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Sport, Education and Society
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Physical contact in physical education – immigrant
students’ perspectives
Annica Caldeborg
To cite this article: Annica Caldeborg (2020): Physical contact in physical education – immigrant students’ perspectives, Sport, Education and Society, DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2020.1816539
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1816539
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Published online: 04 Sep 2020.
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Physical contact in physical education
– immigrant students’
perspectives
Annica Caldeborg
School of Health Science, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Physical contact is common in physical education (PE) and is often also perceived as necessary in the subject. At the same time, no-touch discourses in sport and PE affect both teachers and students in many western countries. Teachers in the subject have for example become increasingly reluctant to touch their students due to risks of allegations. In addition, many European countries have recently experienced a great influx of immigrants from non-western countries, which has resulted in more multicultural classrooms across Europe. This can be problematic in PE due to cultural differences regarding physical contact, especially with the opposite sex. The purpose of this study is to investigate physical contact between teachers and students in PE from an immigrant student perspective. This is understood through the didactic contract. For this purpose, interviews using photo elicitation have been conducted with immigrant upper secondary school students in Sweden. The major findings suggest that the following negotiation aspects determine whether physical contact can be regarded as legitimate by the students: the professionalism of the teacher, the teacher-student relationship, teachers’ instructive skills, the emotionally engaged teacher, opposite sex issues and teachers and students with similar immigrant backgrounds. These aspects are also part of the process of developing a didactic contract regarding physical contact between teachers and students. In conclusion, it is clear that some of the aspects legitimise physical contact and build trust between the teachers and the students, while others challenge this legitimisation and trust.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 19 May 2020 Accepted 26 August 2020
KEYWORDS
Physical contact; physical education; intergenerational touch; touch; immigrant students
Introduction
Physical contact is a fundamental need for most people, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity or (dis)ability. It can provide safety, pleasure and undemanding social togetherness. At the same time, it can also generate fear and vulnerability. Professionals in different areas have become uncertain and worried about being misunderstood when using physical contact in their work– perhaps even more so in the wake of the #metoo movement. In thefield of intergenerational touch in sport and physical education (PE), the issue of physical contact and worries about being misunderstood have been well-debated in the media and in research for at least the last two decades.
Physical contact is common in PE in terms of security touch, denoting touch and relational touch (Andersson et al.,2018). At the same time, PE teachers and sports coaches regard physical contact as tricky due to the risk of allegations of improper behaviour (Fletcher,2013; Öhman,2017; Öhman &
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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CONTACT Annica Caldeborg annica.caldeborg@oru.se https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1816539
Quennerstedt, 2017). However, as yet little is known about physical contact in PE in relation to gender, age, disability and ethnicity, especially from a student perspective (Gleaves & Lang,2017). The student perspective on this issue is however a growingfield. For example, it has been shown that, in general, Swedish students support physical contact in PE (Caldeborg et al.,2019), although female students draw on heteronormative discourses to regulate their performative speech acts on the issue (Caldeborg & Öhman, 2019). It is also important to investigate the perspectives of other students. In this study we do that by studying a number of students who live in Sweden but were born in a non-western country.
The purpose of this study is to investigate physical contact between teachers and students in PE from an immigrant student perspective. The study’s research question is: How is the didactic contract concerning physical contact between teachers and students in PE negotiated by the students? The purpose is important given the influx of immigrants from non-western countries in recent years that has resulted in more multicultural classrooms across Europe (Benn & Pfister, 2013; Lleixá & Nieva, 2020). In Sweden, some 20% of students in Year 9 (thefinal year of nine-year compulsory schooling) are immigrants from low Human Development Index (HDI)1countries (Swedish National Agency for Education,2016). As yet, very little research has been carried out on physical contact in relation to how PE teachers meet and interact with immigrant students (Anttila et al.,2018) and PE teachers and PE teacher education students have been criticised for being unaware of students’ cultural needs (Anttila et al.,2018; Benn & Pfister,2013).
Background
In this section we look at research on intergenerational touch in PE, research related to immigrant students and PE at a general level and physical contact in PE in relation to immigrant students. To begin with, it is important to recognise that in this study the terms‘western’, ‘non-western’ and ‘immi-grants’ should not be understood as homogenous countries or people. Several researchers have pointed to the importance of understanding individual difference among culturally diverse students (Mattingsdal Thorjussen & Sisjord,2018; Stride,2014; Walseth,2015). However, the terms are used to highlight the cultural confusion that immigrant students may experience when entering a country with a different culture and norms than they are used to.
