘Postmodernism and the Possibilities’, 4; Richardson, ‘Writing’.

34. Hopper et al., ‘Multiple Voices in Health’; Sparkes, Telling Tales in Sport. Indeed, the Presidential address by Bob Rinehart at the 2010 annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) called for the increased use of narrative and poetry in sport research.

35. Tsang, ‘Let Me Tell You’; Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism.

36. Hopper et al., ‘Multiple Voices in Health’; Douglas and Carless; ‘Exploring Taboo Issues’; Tsang; ‘Let Me Tell You’; Smith and Sparkes; ‘Changing Bodies, Changing Narratives’; Bruce, ‘Postmodernism and the Possibilities’.

37. For an overview of these debates see Clough, Narratives and Fictions; Gubrium and Holstein, Analyzing Narrative Reality; Elliott, Using Narrative in Social; Sike, ‘Storying Schools’.

38. Like Atkinson, Understanding Ethnographic Texts, these narratives were developed from ‘fragments of “real” utterances and exchanges’ and ‘shards of evidence’, 46.

39. Department for Education and Skills/ Department for Culture, Media and Sport; Department for Education and Skills; Youth Sport Trust – School Sport Partnerships (SSPs) are one of the key drivers of the PESSYP strategy. These are groups of schools that work together to develop partnerships and sporting opportunities for young people.

40. Department for Education and Skills/ Department for Culture, Media and Sport; Department for Education and Skills – Specialist Sports Colleges are at the hub of the PESSYP strategy. They place PE and sport at the centre of the curriculum as a vehicle to develop and improve learning opportunities for all.

41. Bruce, ‘Postmodernism and the Possibilities’.

42. Stanley and Wise, Breaking Out Again.