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‘It’s an experiential thing’: the discursive construction of learning in high-performance coach education

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posted on 2022-09-23, 12:46 authored by Christopher CushionChristopher Cushion, Anna Stodter, Nicola Clarke
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.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Sport, Education and Society

Volume

27

Issue

7

Pages

844 - 861

Publisher

Informa UK Limited

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

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/

Acceptance date

2021-04-27

Publication date

2021-05-09

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

1357-3322

eISSN

1470-1243

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Chris Cushion. Deposit date: 18 May 2021

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