2 Sport, Experience, the Body and Learning

Abstract

Knowledge from the natural sciences has long dominated thinking about learning in and through sport, with motor learning theory having had a powerful influence on sport coaching and the teaching of physical educa-tion and other activities (see, Kirk et al. 1996). However, the past few decades have seen growing influence of, and interest in, other perspectives on sport, learning and athlete development informed by knowledge from the disciplines and sub-disciplines of sociology, anthropology and education (see, Cassidy et al. 2009; Jones et al. 2011) that has provided more sophisti-cated understanding of how and what people learn from participation in sport. As we suggest in the Introduction, developments in motor learning theory that recognize the complexity of learning (see, Berry et al. 2008) increase its ability to explain the complexity of learning in sport but remain limited in their capacity to help make sense of the ways in which individual experiences interact with particular socio-cultural settings to shape what is learned and how it is learned. From the beginning of this study with its focus on Indigenous Australians, we suspected that we would need explana-tions of learning through participation in activity and the ways in which this is inseparably tied into socio-cultural context that recognized this complex-ity. As the study progressed and particularly as we progressed towards theo-retical integration, it appeared to us that motor learning theory could 32 not offer adequate explanations of what and how the participants learned their sporting expertise over their lives. Our focus in the study was on listening carefully and attentively to the stories of elite-level Indigenous athletes as a way of developing an under-standing of how their experiences of growing up in their communities, playing their sport, contributed to their development of expertise. The combined narrative enquiry and grounded theory approach we adopted delays the use of formal theory until the later stages of the study when we integrated the theories grounded in data through the use of formal theory and concepts. As the study progressed, it identified the important influ-ence of culture, family and social relationships on learning expertise in the participants' sport, which suggested to us that we needed to draw on theory that could account for these cultural, experiential and social fac-tors shaping the 16 participants' development into elite sportsmen from a more humanistic and holistic perspective. Over the past two decades, the sport coaching literature has increas-ingly recognized the complexity of coaching and athlete development with growing interest in knowledge and research methodologies from the social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and education (see, Cassidy et al. 2009; Jones et al. 2011). Research on, and thinking about, learning in and through sport and physical education has traditionally drawn on motor learning theory and more recent yet related theory such as constraints-led theory (see, Renshaw et al. 2010) with a focus on skill acquisition, but the past two to three decades have seen increasing inter-est in education theory and explanations of learning (see Jones 2006). There is also growing interest in the influence of socio-cultural contexts on coach and athlete learning (see, Hassanin and Light 2014). As the most influential thinker on education over the twentieth century, John Dewey stresses the links between experience and context for learning, but for him, the environment (physical and socio-cultural) cannot be sepa-rated from experience and learning because 'experience is a matter of interaction of organism with its environment' (Dewey 1933, p. 246). The true environment is not what surrounds the agent/learner but, instead, is what the agent interacts with. The true environment comprises interac-tion between the agent/learner and the environment as one phenomenon. The use of the term athlete 'learning' in some of the coaching literature reflects growing recognition of what educational concepts, learning theory R. Light and J.R. Evans