Education for Sustainable Development: teaching deliberation and ethical decision-making in university coach education

Abstract

Despite increased recognition that a higher education sports coaching qualification plays an important role in shaping coaches’ ethical decision-making, few scholars have considered what ethics to teach and how best to deliver such curriculum. Examples of actual ethics courses are particularly amiss. This article furthers scholarship on ethics education by introducing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), a pedagogical perspective and approach that is employed to teach quality of mind competences considered necessary to make ethical decisions. To demonstrate how ESD can be translated into ethics curriculum, we present the university course “IIG206 Sustainable Sports Coaching”, which the authors delivered to coaching students, and outline how the course offered students’ opportunities to develop quality of mind competences, including “thinking on their feet”, complexity thinking, working interdisciplinarily, creativity, and “thinking outside the box”. Practical recommendations for scholars keen to create and deliver ethics education in coaching education conclude the article.