Freirean-informed sport coach education: A platform for voice

Formal coach education such as time-bounded courses of various levels are an important socio-pedagogical activity provision for sport coaches. These courses often aim to support coaches with their practice, and through various levels, may result in certification to practise as a coach. For many coaches, the rationale for engaging in such activities includes to gain new knowledge, increase employment opportunities and increase social capital amongst their peers. Much of this coach education provision is designed and delivered by National Governing Bodies (NGBs) of sport. Certification to practise is often a priority for coaches engaging in education, and thus in many sports, NGBs have a monopoly over the knowledge valued in the field. We have both engaged in many of these courses, for example, Level 1 Football, Netball, Basketball. In practice, coach education courses typically involve short blocks of learning, sometimes online or in-person over a few weekends, and often attended by volunteer coaches (i.e., parents of participants and student coaches). At the higher levels (level 3 and 4) longer courses are attended by those who seek professional careers as coaches. Given their popularity, unsurprisingly, over the last two decades, an increasing amount of academic attention has been given towards better understanding such coach education provision and how coaches learn. In many corners formal education has been criticised for being decontextualised, ‘one size fits all’, and not meeting the needs of learners (Nelson and Cushion, 2006; Mallett et al., 2009; Downham and Cushion, 2020). Our own work has suggested that formal coach education has developed to be more concerned with the nuances of the coaches’ individual context (Chapman et al., 2019, 2020; Dempsey et al., 2021), albeit there remains much more to be done to personalise coach education. Supporting this contention, coaches reportedly favour informal (e.g. reflective practices) and non-formal (e.g. mentoring) forms of education (Walker et al., 2018). Accordingly, the field remains conscious of finding a balance between the different forms of education that coaches receive. In response, recent studies have advocated a range of theoretical perspectives to support learners such as constructivism (Paquette et al., 2014), experiential learning (Cronin and Lowes, 2016) and – most relevant to this chapter – a critical approach using Freirean principles (e.g. Chapman, 2023). Subsequently, coach education delivered by NGBs and others remains a contested and somewhat fragmented space with continued debate.