Stephanie Beni is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway. She completed her PhD in 2021 at Brock University in Canada, under supervision of Dr. Tim Fletcher. Her research interests lie primarily in understanding the ways young people experience meaningfulness in physical education and identifying practical tools by which physical education teachers can foster meaningful experiences for students. Her PhD research project provided insight into teachers’ experiences of adopting a pedagogical approach to PE teaching which prioritizes meaningful experiences for students through democratic and reflective pedagogies. In her postdoctoral research, she aims to focus on students’ experiences of meaningfulness in PE and how these are influenced by their teachers’ implementation of the Meaningful PE approach. Stephanie’s recent and proposed postdoctoral work has an international perspective, involving participants from Norway, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Ireland, Turkey and Canada, and holds important implications for PE teacher education (PETE) and teachers’ continuous professional development (CPD) in PE pedagogy. Stephanie has shown her excellence in pursuing such important and potentially ground-breaking work. Her work has been singled out at international conferences and in recent publications as one of the most potentially significant areas of research in the field of physical education. For example, the systematic review she led in the article “Meaningful Experiences in Physical Education and Youth Sport: A Review of Literature” in Quest is the now the most read article in the journal’s 70-year history (60 000+ reads at the time of writing). During one of her presentations at AIESEP World Congress 2023, Stephanie will present her research (along with her colleagues) about an international investigation on how teachers make sense of the Meaningful PE Approach in terms of personal experiences and philosophy for PE teaching, local curriculum demands, and characteristics of the innovation itself. He recommendation for the AIESEP Early Career Scholar Award came from Dr. Tim Fletcher.
You can meet Stephanie Beni and other Early Career Scholars awardees on July 4th, between 10am and 1pm, during the Early Career Network Workshop at the AIESEP International Conference in Santiago, Chile.
