The design and delivery of formal coach education and learning
opportunities appear to be permeated by taken-for-granted discourses.
These discourses exercise a systemised influence on the social
construction of coaches’ professional knowledge, with potentially
problematic consequences. Adopting a discursive methodology using
discourse analysis, this study explored the ways in which facilitators and
coaches in a high-performance coach education programme
constructed coach learning. Data were collected over a two-year period
using on-course participant observation (10 days), interviews with
coaches and course facilitators (n = 29), and document analysis. Findings
indicated a dominant discourse of ‘learning’ as a linear, mechanistic and
unproblematic process occurring independently of context, and of
coaches as experiential learners, which positioned participants as antiintellectual and uncritical adopters of ‘what works’. These discourses
functioned to reproduce relations of power between the facilitators (the
holders of knowledge) and the participants (the recipients of
knowledge). The impact of these discursive resources on programme
design and delivery are discussed, alongside implications for elite
coaches’ subjectivity and practice, in order to confront dominant and
legitimate ‘truths’ in coach education.
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/