Intergenerational touch in PE
Although there has been an increase in no-touch policies and discourses on physical contact in sport and PE in recent years (see for example the supervision protocol in the American Youth Soccer Organization, n.d.), physical contact between teachers and students is still quite common in PE and physical instruction is often considered necessary in many western countries (Fletcher,2013; Öhman,2017). More specifically, physical contact can prevent injury and help stu-dents to develop physical abilities in PE (Öhman & Grundberg-Sandell, 2015, p. 79). It has also been claimed that in order for children to develop to their fullest potential, physical contact is sometimes required in PE and can thus be regarded as a basic human right (Öhman & Quenner-stedt,2017). At the same time, research has revealed an increased anxiety amongst sport coaches and PE teachers about physical contact, due to the risk of being suspected of sexual harassment (Fletcher, 2013; Öhman, 2017; Öhman & Quennerstedt, 2017; Piper et al., 2013). Most of the current research in the field has a teacher’s or a sports coach’s perspective. However, Varea et al. (2018) interviewed pre-service PE teachers and found that they generally perceived physical contact as something positive. In addition, Caldeborg et al. (2019) interviewed Swedish students and established that, in the main, they supported physical contact as long as it had a useful purpose and that this was often implicitly understood by the teacher and the student. Later, Cal-deborg and Öhman (2019) found that female students drew on heteronormative discourses in their performative speech acts concerning physical contact in PE.
Research related to immigrant students and PE
Research in PE and PE teacher education on issues linked to cultural diversity, such as race, ethnicity and religion, has been extensive in recent years (see for example Barker & Lundvall,2017; Leseth & Engelsrud,2019; Mattingsdal Thorjussen & Sisjord,2018; Robinson,2018). Research on the PE experi-ences of ethnic minorities has ranged from minority students’ resistance to participation, to the pro-cesses of othering in ethnically diverse PE contexts (Mattingsdal Thorjussen & Sisjord,2018). In line with this, several studies have highlighted the need for intersectionality when interpreting and understanding individual differences amongst culturally diverse students (Mattingsdal Thorjussen & Sisjord, 2018; Stride,2014; Walseth, 2015). For example, Dagkas et al. (2011, p. 225) state that ‘Any research in this area needs to recognise that individuals differentially negotiate multiple and complex layers of identity.’ At the same time, PE teachers are expected to be ‘frontline “agents” of integration’ (Anttila et al.,2018, p. 610) and are criticised for being unaware of their students’ cultural needs (Benn & Pfister,2013). Barker (2019), on the other hand, claims that teachers are not insensitive to or incompetent when it comes to students’ different backgrounds, but instead points to discourses of whiteness as being the real dilemma. Problems around the privileging of whiteness, the othering of non-western immigrants and the need for non-western immigrants to adapt to the norms that are common in the country to which they have moved have also been in focus in thisfield of research (see for example Flintoff,2015; Robinson,2018; van Doodeward & Knoppers,2018). Finally, in their study, van Doodeward and Knoppers (2018) found that the development of caring relationships between teachers and students in multi-ethnic classes was essential for building trust in the teacher-student relationship. Such relationships are influenced by certain elements, such as knowl-edge about the students and caring teaching actions, which can include the use of physical contact (Mordal Moen et al.,2019).
Physical contact with immigrant students in PE
Research on students with migrant backgrounds and physical contact in PE is limited. Anttila et al. (2018) state that there is much to be learned in terms of how PE teachers meet and interact with students with migrant backgrounds. Some researchers claim that PE can be especially difficult for Muslim students in terms of how the subject is traditionally taught and what is regarded as acceptable to them (Benn & Dagkas, 2006). One area of tension is that Muslim stu-dents may be reluctant to touch members of the opposite sex (CAIR,n.d.). Similarly, Kahan (2011, p. 23) claims that co-educational PE can be problematic for Muslim girls due to religious rules that advocate limited ‘social interaction with males, touching or being touched by males’. This is a claim that applies to Muslim students as a whole and not only immigrant Muslim students. However, in this study it is relevant in that the interviewed students are immigrants from mainly Muslim countries. Furthermore, van Doodeward and Knoppers (2018) found that male teachers sometimes found the use of physical contact as a pedagogical tool troublesome when teaching immigrant girls. In this context, it is important to note that in Sweden, PE is a compulsory and co-educational subject, where both male and female teachers teach boys and girls together. However, this is not necessarily the case in the immigrant students’ own home countries, which adds to the need for this kind of research.
