Extracurricular Activities Play a Vital Role in the Lives of Students

Introduction

The evident is asserted when one claims that education has been subject to change greatly these last two or three decades. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, numerous vital calibrations have been done to every aspect of the education system (Kelly, 2004). This ongoing attempt at providing a codified syllabus of lessons and traditions has brought wonders to those seeking to acquire the education that the seek to pursue. Seen from a simplified perspective, school curricula have altered the academic landscape, which gives a construct for learning and mentoring (Livingston, Hayward, and Higgins, 2015).

As researchers, pedagogues, and academic administrators continue to work on scholastic curricula, future innovations in education are bound to unfold.

Being a fragment of scholastic curricula, curricular traditions also are on the frontiers of academic growth. Globally, students partake in extracurricular activites on a day-to-day basis (Holland and Andre, 1987) and extracurricular activities have been observed to have a vital part in the students’ lives (Griffin, 2007). With this in mind, we can accept that these traditions, which are fronted by the institutions that we rely on for education acquisition, are now treated and recognized as institutionalized mainstays in students’ daily lives.

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In the advent of such curricular codification, a plethora of school-based activities have been conjured during the process. When considering the huge amount of activities offered, one realizes the variety of programs proposed. Programs included are sports, publications, student government, fine arts, scholastic clubs, service organizations, and dedicated self-interest activities (O’Dea, 1994). To many, these activities are normal components of growth and are not frequently perceived as innately harmful (Rees, 2008).

These curricular activities can be taken as building blocks with which individuals improve and develop themselves.

Concurrent with these scholastic curricular traditions, social and societal constructs prevail in the same spaces. Contemporary society can be understood as constituted by recognizable and linked spheres (Fuchs, 2008) and manifestations of such structures and frameworks are prevalent worldwide, except for certain outliers. The prevailing social groups in schools’ social climates are subject to vague definition, which is substantiated by the understanding that the term “social group”, in base form, is a term that isn’t used much in mundane living (Thomasson, 2016). Due to the vagueness of the concept, its utility persists to be fragile.

Being the foundations of social groups’ conceptual bases, social constructs imply social variation and inside these social constructs, every person is inclined toward homophily wherein they pick associates who share similar traits and values (Blau, 1974) and a sense of social standard is aroused during the socialization process. Within the global diaspora of communities, interconnections are built wherever possible. Social networks are everywhere and dominant (Burgess, Sanderson, and Umaña-Aponte, 2011). With these conglomerations blooming much more compared to past manifestations of social networks, the social dimension still remains a cryptic reality that prevails out in the open.

Interpersonal relations are not the crux of the discourse. Grunspan, Wiggins, and Goodreau (2014) claimed that “While groups on campus exist to facilitate social interactions, the classroom is a principle domain wherein working relationships form between students. These relationships, and the larger networks they create, have significant effects on student behavior” (p. 167). Influences can be drawn from these formulated groups, facilitated by the classrooms that act as mediums of interconnection.

Background of the Study

As O’Dea (1994) fronts, pedagogues who subscribed to the developmental perspective perceive activities to be supplements of the academic implementation.

Many researches have been undergone to know the advantages of extracurricular activities on student achievement, self-concept, and other social development issues (Griffin, 2007).

According to O’Dea (1994), activities enable students to improve skills like leading, sportsmanship, discipline, confidence, and the capability of handling cutthroat scenarios. Extracurricular activities provide an opportunity to collaborate in ways that enable the previously cited skills to develop. This conveniently ties in and compliments Rees’ (2008) observations that oftentimes, parents encourage partaking in similar activities so that children will become a lot more competitive applicants in reputable collegiate institutions.

In order to understand the nature of these concepts and constructs, we need to be able to define what they are first. Thomasson (2016) states that having terminologies and concepts for social groups is vital because these social groups provide norm-based structure to our lives universally- providing behavioral norms by and/or towards persons included in various collectives or occupying various nodes in a collective’s structure. The norm-based conception of social groups brings other advantages along with it as well. It allows us to posit as to how the same constitution of individuals may compose two or more differing social groups (Thomasson, 2016).

Thomasson (2016) proposes that one objective of providing a hypothesis of ‘what social groups are’ could be thought of as searching for a method of comprehending what the entirety of these collectives have similarly--a method of collaborating them while discriminating other groupings of people that implicitly and completely are not social groups. In this definitive effort, working definitions of the term ‘social group’ has been proposed and disseminated. Greenwood (2003) defines social groups as populations regulated by shared social manifestations of cognition, emotion, and behavior, while Thomasson (2016) states its definition as the unification of individuals brought by internal, external, and/or structuring norms.

This method of comprehending social groups links beneficially with discourses regarding what self-identification as a member of a certain social group really is: It is to acknowledge that the prevalent norms are binding on an individual’s self, even if the prevalent norms are disliked, would gladly be subject to change or rejection, or taken as illegitimate (Thomasson, 2016).

Researches have come to the understanding that a “public sphere” operates as an entity. Some researchers have accepted the uni-dimensional model to quantify this construct, while the majority of other recent studies have concentrated on multi-dimensional models (Dyaram and Kamalanabhan, 2005). These conceptualizations have given birth to certain understandings of the public sphere, with one such claim proposing that the concept of “public sphere” is more useful in analyzing societal organization forms when acquainted with concepts like hegemony, discourses, and gender (Koivisto and Väliverronen,1996 ).