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Background |
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Schools across the nation are faced with the challenge of providing quality after-school programs that enhance and support the academic learning environment and are full of fun! The purpose of this project is to develop a process and protocol to use sport as a vehicle to teach about cultures while facilitating bi-lingual exchange between English-speaking and English-learning children while combining the natural love of sport and recreation with peer teaching, culture, and community development. Sport "provides the stories and images that many of us use to explain and evaluate contexts, the events in our lives, and our connections to the world around us" (Sage, 2001, p. 2). Literacy skills can be easily integrated into the process of learning physical activities (Buell & Whittaker, 2001), and sport and recreation activities examined as cultural practices can serve to explore language, culture, and heritage--all elements that play a role in community development (McKenney & Dattilo, 2001). |
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This program encourages discussion among children from different backgrounds (e.g., Hispanic, African American; and Caucasian) to determine what they know about each other, what they know about sport and recreation as experienced in their culture, and what they would like to learn from the other cultures. The additional element of peer teaching and learning allows for a meaningful "context-embedded" opportunity for informal association and interaction (Cummins, 1980; Long, 1997). Peer teaching establishes children as the cultural and language experts, allowing differential expertise to emerge and thus changing roles within the community of learners. |
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The collaborative project team (made up of after-school staff, University of Georgia faculty and graduate students) developed process maps and resources in Units that use peer teaching of culture and languages within the context of sport as community activities and as cultural history. The Units connect history, heroes, and skills associated with sport using physical activity to allow children to demonstrate differential expertise. Groups of children discovered recreation activities and sports that are popular in a variety of cultures by discussing and researching information using a variety of sources. The children will then be responsible for instructing other children. |
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The goals of this program are to: |
- Increase cross-cultural knowledge
- Increase community development skills
- Increase positive language attitudes
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