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MA Physical Education and Youth Sport alumnus Louis Francis-Edge’s publication success
Louis Francis-Edge, who graduated from the MA Physical Education and Youth Sport programme in 2022, has recently seen his dissertation findings published in the high-ranking international journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy.
Louis’ paper entitled ‘Basketball shorts, plantation food, and ponytail weaves: Black teachers’ experiences of becoming and being a Physical Education teacher’ considers black physical education teachers’ journeys from teacher training through to their roles as educators in schools.
Drawing on Critical Race Theory, Louis uses counter storytelling to demonstrate the permanence of racism and the various ways this pervades all facets of these teachers’ lived experiences. Lack of representation, stereotyping, and acts of resistance are recurring themes within the study, which joins a relatively small body of work in the field of Physical Education.
Such was the significance and value of Louis’ work, the Centre of Social Justice in Sport and Society in the Carnegie School of Sport supported Louis to attend the British Educational Research Association conference in Liverpool 2022, alongside dissertation supervisor Dr Annette Stride.
Louis then embarked on his own teacher training year while continuing to work with Annette and Professor Hayley Fitzgerald to translate his research into a publication. The paper has sparked interest within the Physical Education community with Dr Ash Casey (Loughborough University) writing a blog about the paper for his Physical Education Practitioner Research Network (PERN). PERN is a particularly useful resource within the Physical Education community as it offers a space for teachers, coaches, physical activity leaders, volunteers and university practitioners from around the world to come together and discuss practice, young peoples’ experiences, and research.
Louis and Annette will also appear in Dr Risto Marttinen’s (George Mason University) podcast series ‘Playing with Research in Health and Physical Education’ in December. This series offers another valuable resource for the Physical Education community in addressing current issues in health and physical education, whilst ensuring research is accessible for educators and university students from all over the globe. The podcast series is available to listen to through Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
In continuing with his success, Louis has recently achieved one of his long term goals, starting his first teaching post as a Physical Education teacher in Rotherham.
If you are interested in Louis' work, you can read his paper here.
Dr Annette Stride
Annette is a Reader in the Carnegie School of Sport, working within the Physical Education Academic Group. Her research has a social justice agenda, focusing upon populations that experience marginalisation, discrimination and disadvantage in PE, sport and physical activity contexts.
