Improving 'at-action' decision-making in team sports through a holistic coaching approach
- Authors: Light, Richard , Harvey, Stephen , Mouchet, Alain
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport, Education and Society Vol. 19, no. 3 (April 2014 2014), p. 258-275
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- Description: This article draws on Game Sense pedagogy and complex learning theory (CLT) to make suggestions for improving decision-making ability in team sports by adopting a holistic approach to coaching with a focus on decision-making 'at-action'. It emphasizes the complexity of decision-making and the need to focus on the game as a whole entity, where players, individually and collectively, attempt to manage disorder in the face of an opposition. It rejects the complicated, mechanistic approach to learning and cognitivist views that dominate the literature on decision-making in team sports that see it as being a linear process of conscious thinking limited to the individual mind. It offers an alternative, holistic view grounded in a practical example of how this might be achieved in coaching rugby union football and theorized within a CLT framework.
Mushin : learning in technique-intensive sports as a process of uniting mind and body through complex learning theory
- Authors: Light, Richard , Kentel, Jeanne
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Vol. 20, no. 4 (2015), p. 381-396
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- Description: Background: Interest in the use of learning theory to inform sport and physical-education pedagogy over the past decade beyond games and team sports has been limited. Purpose: Following on from recent interest within the literature in Eastern philosophic traditions, this article draws on the Japanese concept of mushin and complex learning theory (CLT) to propose a CLT-informed pedagogy for coaching the 'technique-intensive' sports of track running and swimming. Method: This article grounds theoretical discussion about learning in specific examples of practice to establish a dialectic relationship between theory and practice. The suggestions we make draw on first hand teaching/coaching experiences and CLT as a broad theoretical framework within which we draw on Eastern concepts of learning expressed in the Japanese concept of mushin as a state in which mind and body are united. Conclusion: The pedagogy we suggest challenges a dualistic view of theory and teaching and the mind/body binary that has long dominated physical education teaching and sport coaching. It offers a means of recognizing and accounting for the body in learning and of offering positive pedagogy for teaching technique-intensive sports. © 2013 Association for Physical Education.