Suchergebnisse

Reducing social exclusion through interventions designed to sustain school engagement is a key aim of the education and social policy of any government. This paper is a response to the call for there to be more focused empirical sports coaching research through examining the transformative potential of community based sports coaches to support schools in arresting school disengagement. By embracing an understanding that challenges the definitional core of sports coaching as simply improving the sporting performance of an individual or team, and, drawing theoretically on the work of Carlisle et al. (2006) and Shields (2010), the role of 'coach as transformative leader' is articulated. Analysis of data collected by means of semi-structured interviews with a group of community based sports coaches (n=8), revealed three factors salient to our understanding of re-engaging young people with formal education through sport. These were the impact of the community sport programme, the relationship between schools and community sports groups and, the implementation of transformative leadership qualities by sport coaching practitioners. Importantly, this paper explicates the pivotal function that coaching practice which embraces transformative leadership principles can have on re-orienting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds towards more optimistic futures and educational objectives.

This article focuses on an explorative and experimental project seeking to implement Chaordic Learning Systems (CLS) as a pedagogic approach in Higher Education. We outline a project that embraced technologies of Web 2.0 to show how both physical and virtual spaces can be used to support and develop a strong and dynamic learning community in which staff and students work alongside each other to co-produce learning resources. Drawing on theories of Communities of Practice and Situated Learning a new teaching framework was introduced to a Level 5 undergraduate module (7.5 ECTS credits) that had not, until this project, used both face-to-face and online learning tools to engage students in the critical and discursive debates pertaining to sport and physical culture. We undertook this project with the belief that Higher Education should be concerned with answering the calls of an increasingly digital society for whom learning is not restricted by the physical boundaries of the university or the political landscape within which learning finds itself.