Earlier research tells us that although physical contact in PE is considered necessary, it is also increasingly associated with teachers’ fears of being falsely accused of harassment (Fletcher,2013; Öhman, 2017). The student perspective on this issue has shown that physical contact is mainly purpose-bound. However, it can be difficult to grasp the underlying dynamics of these purpose-bound situations because they are primarily based on implicit understandings between teachers and students. Due to the increased migration of refugees to Europe in recent years, and that PE tea-chers and PE teacher education students are largely unaware of students’ cultural needs, more knowl-edge is needed about immigrant students’ experiences in PE.
Theoretical framework
This study is embedded in a didactic research tradition, in which didactic refers to an‘interest in the relations between teaching, learning and socialisation’ (Quennerstedt & Larsson,2015, p. 565). It can also be described as an‘irreducible three-way relationship linking teacher, students and knowledge taught’ (Amade-Escot,2000, p. 86) or as the didactic triangle. Research in thisfield focuses on what is taught and learned, how, why and by whom (Amade-Escot,2006; Gundem,2011; Quennerstedt & Larsson,2015). The concept of the didactic contract is of specific interest in this study because it relates to teachers’ and students’ expectations in a given knowledge area (Brousseau, 1997; Gundem,2011, p. 61):
Habits of the teacher are expected by the student and the behaviour of the student is expected by the teacher; this is the didactical contract. (Brousseau,1997, p. 225)
When something is to be taught and learned, teachers and students associate it with their expec-tations and responsibilities. The didactic contract can be said to be the result of implicit negotiations between teachers and students about the knowledge that is taught in a given situation or subject (Amade-Escot, 2000). As such, it is an unwritten and implicitly understood contract. Breaches of the didactic contract are not always a sign of defect, but could signal an increase or a stagnation of knowledge and learning (Leriche et al.,2016).
The didactic contract has been used in a wide range of studies and can be understood in several ways when analysing data (Barker et al.,2017; Delacour,2016; Gundem,2011; Leriche et al.,2016). The use of the didactic contract in this study is similar to the way in which Caldeborg et al. (2019) have used it to analyse students’ perspectives of physical contact in PE. Important in the analysis of the teacher-student relationship is also the notion of the differential didactic contract (Verscheure & Amade-Escot,2007), which refers to the meaning that students make of a situation. This meaning is primarily personal and based on the students’ previous experiences. However, personal experience is also linked to the social and institutional context in which an event takes place (Amade-Escot et al.,
2015, p. 662). In this way, students’ personal experiences of physical contact in PE can be shared by other students and teachers in the same social or institutional context. Furthermore, Caldeborg et al. (2019) concluded that when students and teachers agreed on when, how or why physical contact was used in PE, this agreement was part of the process of developing a didactic contract. That is, an implicit agreement between teacher and student. In this study it is clear that such an agreement requires continuous work and negotiation. The interpretations and definitions mentioned in the fol-lowing quote are understood as the negotiations that take place between the two parties:
Social interactions consist of a continuous process of interpretation and definition of both the context and the meanings. The didactic contract is a specification of this phenomenon within the teaching/learning process. (Verscheure & Amade-Escot,2007, p. 248)
By using the didactic contract as a theoretical approach, it is possible to determine which negotiation aspects are important to students in the context of physical contact in PE, where both students and teachers are expected to abide by the same rules.
Method
This section begins with a presentation of the interviews and is followed by ethical reflections and the analysis procedure.
The interviews
Thefindings draw on interview data collected from 21 immigrant students (12 males and 9 females) in three upper secondary schools in Sweden. All the male students identified as Muslim. Amongst the female students, six identified as Muslim, two as Christian and one as an atheist. The students were
born in the following countries: Afghanistan (7), Syria (5), Somalia (4), Eritrea (1), Iraq (1), Russia (1), Palestine (1) and Uganda (1). All the students were originally asylum seekers who had been granted a Swedish residence permit. They had lived in Sweden between three and thirteen years, and six of them (all males) came to Sweden as unaccompanied minors.
