Learning Culture through Sports: Exploring the Role of Sports in Society

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On school playgrounds and sporting fields, the words "you throw like a girl" are often used to denigrate particular players. Caricatures on Native Americans continue to fill billboards and sport stadiums, even in our nation's capital, despite the outcry of many American Indian organizations and supporters. These words, images, and the actions associated with them have meanings, and say much about the role of sport in our world and in our lives. Yet sport is rarely examined critically, despite the fact that it is an integral part of our society, and an important force in our lives. While we often complain about certain aspects of sport, rarely are solutions explored.

This book provides coaches, educators, parents, and others dealing with students and athletes with an engaging and critical venue by which to examine contemporary issues and controversies surrounding sport. In this text, authors take up the challenges faced by sport in our world, especially as it relates to the lives of young people, providing multiple perspectives on the issues, problems, and possibilities of sport in contemporary American society. The authors represent a variety of positionsscholars, coaches, teachers, athletes, and community membersproviding readers with different lenses through which to examine sport and its role in our society. This book helps readers to recognize that sport is not just a game, but also a serious piece of our culture that needs to be examined critically from multiple perspectives.

Reviews

A remarkably useful and versatile contribution to the field of sport sociology that has the added benefit of resonating across a range of disciplines. These essays manage to address themes with direct relevance to fields as diverse as history, education, psychology, gender studies, anthropology, and political science. And they do so without losing focus on what makes this such a necessary collection in the first place: The sheer power of sports culture to shape social constructions of gender, race, sexual orientation, and nationality. But perhaps most impressive is how the editors have managed to explore these dynamics by connecting social structures to people's everyday, lived experiences. -- Jackson Katz, co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program and creator of the critically acclaimed film Tough Guise: Violenc
The essays are solid, and they challenge the reader to think about and reflect on social constructs and their relationships with sport and society. * Choice Reviews *
Young people already know that organized sportswhether they love them or hate themare an important part of their lives. Sports are a multi-billion dollar business that saturates the mass media; young peoples' clothes are splattered with swooshes and team logos; school activities and annual year books point to sport's centrality in the social life of schools. So it is fitting that Sandra Spickard Prettyman and Brian Lampman have assembled a collection of fascinating articles from some of the top scholars of sport. Teachers and students alike will find that this text, like no other, illuminates previously taken-for-granted, yet centrally important issues in their daily lives. -- Cheng Chen, professor of sociology and gender studies, University of Southern California, and author of Taking the Field: Women, Men and Spo

Author Bio

Sandra Spickard Prettyman is an assistant professor at the University of Akron where she teaches courses in Cultural Foundations of Education and Qualitative Research.

Brian Lampman is a secondary educator at Saline Middle School (MI) where he teaches eighth grade social studies, integrating sports sociology concepts into his course. Brian also coaches the varsity boys' soccer team in Saline.