Professor David Kirk from the School of Education is one of four co-authors of a paper that has won the prestigious annual Best Paper Award of the American Educational Research Association’s special interest group in Research on Instruction and Learning in Physical Education.

Professor Kirk’s co-authors are Dr Carla Luguetti and Professor Luis Dantas from the University of Sao Paulo and Professor Kimberly Oliver from New Mexico State University.

The paper, titled ‘The life of crime does not pay; stop and think!’: the process of co-constructing a prototype pedagogical model of sport for working with youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds’, was published in the journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, (DOI: 10.1080/17408989.2016.1203887).

The Award Committee commented that the paper makes ‘an outstanding contribution to the field of physical education’. Professor Kirk and his co-authors will collect their award during the AERA Annual Conference, which will take place in San Antonio on the 25th April – 2nd May.