Critically Understanding and Engaging with the (Micro)Political Dimensions of Coaches’ Work in an Advanced Undergraduate Coaching Course

In this chapter, we provide an overview of “why” and “how” we have chosen to integrate elements of Social Inquiry (SI) and Project-Based Learning (PBL) to facilitate university student-coaches’ active engagement with the (micro)political dimensions of coaching. We begin by briefly defining the concept of (micro)politics and outline why we believe this topic should occupy a more prominent place in coach education curricula than it has to date. We then introduce a hybrid approach joining PBL and SI, and describe how their combination has utility for enhancing the critical thinking and professional judgment of student-coaches. Following this, we describe how we have utilized this approach with student-coaches in a final-year undergraduate coaching module. While we believe this hybrid approach has many merits, we acknowledge that it is just one way, among many, to facilitate learning