Learning in the workplace: high performance sport coaching

The past decade has seen a shift towards viewing workplaces as legitimate sites that can promote authentic learning for employees. Sport coaches have underscored the importance of experiential learning in developing their coaching skill, however despite wide acceptance of the view that learning occurs everywhere but to different extents and with different efficiency, and the acknowledgement of current national coach education programs as insufficient, no workplace learning research has focussed specifically on the field of high performance sports coaching. This paper proposes an examination into what high performance sport coaches within the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS) know and how they have come to know. For the first time, high performance sport coaching settings will be conceptualised as workplaces, facilitating an examination of the learning that occurs within the QAS. Sociocultural research that examines the interaction between what the workplace (QAS) affords the individual and the personal agency of the individual (high performance sports coaches) will be important in informing coach education and structuring work environments that facilitate meaningful learning. Moreover, this research will provide a better conceptual understanding of the high performance coaching process. It is envisaged that the results will enable the QAS to formulate learning curricula for their coaches. The kinds of questions which are yet to be addressed in the associated literature include: What learning is essential for high performance sport coaches? How do high performance sport coaches currently learn essential information? And, how can the workplace of high performance sport coaches be best structured to facilitate learning? The proposed study outlined in this paper will attempt to engage these issues for the first time