L Rivard - Doctoral Stipend 2011
McGill University
Français
Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) promotes physical education and sport activities as tools that can ‘empower’ girls, improve their health, and break down strictly defined gender norms and stereotypes that control and confine girls’ lives. However, as the majority of studies indentifying the benefits of girls’ participation in physical activity have taken place in Western contexts, experts call for studies that help to better understand how physical activity is defined, understood, and personally experienced by girls in developing countries where socio-cultural contexts and gender dynamics greatly differ. Consequently, this study seeks to better understand SDP in the context of Rwanda by researching Rwanda girls’ perspectives on their lived experiences of physical education and sport activities. Ten action-based qualitative case studies using the visual participatory method Photovoice will be implemented in rural and urban classroom settings. The girls will be asked to photograph what they consider to be the main barriers to their lived experience of physical activity and solutions to these barriers. They will present their photographs, discuss the issues raised and make suggestions to improve their experience of physical activity. Semi-structured interviews exploring the issues raised by the girls will then be held with the ten classroom teachers, and SDP expert, and a local Gender expert. By bringing forward girls’ own challenges and solutions, this study aims to help local SDP programming respond to these issues and to highlight the importance of understanding context specific barriers to sport participation and personal definition of a successful experience of physical activity.
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