The 16th ENSE Forum will take place in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2021.
Tempo Livre, a Portuguese grassroots sports organization and ENSE member, will host the Forum in Guimarães, a city also known as the “birthplace of Portugal”.
Initially founded by the local municipality, Tempo Livre is highly active in the fields of grassroots sports, sports promotion, as well as in the management of local sport facilities. Since 2018, Tempo Livre have also launched their very own sport studies department, the Centro de Estudos Do Desporto Guimarães.
The President of Tempo Livre, Amadeu Portilha, stressed that “it is an honor for Tempo Livre and its Sports Studies Center to have the opportunity to host a congress bringing together some of Europe's leading experts in the field of sport education. Today we are living in a time when the increase in physical inactivity is deeply worrisome because of the profound negative impact it will have on future generations. Sharing knowledge, projects, ideas and good practices, with emphasis on the education of teachers and coaches, is fundamental to the challenges facing today to counteract this trend, ”he said.
More details on the next Forum will be released in the coming months, including the forum theme and dates. In the meantime, if you are interested in more information about presenting or participating in the forum, you can reach out to us at info@sporteducation.eu
The second transnational meeting of the Social Entrepreneurship Training Program for Athletes (SENTA) project was hosted by the Universidad Católica de Murcia and took place from the 7th until the 8th of October 2019 in Murcia, Spain. In total, 15 representatives from 8 institutions took part in the meeting.
Working with top elite athletes, the objective of this Erasmus + project is to help address challenges related to dual careers in sport and to develop a platform that will enable athletes to become social entrepreneurs as a career option.
The two days offered space for presentations as well as intense discussions on how to transform elite athletes into valuable social sport entrepreneurs. With the help of qualitative interviews with elite athletes on social entrepreneurship and the options of dual careers, the overall aim of SENTA is to develop an online Gamification-based training program on Social Entrepreneurship for talented, elite or retired athletes.
More information can be found on SENTA’s website under https://www.dualcareer.net/
Following the latest ENSE General Assembly, which took place on September 27th as part of the 15th ENSE Forum in Vienna, ENSE is proud to welcome Thomas Skovgaard as its new president.
He now begins a two-year term as ENSE president.
Thomas Skovgaard is Associate Professor and Head of Centre in the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. He has been involved in the field of physical education and public health for over 20 years.
He has worked extensively on the internationalization of education in sports and movement. Prof. Skovgaard is also part of the ENSE-supported project on Intercultural Education through Physical Activity, Coaching, and Training (EDU-PACT) supported by the ERASMUS+ programme.
At the Assembly, Louis Moustakas was elected as the Secretary General of the organization and Karen Petry remained on the board as Past President. In addition, Harald Tschan was elected as Treasurer of the organization, while Ladislav Petrovic, Michael Bronikowski, Susana Carla Alves Franco, Johan de Jong, and Antonio Tressitore were elected as board members.
More than 100 participants and presenters from all over the world joined the 15th European Network of Sport Education Forum in Vienna, Austria, which was held on the 26th and 27th of September 2019. Researchers, practitioners and students met at the Institute for Sport Science at the University of Vienna to discuss issues related to the theme “Sport. Education. Society. – Links & Solutions”.
The Forum offered a space for reflection and discussion about the potential of sport to address the societal and educational challenges facing Europe and ways to maximize this potential. Through more than 30 interactive sessions, working groups and presentations, the Forum generated knowledge and recommendations that will help both researchers and practitioners alike. More than 35 speakers showcased their current research projects and discussed current societal challenges in regard to European sport and sport education.
In his keynote presentation, Mr. Jean Francois Laurent from The Association for International Sport for All (TAFISA) spoke about the future challenges in the field of grassroots sport and how education can help address those very challenges. In a lively round table debate, Michal Bronikowski (AWF Poznan), Marcela González-Gross (Polytechnic University of Madrid), Kirsi Hämäläinen (Finnish Olympic Committee) as well as newly-elected ENSE president Thomas Skovgaard (University of Southern Denmark) discussed how the lessons learned through sport education could be transferred into real life settings.
Besides researchers and educators, students from the German Sport University also played an active role through a number of poster presentations. The posters – covering different topics ranging from sport for development, to gender equality and sport governance – were integrated into the Forum through a guided poster exhibition.
We would like to extend our thanks all the presenters, participants and the volunteers from the University of Vienna´s Institute for Sport Science, who also organized the #BeActive breaks, as part of the European Week of Sport.
A big thank you also goes to the gracious support provided by our partners, the European Commission, the Erasmus+ programme, the City of Vienna, the Austrian Bundes-Sportorganisation, and AlphaChamp, with additional nutritional support provided by VitaCan and Ströck.
We are already looking forward to the next ENSE Forum, which will be hosted in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2021.