In pursuit of becoming a senior coach: the learning culture for Australian Football League coaches

Background and Purpose: Given the turbulent and highly contested environment in which professional coaches work, a prime concern to coach developers is how coaches learn their craft. Understanding the learning and development of senior coaches (SCs) and assistant coaches (ACs) in the Australian Football League (AFL – the peak organisation for Australian Rules Football) is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the learning of SC and AC in the AFL. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organisations and workplaces with their own learning cultures where learning takes place. The purpose of this paper was to examine the learning culture for AFL coaches.

Method: Five SCs, 6 ACs, and 5 administrators (4 of whom were former coaches) at 11 of the 16 AFL clubs were recruited for the research project. First, demographic data were collected for each participant (e.g. age, playing and coaching experience, development and coach development activities). Second, all participants were involved in one semi-structured interview of between 45 and 90 minutes duration. An interpretative (hierarchical content) analysis of the interview data was conducted to identify key emergent themes.

Results: Learning was central to AFL coaches becoming a SC. Nevertheless, coaches reported a sense of isolation and a lack of support in developing their craft within their particular learning culture. These coaches developed a unique dynamic social network (DSN) that involved episodic contact with a number of respected confidantes often from diverse fields (used here in the Bourdieuian sense) in developing their coaching craft. Although there were some opportunities in their workplace, much of their learning was unmediated by others, underscoring the importance of their agentic engagement in limited workplace affordances.

Conclusion: The variety of people accessed for the purposes of learning (often beyond the immediate workplace) and the long time taken to establish networks of supporters meant that a new way of describing the social networks of AFL coaches was needed; DSN. However, despite the acknowledged utility of learning from others, all coaches reported some sense of isolation in their learning. The sense of isolation brought about by professional volatility in high-performance Australian Football offers an alternative view on Hodkinson, Biesta and James' attempt in overcoming dualisms in learning.     

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高职院校的校园文化,既具有高等学校校园文化所共有的特征,又具有自身的鲜明特色。本文立足于高等职业技术教育,从高职院校应用性人才的培养上入手,探讨了高职院校校园文化建设的框架。     

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我国高职教育是在社会主义市场经济体制下发展起来的新型教育。新形势对高职院校思想政治工作提出了新的要求,要针对高职院校思想政治工作的薄弱环节和存在问题,探索加强和改进思想政治工作的新路子。     

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当前乃至今后一段时期,我国高等职业教育的主要任务是加强内涵建设,提高教育质量.职业道德教育是高职院校内涵建设的重要组成部分.加强高职学生职业道德教育,要以提高对加强高职学生职业道德教育的认识为突破,以正视高职学生的职业道德教育现状为前提,以寻求切实有效地加强高职学生职业道德教育的内容、途径和方法为保障,努力开拓高职学生职业道德教育新视野.     

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