Life Skills Through School Sport: A Participatory Teacher Development Program

Julie Vang Knudsen,Lars Breum Christiansen,Lise Maria Elkrog-Hansen

doi:10.4236/ape.2020.103024

Abstract

School sport participation can promote life skills in children and youth, but teachers could use an explicit teaching approach to fulfil the potential. Therefore, we conducted a participatory teacher development program, which should promote students’ life skills through school sport at three Danish boarding schools. The aim of this study is to present the program and the teachers’ experiences with the explicit teaching approach and the development program itself. The study design is based on participatory action research and comprised four phases in which the teachers were involved in the design, planning, implementation and evaluation of a life skills course for their students. The evaluation was based on focus group interviews with the teachers involved. The teachers found it beneficial to work explicitly with life skills in school sport and stated that the program provided an opportunity to view their practice from a different perspective. Furthermore, they emphasized that school sport could readily be structured in ways that increase the student’s development of life skills. At the same time, the teachers found the explicit teaching strategies challenging due to priority of time and difficulties connecting the sports practice to other life contexts. Finally, the teachers experienced positive and engaged students who most likely increased their understanding of life skills.

Highlights

IntroductionHodge, & Heke, 2004; Gould & Carson, 2008)
It is often stated that participation in sport can be used as a vehicle to foster positive psychological and emotional development in young people, and that this personal development can be applied in various non-sport settings
The results are presented in five themes: 1) The new practice; 2) Balancing discussion and practice; 3) Working with transfer; 4) Development of students’ life skills; and 5) Teacher development program

Summary

Introduction

Hodge, & Heke, 2004; Gould & Carson, 2008) This type of personal competencies, learned and used in different contexts, is often termed life skills, which can be defined as: “the skills that enable individuals to succeed in the different environments in which they live, such as school, home, and in their neighbourhoods” Life skills are often described as falling into overarching categories such as: interpersonal, behavioural, cognitive, intrapersonal and emotional skills. Within these categories are more specific life skills such as: teamwork, problem solving, communication, creativity, coping, etc. An essential aspect of a life skill development in sport is that it can only be considered a life skill, when it can be transferred from the sporting context to non-sport contexts (Gould & Carson, 2008; Pierce, Gould, & Camiré, 2017) This process is called transfer and Pierce et al (2017) define it as follows: “The ongoing process by which an individual further develops or learns and internalizes a personal asset in sport and experiences personal change through the application of the asset in one or more life domains beyond the context where it was originally learned.”

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Discussion

Conclusion