The interviewer gained access to the students through PE teachers at three different schools,2who then recruited those students who met the sample criteria.3 The PE teachers and the interviewer informed the volunteers about the study orally and by letter. They were told about previous research on the topic, such as the reported importance of physical contact between teachers and students to facilitate development in PE and teachers’ concerns about physical contact. They were also told that participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw from the interviews at any time. They were also informed that confidentiality would be assured. The study’s ethical procedures followed the Swedish Research Council’s (2017) recommendations and an application to the Swedish Ethical Review Authority was submitted and approved. In addition, the students were given the option of being interviewed in groups, pairs or individually.4The interview questions were inspired by those posed in the Öhman and Quennerstedt (2017) study, and were in line with the interview questions in Caldeborg et al. (2019) and covered when physical contact was used in PE and when it was or was not relevant.
Photo elicitation was used as a technique in the interviews. The main idea with photo elicitation is to use photographs in the interview situation to help trigger memories (Collier,1957; Harper,2002; Katzew & Azzarito,2013) and give rise to richer data (Hall et al.,2007; Harper,2002; Meo,2010). Photos can also function as a bridge between the researcher and the interviewees by overcoming potential differences in their social, cultural and linguistic worlds (Collier,1957; Katzew & Azzarito,2013). The photos that are used in interviews also need to‘break the frame’ (Harper,2002) and lead to discus-sions about the topics the researcher is interested in. The photos selected for this study were both inspired by and in line with the situations in which physical contact is used by teachers as a pedago-gical tool in PE, as described by Öhman and Quennerstedt (2017), and reflected common situations in Swedish PE, which led to open discussions about the issue at hand. Before the data collection began, the selected photos were tested in a pilot study in an attempt to avoid any major misunderstandings.
Ethical reflections
Interviewers in privileged positions who conduct research on minority groups have been criticised for cementing already existing power relations and contributing to the stereotyping and homogenising of minority groups (Walseth,2015). At the same time, it has been argued that this critique contributes to essentialist understandings of for example ethnicity or gender (Flintoff & Webb,2012; Walseth,
2015). The power difference in the interviews conducted in this study was unequal, in that the inter-viewer was a white female researcher and a member of a majority researching a minority. However, and as claimed by Flintoff and Webb (2012, p. 584),‘we cannot afford to use the politics of identity as an excuse for not engaging with those that are differently situated from us’. The option of choosing individual, pair or group interviews was a way of reducing this power imbalance and minimising the risk of the students feeling intimidated in the interviews, especially as discussing experiences of phys-ical contact can be difficult. Further, when using photos in interviews it is the photos themselves that are the centre of attention (Hall et al.,2007), which can help to avoid or reduce any tensions that might arise in verbal interview contexts.
When interviewing ethnic minorities, age and context-appropriate language is important, especially when language barriers can affect the interview. The use of photographs is therefore helpful, in that they can ease the communication between interviewer and participant (Cohen et al., 2011). This was also the case in the interviews in this study. Although the participants’ Swedish was not always grammatically correct, they were proficient enough to take part in the respective schools’ national programmes.
Analysis procedure
The purpose of the study has been to investigate physical contact between teachers and students in PE from an immigrant student perspective. This is understood through the lens of the didactic con-tract. The research question is:
. How is the didactic contract concerning physical contact between teachers and students in PE negotiated by the students?
When going through the data with this question in mind, certain negotiation patterns were dis-cerned. In addition, these negotiations influenced the development of a didactic contract concerning physical contact between teachers and students in PE.
The analysis was inspired by Braun and Clarke (2006) and their description of thematic analysis. The analysis of the data was conducted by the author of the article, although as is customary, the analysis was also quality checked by a research group consisting of three senior researchers in the field of sport science. The interviews were transcribed verbatim. This was followed by familiarisation with the data and an initial systematic coding of interesting features. This process included looking for and organising patterns in the data manually. The identified codes were then matched with extracts that demonstrated the different codes. The codes were then placed in potential themes, which were reviewed and checked in relation to thefirst coded extracts. This formed a sort of the-matic map. The themes were refined and rewritten several times before clear definitions and names for each theme were formulated. Lastly, quotations illustrative of the themes were extracted.
