ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, a body of scholarship has highlighted the benefits of an activist approach in physical education and sport pedagogy. This body of research is grounded in feminist theories and critical pedagogies and was developed through work with marginalized populations (e.g., girls, young people of colour, young people in poverty). The aim of this chapter is to discuss an activist sport approach to before- and after-school programming as a possibility of co-creating empowering possibilities with youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds. In this chapter, we define activist approaches and critically examine the relationship between sport, critical pedagogy, and activism. This is followed by an illustration of an activist sport approach developed over the last seven years. We argue for the power of before- and after-school programming to help young people to have the agency and capacity to analyze their social context and to name, critique and negotiating the forces that impede their choice of possibilities.
