Centering the voices from the margins : Indo-Canadian girls’ sport and physical activity experiences in private and public schools
Creators: name: Batth, Indy
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: As 'visible minorities', physically active Indo-Canadian girls are misrepresented, marginalized and rendered 'invisible' by the dominant society. There is no Canadian literature to address such misrepresentations or to challenge the stereotypes that continue to label Indo-Canadian girls as passive, frail, tradition bound, submissive and victimized (Razack, 1995; Jiwani, 1992a,b, 1996). Such popular stereotypes are reified within the sport and education system (Lovell 1991; Hargreaves 1994; Razack 1995), falsely distorting Indo-Canadian girls' interests in sport. The purpose of this study was to explore and understand how Indo-Canadian girls interpret their experiences of physical education in separate and public school systems. Research questions included: What are their sport and physical activity experiences in grade 10 and 11? What are their perceptions of gender and race in their varied experiences? Do the various school settings make a difference? What was lacking in the Canadian literature was an adequate analysis of gender, race and sport that includes Indo-Canadian girls and women. Although some British researchers have made significant contributions, others tended to adopt a cultural deficit approach (Hoover, 1990; Stanley, 1995) which 'blames' Indian culture and the family for girls' participation rates without addressing the impact of institutionalized racism and sexism (Raval, 1989). The issue of co-ed versus segregated physical education classes is an ongoing debate which rarely discusses the fact that girls are not a homogeneous group or that the 'traditional' Eurocentric, male defined norms, standards and conditions of sport settings continue to be perpetuated. Issues of voice, silence and representation were also central to this study The research methodology employed hermeneutic interpretation and five ethnographic techniques which included observations, focus group interviews, one-on-one semi-focused interviews, document analysis and field notes. This study included three schools in the Lower Mainland, a private Sikh Punjabi school and two public schools. Following observations and focus groups with grade 10 girls at the private school, 4 girls were subsequently selected for further in-depth interviews and observations in grade 11 at the public schools. This study illuminated the importance of voice, silence, representation, gender, race and physical activity. What was most surprising in this study was that the girls' voices concentrated * significantly on the male referent point, the white referent point, and the impact of male domination in their experiences of sport, even though the majority of their experiences were in segregated PE classes rather than co-ed classes. The major contributions of this study include: the importance of understanding the nuances and interpretations of silence; the problems of sport settings which continue to be biased and exclusionary; the importance of debunking the cultural deficit model and generalizing stereotypes about Indo-Canadian girls, families and cultures, and; how gender and race are integrated and interlocking so that they cannot be analyzed as separate variables. This study recommends that the experiences of Indo-Canadian girls be contextualized within the dynamic and coexisting influences of peers, families and culture, teachers and curriculum, and systems and structures. It also recommends that we pay more attention to how we know rather than primarily to what we know (Razack, 1993).