Findings
It takes time and effort for students to decode and negotiate physical contact in PE. Using the analyti-cal question, the negotiations that took place amongst the students about physianalyti-cal contact in PE were discerned. In this section, the aspects or specifications of how these negotiations were pro-cessed and influenced the development of didactic contracts concerning physical contact are pre-sented as six different themes: (a) the professionalism of the teacher, (b) the teacher-student relationship, (c) the teachers’ instructive skills, (d) the emotionally engaged teacher, (e) opposite sex issues and (f) teachers and students with similar immigrant backgrounds.
(a) The professionalism of the teacher
In their talk about physical contact in PE, the students often referred to the teacher and indicated trust in their profession. The students said that physical contact was used because the teachers were simply acting in accordance with their employment and doing their job by helping the students:
You know, a teacher’s job is to try to get the student to learn something, for that the teacher has to help … in some way […] all of these photos, they are totally ok … I mean, the teacher was just trying to help. (Male student, interview 10)
They just do their job… to teach … (Female student, interview 9)
PE teachers sometimes need to have physical contact with their students in order to do their job properly and to help them succeed. As students expect this kind of physical contact, there seems to be a mutual understanding of it between the teachers and the students. When students negotiate physical contact in PE as part of the teachers’ professionalism, they can be said to have developed a mutual didactic contract. In addition, the students said that the teachers could see and interpret whether the students were comfortable with physical contact without verbal communication. In response to a question about how teachers dealt with physical contact, one student said:
Through body language… you know, body language says a lot … if the student doesn’t talk much then body language does it for them […] when the teacher sees that there is something [bothering the student] … the teacher just asks… it’s simple for both actually. (Female student, interview 14)
The students had both faith and trust in the teachers’ professionalism and their ability to interpret body language and facial expressions. Thus, the teacher could adapt their physical contact to the needs of different students, in line with what Amade-Escot et al. (2015) terms the differential didactic contract. The students also discussed teachers’ professionalism in terms of the teachers’ and students’ institutional framework. In other words, there were rules and regulations that everyone was expected to follow:
Here [in Sweden] he [the teacher] could be put in jail… yeah, or something, some kind of crime, but there [in the home country] no-one cares. (Female student, interview 1)
The students expected the teachers to stick to the rules and do their job. As they knew what to expect from the teacher, a didactic contract in which physical contact by the teacher was con-sidered legitimate by the student had been processed. However, this implicit and silent trust in the PE teacher’s professionalism was not enough. A relational dimension was also important to the students.
(b) The teacher-student relationship
One of the important cornerstones in negotiating physical contact is the relationship that is formed between students and PE teachers. According to the students, one way of developing this relation-ship was for teachers to know their students:
I anyway think that, the teacher… ought to try to you know … like get to know the students a bit more person-ally… that they like know how … if we say how [interview partner] is like as a person … and how she would think about it [physical contact]… (Female student, interview 11)
It was important for the students to feel that the teacher knew them and that they had developed a relationship with them so that physical contact could be perceived as legitimate. This also made it easier to trust the teacher:
Well, I feel much safer with a teacher that I’ve known several years … and then I think about her almost like she’s my mum […] the more unfamiliar [the teacher is] … maybe you have more limits [towards that person] so to say. (Male student, interview 3)
The students knew what to expect from a teacher with whom they were familiar. There was thus a mutual understanding between them that helped the students in their negotiations and created a mutual didactic contract between the teacher and student concerning physical contact. If the stu-dents were not familiar with the teacher it could make them erect barriers, which then complicated the development of the didactic contract. Relationship building worked both ways and several examples showed the importance of this:
You know the teacher and you know that the teacher would never do anything bad to you. (Female student, inter-view 11)
It depends on what relation the teacher has with the students, how kind of close the student feels to the teacher … yeah everything is about, well, trusting the teacher, that matters the most. (Male student, interview 12)
When the students felt that they knew their teacher it also meant that they trusted the teacher not to harm them. The relationship between teachers and students is of great importance when negotiating physical contact in PE and in developing didactic contracts that the students and teachers can implicitly agree on. The importance of relationship building between teachers and students is also acknowledged by van Doodeward and Knoppers (2018). Similarly, and according to Mordal Moen et al. (2019), the use of physical contact can contribute to the development of such relationships.
