Zoekresultaten

Social inclusion through sport? Pedagogical perspectives of Dutch youth sport coaches

The impact of organized youth sport on youth development depends on various conditions in the pedagogical climate, such as how sport is delivered by youth sport coaches. While this is broadly acknowledged and provides a basis to improve youth sport and its developmental outcomes, little is known about the pedagogical perspectives of youth coaches on their practice. This study uses semi-structured interviews with 32 youth sport coaches in diverse youth sport contexts in the Netherlands. Reflexive data analysis is employed to garner insights into coaches’ role perceptions, coaching goals, and underlying values. The findings show that while youth coaches focus on sport-centered activities, many foreground non-sport dimensions such as life mentoring and working towards social inclusion as critical elements of their work, reflected in five pedagogically-oriented goals: discipline, autonomy, resilience, social abilities, and aspirations. Underlying these goals are pedagogical values such as building and maintaining caring relationships with participants. These goals and values echo scientific literature on pedagogical sport climate conditions (e.g. positive youth development), and challenge notions of youth sport as a performance-oriented and uncaring setting. The results contribute to existing knowledge about youth coaches’ pedagogical orientations, and inform the development of strategies to stimulate positive sport practices and developmental outcomes for participants.

'You don't realize what you see!': the institutional context of emotional abuse in elite youth sport.

Various discourses construct youth sport as a site for pleasure and participation, for positive development, for performance and for protection/safeguarding. Elite youth sport however continues to be a site for emotionally abusive coaching behaviour. Little attention has been paid to how the institutional context may enable or sustain this behaviour. Specifically, how do coaches and directors involved in high-performance women’s gymnastics position themselves in relationship to these discourses to legitimize the ways they organize and coach it? We drew on a Foucauldian framework to analyse the technologies and rationalities used by directors and coaches of elite women’s gymnastics clubs to legitimize and challenge current coaching behaviours. The results of the 10 semi-structured interviews showed how coaches and directors legitimized coaching behaviour using discourses of pleasure, protection, performance and of coaching expertise and assigning responsibility for current coaching behaviour to athletes, parents, (other) coaches and global and national policies.

"We must not engage in the blind glorification of sport."

Presentation at seminar: What struggles and opportunities do youth face in relation to their participation in sport and physical activities? This question is the starting point of the seminar 'Youth sport participation at the intersection of gender, ethnic and religious identifications' that will be held at Utrecht School of Governance on December 8 2017.

The meaning of inclusion according to children with a disability, parents and sport professionals (ISAPA, 2021)

During the online International Symposium of Adapted Physical Activity (ISAPA) in June 2021 te results of the SEDY2 project were presented. Aim The Erasmus+ Sport Empowers Disabled Youth 2 (SEDY 2) project addresses the topic of encouraging inclusion and equal opportunities in sport. Currently, different terminology about inclusion is being used in different countries, making it difficult to compare findings and to set unilineal goals and targets. In order to tackle the issues that are currently preventing youth with disabilities from participating in sports, the primary purpose of this study is to reach a consensus statement on what inclusive sport truly means. Literature shows that inclusion is a question about individual choice of a sporting activity across a continuum of segregated, integrated and inclusive approaches (Kiuppis, 2018) considered as The inclusion spectrum (Stevenson & Black, 2011). Most of the existing research is not based on the authentic wishes and feelings of children and young people with a disability themselves. Therefore, the main research question is ‘Inclusion in sport: what does it mean in practice?’ Methods To ensure that the authentic views, wishes and feelings regarding inclusion in sport were attained, online focus groups interviews were conducted with children and young people with a disability, their parents and sport professionals in Finland, Lithuania, Portugal and The Netherlands. Data is coded and analysed with Maxqda through the method of thematic content analysis. Results All four countries conducted a focus group with each stakeholder group: children with a disability themselves, their parents and sport professionals. In total 12 focus group interviews were conducted. Preliminary results show that inclusion is about individual needs and wishes and is associated with terms as feeling welcome, taking part, having a choice and equal opportunity. “…it is equal opportunities for all to participate and that, that you are part of like a group and, and that feeling of being part of a group and that you feel welcome.” Focus groups with professionals found that for them inclusion is not the same as inclusion policy. “I think we are talking about the same thing, and we feel the same way, but if we compare that to the inclusion policy or the sports covenant, maybe we are not always talking about the same thing.” All focus groups will be analysed and the results will be presented during the session. Discussion/conclusion Results have been discussed within the SEDY project group with sport organisations, Paralympic Committees and Universities of Applied Sciences to reach internal consensus. In order to tackle the issues that are currently preventing people with disabilities from participating in sports, there is need to reach a broad consensus statement on what inclusive sport truly means. Therefore the next is to discuss the results externally, to reach broad consensus. This can be taken as starting point for actual steps of improvement to include more children with disabilities in sport.

The development of shared leadership as fundamental concept in youth team sport.

Leadership development concerns a complex subject because it pertains an extensive number of combinations of features of people, purposes and contexts. Much research has been conducted on the development of adult leaders, but little is known about youth sharing the leadership in the context of playing sport, while the ability to choose the right leader is crucial for being successful. Youth leadership development should not only focus on building the capacity of individuals but emphasise the collective, a shared leadership approach, taken the relational network of influence into account. A 5 P’s framework (precondition, person, process, position and purpose) is used to analyse the shared leadership capacity in elite youth team sport. Shared leadership development requires a combined leadership approach whereas youth teams in sport can choose between an individual, distributed or shared leadership approach at which leader - and follower identities are claimed and granted to achieve common purposes.

Youth organizing