Athletic Performances: Sports Participation as a Performative Tool

• In Event: Research in K-12 Education and Athletics: Past, Present, and Possibility

Abstract

Dr. Eric DeMeulenaere is an assistant professor of Urban Schooling in the Department of Education at Clark University. His paper presentation will examine the role athletic participation plays in the formation and presentation of academic identities by urban high school students of color while examining possibilities for future research.

Theoretically framed by Goffman’s (1959, 1967) concept of interaction rituals and face work, this paper employs qualitative research with five high school youth from San Francisco whose involvement with sports helped them improve their academic performance. Goffman keenly highlights the complicated interactions that individuals perform to construct positive presentations of self. For urban high school students of color these negotiations are further complicated by regularly inhabiting school spaces rooted in distrust (DeMeulenaere, 2012; Kohl, 1995). Urban students frequently struggle to maintain a successful presentation of self across the divergent and conflicted contexts that they inhabit including their homes, the court (or field), their peer groups, and their classroom. Those that are successful in multiple contexts develop sophisticated repertoires that enable them to eloquently shift their presentation across the different spaces while maintaining a coherent sense of their identity.

This paper explores this identity work by examining the ways that student involvement with high school sports can serve as a bridge between these different and often conflicted spaces. Sports participation is widely embraced across the different contexts and this paper examines the ways that students can use this positive status marker as a tool for their negotiations of their personal identity and academic performance. The findings reveal that athletic participation not only improved the academic identity and performance for these students, it served as a powerful tool in their management of divergent social contexts. The paper concludes with several implications for the importance of maintaining sports programs in urban high schools.

Dr. DeMeulenaere joined Clark University's Education Department from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was involved in urban education for sixteen years. He taught middle and high school social studies and English in Oakland and San Francisco for eight years. He also served as an adjunct professor in Education at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. More recently, he was the co-founder and principal of an innovative small high school in East Oakland focused on social justice. Since arriving at Clark, he has worked directly with teacher inquiry teams at partnership schools and has continued to teach courses to high school students there. His research includes an investigation on the influence of high school sports participation on student performance, analyses of the relationship of school culture to educational change, developing a framework for a "pedagogy of trust," and critical media literacy with youth. His research incorporates participatory action research, critical autoethnography and counterstory-telling and draws extensively from critical theory. He has recently co-authored a book with fellow presenter Dr. Colette Cann entitled Reflections from the Field: How Coaching Made us Better Teachers.

Author

• Eric J. DeMeulenaere, Clark University