Richard Light

Knowing the Game: Integrating Speech and Action in Games Teaching Through TGfU

The “discursive turn” in the social sciences points to the potential in Teaching Games for Understanding pedagogy (TGfU) as a means of providing a holistic learning experience for students and a platform from which to reposition physical education among institutional forces that define boundaries between academic disciplines in the school curriculum. We argue that games taught in physical education using TGfU as a form educational conversation in which the mind, expressed in speech, and the body, expressed in action, embody the ideal holistic learning experience that simultaneously provides for cognitive, affective, social, and physical learning.

Game Sense : Pedagogy for Performance, Participation and Enjoyment

Preface. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Section I 1. Introduction 2. The Development of Game Sense 3. Theorizing Learning In and Through Game Sense 4. Game Sense for Physical Education and Sport Coaching 5. Game Sense Pedagogy 6. Assessing Knowledge-In-Action In Team Games Section II 7. Touch Rugby 8. Oztag 9. Australian Football 10. Soccer 11. Field Hockey 12. Basketball 13. Netball 14. Cricket (Kanga) 15. Softball 16. Ultimate Frisbee 17. Volleyball. Bibliography. Index.

Situated Learning in an Australian Surf Club.

The article examines learning and identity formation for young people in an Australian surf club. Drawing on Lave and Wengers notion of situated learning, it identifies how membership in the surf club from an early age involves highly significant and meaningful learning and identity formation, where learning is co-constructed with other members as a process of negotiating meaning and knowledge. It identifies how membership in the surf club and participation in its practices over time provides the participants with access to resources for understanding and cultural knowledge through growing involvement in practice. In doing so it suggests that there is a need to view physical learning as a complex process that is inseparable from social and cultural ‘webs of experience’.

Improving 'at-action' decision-making in team sports through a holistic coaching approach

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.

The Social Nature of Games: Australian Preservice Primary TeachersÍ First Experiences of Teaching Games for Understanding:

This article reports on a study of pre-service generalist primary school teachers’ experiences of a games unit taught using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach in an Australian teacher education programme. The study sought to make sense of the knowledge and dispositions that pre-service primary school teachers brought into the games unit, the ways in which this shaped their interpretation of the TGfU approach, the impact that this had on their perceptions of physical education’s educational value and the pedagogy they articulated as intending to adopt.A sense of ‘joy’ related to achievement and profound learning (Heywood, 2001) emerged as a central theme in many students’ accounts of their games unit. It is argued in this article that this sense of joy arose from the holistic, whole-body learning that is possible in games using a TGfU approach.

Children’s Social and Personal Development Through Sport: A Case Study of an Australian Swimming Club:

Despite the prominence of swimming in Australia and the large numbers of children participating in it, no previous research has been conducted on what the implications of this might be for their social development. Indeed, there is a lack of empirical research conducted on the personal, moral, and social learning that arises from children’s participation in sport. Building on research conducted on learning and the formation of identity in an Australian surf club (Light, 2006), this article contributes toward redressing this oversight by drawing on a 3-month ethnographic study conducted on a swimming club in Sydney, Australia. Focused on children aged 9 to 12 years of age, it explores the range of social, personal, and cultural development that occurs through their participation in the practices of the club. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) analytic concepts of situated learning and communities of practice, it suggests that a range of important social learning, enculturation, and the development of identity arises from participation in the practices of the swimming club.

A Constructivist-Informed Approach to Teaching Swimming

Interest in constructivism has fueled enthusiasm for the development of games and team-sport pedagogy over the past decade, but individual sports have yet to receive the same attention. In this article we redress this oversight by suggesting that constructivist perspectives on learning can be used to develop student-centered, inquiry-based approaches to teaching individual sports. We set out to provide examples of how this might be achieved by outlining the ways in which constructivist theories of learning can be employed to inform the teaching of swimming. Typically characterized by high repetition and a strong emphasis on technical mastery in a stable and predictable environment, swimming has escaped the attention of researchers in the physical education field interested in exploring the contributions that constructivism can make to enhancing learning. To emphasize the significance of the physical environment for learning, we suggest two approaches for teaching swimming in the two very different contexts of the pool and the surf to explore the implications that this holds for learning and teaching.

Interpreting and Implementing the Long Term Athlete Development Model: English Swimming Coaches' Views on the (Swimming) LTAD in Practice

The LTAD (Long Term Athlete Development) model has come to represent a sports-wide set of principles that significantly influences national sports policy in England. However, little is known about its impact ‘on the ground.’ This study is concerned with how national sporting bodies have adapted the model to their specific requirements and how local interpretation and implementation of this is operationalized and delivered. Interpretation and implementation of the LTAD model used in English swimming was investigated through interviews with six elite and five non-elite swimming coaches in the north of England. While there were concerns with aspects of the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) regulations governing competition for age-group swimmers, the major concern expressed by participants was with over-emphasizing volumes of training, leading to the neglect of technique.

Culture, embodied experience and teachers’ development of TGfU in Australia and Singapore

Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of research in need of attention in the TGfU literature. In setting out to redress this oversight in the literature this article draws on a study of TGfU teacher development conducted in Australia and Singapore to examine teachers’ development of TGfU/Games Concept Approach (GCA) teaching in a sequence covering the last two years of teacher education and the first two years of full-time teaching. This article highlights the extent to which teacher development of TGfU is situated within immedi ate cultural and institutional contexts. It identifies how the different cultural meanings attached to sport and its place in both countries shape the participants’ interpretation and understanding of TGfU/GCA.

Dispositions of elite-level Australian rugby coaches towards game sense: characteristics of their coaching habitus

Bourdieus analytic concept of habitus has provided a valuable means of theorising coach development but is yet to be operationalised in empirical research. This article redresses this oversight by drawing on a larger study that inquired into how the ‘coaching habitus’ of elite-level Australian and New Zealand rugby coaches structured their interpretation and use of the Game Sense approach to coaching to illustrate how habitus can be operationalised. It focuses on the identification of characteristics of the individual coaching habitus of four elite-level Australian rugby coaches and how they shape their interpretation and use of Game Sense. Drawing on suggestions made by Lau, we identify the characteristics of four individual ‘coaching habitus’ by examining their views on: (1) the characteristics of good coaches; (2) characteristics of great rugby players and how to develop them; and (3) their dispositions towards innovation in coaching.