(c) Teachers’ instructive skills
In addition to professionalism and relationships, the students also negotiated physical contact on the basis of the teachers’ instructive skills. The students expected the teachers to be experts on instruc-tion and to be able to prevent injury:
I recognise all of these (photos) […] I means the student shouldn’t feel like that […] safe and sound, if the teacher is not there… and helps you. (Female student, interview 9)
There are situations where the teacher like has to hold the student and show how to do it, like in this photo [a girl hanging on a bar, behind her is a male teacher who is holding her by the waist], well it’s a little girl who wants to try pull-ups, but she can’t manage on her own, and she wants to. (Male student, interview 8)
The students found the intention and use of physical contact as a pedagogical tool relevant when it was linked to learning, such as doing movements correctly or receiving physical help. This related to denot-ing touch as described by Andersson et al. (2018), and which is described as physical contact that helps students to convey a desired body movement or develop motor skills. The students also highlighted another dimension of the teachers’ instructive skills. For example, when asked about situations in which the use of physical contact would not be acceptable, one student responded by saying:
Everything that concerns… lesson and … physical movements, then it’s ok of course … because there are new movements, it’s something that we’re going to learn … but, outside of that, then it’s not ok. (Female student, interview 14)
The above quote indicates that when the focus of physical contact is learning, and when it takes place in the safety of the PE classroom, the students regard it as legitimate, even though the same kind of physical contact would not be considered appropriate in a different setting. In other words, in this sense the students’ negotiations could override religious and/or cultural norms that might otherwise have affected some of the students’ perceptions of physical contact.
(d) The emotionally engaged teacher
The students did not only negotiate the teachers’ professionalism, relationship or instructive skills. Emotional aspects, such as motivation, encouragement, confidence and comfort were also relevant:
The teacher can maybe encourage by saying something, but you feel better with a high-five. (Male student, inter-view 2)
Physical encouragement could thus be more motivating than verbal support. Some of the students also linked physical contact to human acts and that people sometimes needed physical contact to feel good:
We are anyway people you know. Sometimes when something bad has happened then we really want someone to hug us and comfort us and stuff, so it feels like […] all these situations [points to a number of photos] are more like… human relations. (Female student, interview 7)
Comforting an upset child or giving emotional support through physical contact is a human act. Phys-ical contact is often negotiated as relevant and legitimate when it is related to emotions and to motiv-ating and comforting students. The emotional aspect of physical contact is also identified in Caldeborg et al. (2019), where the students discussed physical contact as an essential part of being human. When students know what to expect from their teachers, and when they also rely on them for help or comfort, they can be said to have developed a mutual didactic contract concern-ing physical contact.
(e) Opposite sex issues
It is clear that physical contact is seldom a problem when female teachers teach girls and male tea-chers teach boys. However, negotiations take place in relation to physical contact when male
teachers teach female students. Physical contact between teachers and students of different sexes in a PE setting is rare in many of the interviewees’ home countries. Co-educational PE (the norm in Sweden) could be one of the reasons why gender is problematic in Sweden. One example of this is the discussion around a photograph of a male PE teacher in a swimming pool teaching a child to swim by holding onto the child’s feet:
Interviewer: Ok, if we say that it’s a boy who is learning to swim and he has a female teacher, is that … Female student: I think that would be ok.
Male student: Yes, I would think the same… but […] it would be a bit unpleasant if it was the other way around… I mean if it was a girl and a man teaching her.
Female student: I think so too. (Interview 1)
This idea of male teachers teaching female students could be embedded in the interviewees’ immi-grant backgrounds, given that the students continuously referred to their cultural backgrounds during the interviews. The same idea emerged in other interviews as in the following excerpt:
Female student 1: For us [ female Muslim students] yes… like women [teachers] … they … we don’t misinter-pret them that much.
