Speaker
Description
Many sport organizations and coach education programs are concerned with a range of issues related to the sustainability of athlete development. These include, long-term athlete development, sustaining motivation for continued sports participation, preventing sports-related injuries, promoting life skills and positive youth development, and improving psychological health and wellbeing. Reflecting on my own education, professional coaching experience and research within athlete development and sport coaching, and a decade of educating coaches, I will demonstrate how strong elements of discipline, reductionism and capitalism constrain opportunities for coaches to move towards more sustainable athlete development practices. I argue how post-structural and critical theory can provide the starting point for coach education for sustainable development by moving beyond disciplinary boundaries. I show how this pedagogical strategy permeates my efforts to improve the design of our coach education program at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, and how I have used this to develop pedagogical material for two different sports coaching courses. By doing so, coaches can be inspired to integrate different disciplinary knowledges in a myriad of different and innovative ways to produce a more ethical, effective, and reflective coaching practice. I discuss the effects this pedagogical strategy had on my teaching and the implications this might hold for the future of coach education in higher education.
