Students' Exploration Concerning the Role of Sport in Their College Experiences

• In Event: Today's Collegiate Student-Athlete Experiences: Understanding the Psychosocial, Motivational, and Contextual Factors Involved

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this paper is to highlight student exploration over the role of sport in their college-going experiences. To that end, this paper highlights the pedagogical aims and tools in an undergraduate classroom, The Place of Sports In The University, and the role of online digital publishing in Stories From The Place of Sports in the University (see https://uw.pressbooks.pub/theplaceofsports/). Students explored how esports, recreational activities, intramurals, clubs, and spectator sports influenced pre-college choices and college-going experiences. Specifically, how sport activities cultivate the collegiate ideal through ceremonies, stories, rituals and rites of passage, and unique language; all of which are most well understood by insiders to the campus community (Toma, 2010; Toma & Kezar, 1999). Additionally, the aim was to explain the role of Creative Commons (n.d.) licensing for contributing original content or building on content in the public domain.

Perspectives
This paper unpacks several perspectives that inform and interrogate a fundamental question - what is the place of sports in the university? These perspectives are focused on the participants and the spectators as college students and span the range from traditional varsity competition to club and intramural, campus recreation, and esports. Furthermore, perspectives include the collegiate ideal drawn from higher education literature (Toma, 2010; Toma & Kezar, 1999; Rudolph, 1990), concepts of place and space drawn from geography (National Research Council 2002), and pairs them with the idea of a thick institution (Brooks, 2017).

Modes of Inquiry
Inquiry is guided heavily on public and digital scholarship principles. First, public scholarship, where scholars share their work beyond their own field, including audiences beyond the academy and with tools of social media (Rankin, 2020) provides the foundation for engaging over student-curated presentations of their work. Secondly, digital scholarship “involves more than using information and communication technologies to research, teach, and collaborate. It includes embracing the open values, ideology, and potential of technologies derived from peer-to-peer networking in order to benefit both the academy and the society” (Ossiannilsson, 2017).

Data Sources
Drawing on digital and public forms of scholarship, students engage in several steps of inquiry, selecting a theme, locating secondary sources, crafting conversation questions and engaging in guided conversations, and image collection or curation. Students also participate in peer review offering editing advice and feedback in advance of final publishing. Using the inquiry tools of autoethnography and digital storytelling, students examine their individual and shared experiences of ‘going to college’ and the role of the collegiate ideal. In conclusion, students contribute to an open-access collection of stories that illustrate the role of sports in campus culture (e.g., mission, history, traditions, values, settings, practices) and in the cultivation of the collegiate ideal.

Significance
The aims of this paper are to illustrate the ways in which college students, including college athletes, engage in an interrogation of sports in their college-going experiences. Additionally, this paper aims to illustrate how Creative Commons licensing fits in the emerging role of public and digital scholarship in the student academic experience.

Author

• Jennifer L. Hoffman, University of Washington
  Presenting Author