Female student 2: But if it’s a man, you have this insecurity … if they mean something with [the physical contact] […]
Female student 1: If it’s a boy, a man or a boy … so it’s kind of uncertain about what they want. (Female stu-dents, interview 4)
As in the previous quote, these students referred to their immigrant background several times in the interview. When student 1 said‘For us’ she might have been referring to herself and her interview partner as Muslim girls. The insecurity about male teachers amongst female students is also evident in previous research (Caldeborg & Öhman,2019), where this was found to be rooted in a het-eronormative discourse. However, in the study reported on in this article it seemed to be more rooted in religious or cultural norms and customs. This is something of a contradiction with regard to some of the other themes, for example where the students expressed trust in the teacher. At the same time, it also shows the complexity of physical contact in PE. Most studentsfind physical contact legitimate and agreeable, although in more detailed discussions about the issue some aspects of the students’ negotiations could challenge the development of mutually understood didactic contracts concerning physical contact.
Physical contact in PE between male teachers and female students can thus be difficult. The study has shown that one reason for this is the students’ immigrant backgrounds. Another reason, as reported by Caldeborg and Öhman (2019), can be found in heteronormative discourses. However, regardless of the reasons, it can make it more difficult for female students to develop a didactic con-tract concerning physical contact.
(f) Teachers and students with similar immigrant background
In terms of the negotiation aspects related to gender, it was apparent that there were differences of opinion about the male PE teachers. Some of the students said that male teachers with similar immi-grant backgrounds as the female students might think badly of them if they did not act in line with the norms and values of their shared immigrant background:
If it had been a woman [ female teacher]… that’s totally ok with me for example but if it’s a man [male immigrant teacher], he might judge me… if I did something in PE, he might judge it as something that’s wrong for a girl to do, and based on cultural things you shouldn’t do it like that and so on … so, I think it’s always … better to have a Swedish [teacher]. (Female student, interview 7)
The risk expressed here is that having a similar background as a male teacher could have a negative effect on female immigrant students. There is an assumption here that male immigrant teachers expect female students to act and behave in ways that do not always reflect the current PE subject content or the teaching methods in Sweden. Some of the male students had similar views.
For instance, in relation to immigrant girls being taught to swim by a male teacher with a similar immigrant background, one male student said:
Then they [the girls] might feel a bit ashamed […] I think like this, if I say clearly, maybe … the teacher says to them that they are whores… because they show their bodies … it’s because I know that they say this […] I mean, women must always wear a hijab… (Male student, interview 6)
This student’s interview partner did not fully agree, but continued by saying:
Yeah, but this man or that woman who has become a teacher… from the same country as the students … this man has come here you know, moved here a long time ago… and finished school, finished high school too and trained to be a teacher [in Sweden]… so a long time has passed … during this time that he has trained … thoughts will change… (Male student, interview 6)
It was clear in the interviews that some of the female students found physical contact from a male PE teacher difficult, especially if they shared a similar immigrant background. There was a risk that they would not have the same expectations in PE and might not agree on when, how and why physical contact could be used. Negotiation aspects like this can be challenging and make the process of developing a didactic contract between teachers and students more difficult. It would therefore seem to be important tofind common ground, where both parties ‘play by the same rules’. At the same time, it was assumed that the longer a male immigrant teacher had lived in Sweden the less likely he would be to judge the females’ behaviour. The teacher could then be said to have become more of a native Swede and part of the institutionalised Swedish PE profession, where a shared immigrant background was no longer as significant in terms of physical contact.
It is also clear from the study that in some cases physical contact is more legitimate in PE than outside the PE classroom, due to the professionalism of the teacher, the student-teacher relationship or the tea-cher’s instructive skills. However, in the case of a teacher with a similar immigrant background as that of the student, physical contact could be a barrier in the PE context. In short, it was evident that the stu-dents involved in this study had taken several negotiating aspects into consideration in the process of developing didactic contracts concerning physical contact with their teachers. Some of the aspects facili-tated this process, while others challenged it. This can be compared to set of weighing scales, where the weights on one side are the students’ negotiation aspects that contribute to building trust in the teacher, and those on the other side are aspects that challenge this trust, such as different sexes. When students negotiate physical contact they often take all these aspects into consideration when deciding which side weighs heaviest. In a way this also determines whether a didactic contract in which physical contact can be regarded as legitimate can be developed between teachers and students.
Discussion and conclusions
The purpose of this study has been to investigate physical contact in PE between teachers and stu-dents from an immigrant student perspective through the lens of the didactic contract. Didactic con-tracts are continually being made throughout the teaching and learning process (Verscheure & Amade-Escot,2007) and should always be open to negotiation.
