3 The Study

Abstract

This study set out to answer the central research question of: ‘What pedagogical factors have enabled male, Indigenous athletes to become elite level players in Australian football and rugby league?’ It challenges reductionist assumptions about Indigenous achievement in sport as being a reflection of inherited or innate qualities by conceiving of the participants’ development into expert performers as a process of learning to provide a more sophisticated understanding of Indigenous athletes’ achievement and development of expertise as a process of situated learning. It adopted a positive approach with a focus on what enables the achievement of excellence in sport by the participants instead of focusing on ‘barriers’ and factors that impeded achieving success. This is not to say that we ignored factors that interfered with or impeded their journeys to the AFL or NRL. Indeed, all of the participants faced very significant challenges and particularly for those who had to move to cities far away from home and the demands of highly structured training environments. However, our focus was on how they succeeded in dealing with these challenges as well as who and what helped them. We focused on what facilitated their achievements in footy and enabled them to climb to the highest level in their sport.