| The purpose of this research project was to explore how knowledge can be enriched when a sport pedagogy and psychology consultant/facilitator collaborated with sport coaches to help them learn through their everyday coaching experiences. A collaborative inquiry approach was used. As the initiating researcher, I acted as a consultant/facilitator, working with coaches of two sports, athletics and alpine skiing. Data were mostly generated using interviews (semi-structured and on-going informal), participant observation, my journal, and, in Study Two, group meetings. In Study One, I made myself available as a consultant to six coaches from one athletics club, if they wanted to share any coaching issues with me. For six months I visited the coaches while they worked. The coaches mostly shared issues relating to sport psychology. Interactions among these coaches were mostly one-on-one, with little sharing of coaching issues between themselves. My work with them was of the same individual nature. The first two parts of Study Two involved two contexts in which I acted as a facilitator with groups of ski coaches (Part One, seven coaches and Part Two, six coaches). My role was to nourish knowledge creation within the coaches' community of practice (CoP). A series of round table meetings were the site for much of the negotiation of meaning that was the result of coaches sharing knowledge about coaching issues. The coaches found they learned a lot, that communication between them was improved, they enjoyed the process, and that their athletes benefited from all of this. In Part Three of this study, I stepped back and observed what happened to the CoPs without a facilitator. Two groups were involved in this study. One group was partially successful but found it difficult to keep up the learning in the CoP without a person responsible for coordinating the process. The other group had leadership problems and never met with the purpose of learning through negotiation of issues relating to their practice. Knowledge sharing in this group was mostly one-on-one. Recommendations are made concerning coach education, especially in relation to how this approach to learning through participation can compliment existing formal education. |