This study has shown that considerable work is involved in the processing and balancing of physical contact in PE. This work and these efforts are identified in the six different negotiation aspects, all of which are important parts in the process of developing mutually understood didactic contracts between teachers and students concerning physical contact in PE. Some of these negotiation aspects can also be observed in other studies. The fact that immigrant students generally support physical contact in PE mirrors thefindings in Caldeborg et al. (2019). Negotiation aspects, such as the importance of trust and relationship building, are also acknowledged by other researchers (Mordal Moen et al.,2019; van Doodeward & Knoppers,2018) and confirm that they are integral parts of the teaching profession. Furthermore, teachers’ use of physical contact for learning, safety and emotional support are also evident in Caldeborg et al. (2019). In other words, when studentsfind the teacher’s use of physical contact
legitimate in PE, they can be said to have developed a mutually understood didactic contract concerning physical contact. However, some negotiation aspects can also challenge the development of these didactic contracts, such as when the teacher is male and the student female. This also reflects the findings in Caldeborg and Öhman’s study (2019), in which it was found that the students made use of heteronormative discourses on physical contact between male teachers and female students. The findings of this present study show that it is not a heteronormative discourse that the immigrant stu-dents draw on, but that it is more a question of their cultural and religious backgrounds. This is not very surprising, given that research has found that social interaction with men in PE can be problematic for Muslim students (CAIR,n.d.; Kahan,2011) and that male teachers mayfind physical contact difficult when teaching immigrant girls (van Doodeward & Knoppers,2018). At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the students also say that gender is not really an issue in the protective walls of the PE classroom. The negotiation aspect related to female immigrant students who feel judged in negative ways by a male immigrant teacher if they fail to act in accordance with the norms and customs of their shared immigrant background is however interesting, in that sharing an immigrant cultural back-ground with a male teacher is not necessarily a resource when it comes to physical contact in PE. A con-sequence of this is that in some cases it can be difficult for immigrant students to develop didactic contracts with male immigrant teachers in relation to physical contact in PE.
Several researchers have focused on the privileging of whiteness, the othering of non-western immigrants, or the assimilation needs of immigrant students (Flintoff,2015; Robinson,2018; van Doo-deward & Knoppers,2018). This has not been the focus in this study and one way of interpreting this study’s findings is that these students show that they have learned to juggle between the norms and customs of different cultures. Most of the time, these students move between these different per-spectives depending on context. This is similar to the claim made by Dagkas et al. (2011), that indi-viduals negotiate several and often quite complex layers of identities in different ways. These various perspectives and cultural norms have made the students knowledgeable, resourceful and experi-enced negotiators in terms of physical contact in PE. In this way, physical contact between the sexes, which would not always be considered appropriate by many of the immigrant students, can nonetheless be regarded as legitimate in the PE classroom.
Didactic contracts are always in the making and can change over time. This is not only true for immigrant students but can also apply to other groups of students with different or other concerns that they need to negotiate in terms of physical contact in PE. The call for intersectionality in under-standing individual difference among culturally diverse students (Mattingsdal Thorjussen & Sisjord,
2018; Stride,2014; Walseth,2015) is of course true for all students in school. However, the choice of this study’s particular group of students allows us to discern which negotiation aspects they carry with them and value and how they are linked to their immigrant backgrounds and to the process of developing didactic contracts concerning physical contact in PE.
The immigrant students in this study take all the negotiation aspects into consideration when negotiating physical contact in PE. Some of the aspects legitimise physical contact and build trust between the teachers and the students, while others challenge this legitimisation and trust. It is therefore important for PE teachers to be aware of all these negotiation aspects in their teaching of the subject. Many PE teachers already work on relationship building and trust with their students. At the same time, it can also be helpful to have confirmation of what immigrant students value and the kinds of challenges they face in relation to physical contact in PE.
Notes
1. Countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria are included in the lowest HDI groups. 2. One city school and two rural town schools.
3. Students who were not born in Sweden and have a non-western background.
4. 5 individual interviews and 3 pair interviews were conducted with the male students and 2 individual interviews and 3 pair interviews with the female students. There was also one gender-mixed interview.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Annica Caldeborg http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1097-8750
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