Richard L. Light

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand · School of Sport and Physical Education

This study focuses on the analysis of collective meaning associated with secondary physical education teachers’ (n = 12) experiences of teaching games using a game based approach (GBA). Participants taught in one of two different international contexts, southeast Australia or southeast England, and all had some experience of using a GBA to teach ga...

This study investigated secondary school physical education teachers' experiences of using a game based approach (GBA) with the primary aim of exploring the qualitatively different ways teachers experience what they consider to be a GBA when teaching games. Participants in this study (n=12) taught in schools in either southeast Australia or southea...

Despite recognition of the influence of social and cultural contexts on young people’s participation in youth sport, there are a limited number of studies that have identified how culture shapes the nature of participation and how it influences experience. This article reports on a study that inquired into what adolescent girls (13–16 years) enjoy...

This paper describes how elicitation interview technique was used within a phenomenographic research design to explore physical education teachers’ experiences of teaching games using a Game Based Approach (GBA). Participants taught in one of two different international contexts, Australia or England, and all had some experience of using a GBA to t...

Recent developments in the theorization of learning reflect a degree of frustration with the limitations of Western dualism and, in particular, with its separation of mind from body. These include the appropriation of the Buddhist concept of mindfulness in Positive Psychology and the concept of flow that has been applied to thinking about athlete p...

While constructivist theories of learning have been widely drawn on to understand and explain learning in games when using game-based approaches their use to inform pedagogy beyond games is limited. In particular, there has been little interest in applying constructivist perspectives on learning to sports in which technique is of prime importance....

Background: While there is significant interest in coach behaviour during training sessions and recognition of what it could add to existing knowledge on coaching, in-game coach behaviour has received little attention. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify coaches' in-competition communications with rugby players, through a series of c...

As a well developed indicator of high quality teaching in any subject area we use the NSW QTF in this article to identify what might constitute quality teaching in physical education and to suggest the extent to which Game Sense pedagogy can be seen to meet the expectations of the NSW QTF. We identify and discuss the pedagogical features of Game Se...

This book aims to bridge the divide between research and practice by exploring contemporary games teaching from pedagogical, research and policy perspectives. It offers interesting new commentary and research data on well-established models such as teaching games for understanding (TGfU), Game Sense, Play Practice and the games concept approach (GC...

Conclusions for the contemporary developments in games teaching book.

Background: Interest in the use of learning theory to inform sport and physical education pedagogy over the past decade beyond games and team sports has been limited. Purpose: Following on from recent interest within the literature in Eastern philosophic traditions in this article draws on the Japanese concept of mushin and complex learning theory...

Ethics in youth sport is focused on the application of ethical policy and pedagogies and is grounded in practice. It assumes no prior ethical training on the part of the reader and is essential reading for all students, researchers policy makers and professionals working with children and young people in sport across school, community and professio...

Aim. This article reports on a case study that inquired into how coaches’ beliefs about and dispositions toward coaching that structure their practice were developed through long-term experience. Method. Focused on three coaches working at high performance levels in Victoria, Australia data was generated through three rounds of semi-structured inte...

Introduction to the various chapters in the book.

Conclusions to the various chapters in the book.

There is a growing body of research focusing on women in the business sector using a transformational model of leadership that identifies the ways in which they lead yet little is known about the style of leadership women practise in sport. In attempting to redress this oversight in the literature, this article draws on data from a larger study to...

This article reports on a case study that inquired into the influence of the New South Wales Primary Schools Sports Association competitive swimming structure on the development of talented12-year old female swimmers. The study focused on ten 12-year old girls in the New South Wales team that contested the 2009 national swimming championships with...

Abstract Background: While there is significant interest in coach behaviour during training sessions and recognition of what it could add to existing knowledge on coaching, in-game coach behaviour has received little attention. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify coaches’ in-competition communications with rugby players, through a se...

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has increasingly been used in research in the sports coaching field and offers a useful concept for understanding how experience comes to shape coaching practice. In this article, we begin by outlining the use of habitus in the sports coaching literature and provide a brief description of habitus and its relationship w...

In addition to playing an important role in combating lifestyle diseases such as obesity, participation in youth sport provides opportunities to develop skills and competencies in sport and in life-long social, moral, and personal development (Light, 2008; Georgakis & Russell, 2011). In countries that have well-developed clubs, youth sports systems...

Background: Research on pedagogy in physical education and sport has increasingly been informed by contemporary learning theory with the socio-cultural perspective being prominent. Over a similar period research on the social dimensions of physical education and youth sport has drawn on a range of social theory yet there has been little systematic...

This article builds upon research on youth sport clubs conducted from a socio-cultural perspective by reporting on a study that inquired into the reasons why children aged 9–12 joined swimming clubs in France, Germany and Australia. Comprising three case studies it employed a mixed method approach with results considered within the framework of Côt...

Bourdieu's analytic concept of habitus has provided a valuable means of theorising coach development but is yet to be operationalised in empirical research. This article redresses this oversight by drawing on a larger study that inquired into how the ‘coaching habitus’ of elite-level Australian and New Zealand rugby coaches structured their interpr...

This article reports on a study conducted in Australia and France that inquired into the meaning and the nature of children's experiences of being in swimming clubs with a focus on the positive aspects of membership that keep them in their clubs. Three-month long case studies were conducted in a club in Australia and in a club in France, employing...

This article engages with four key informants from a school into the meaning of soccer in the lives of the informants and the disparity between the school's practice and the cultural meanings attached to soccer, at the school and community‐based clubs. We will demonstrate how their ability and the cultural knowledge developed through playing club s...

The LTAD (Long Term Athlete Development) model has come to represent a sports-wide set of principles that significantly influences national sports policy in England. However, little is known about its impact ‘on the ground’. Research is yet to investigate how national sporting bodies have adapted the model to their specific requirements and how loc...

At all levels of education in New South Wales outdoor experiences and outdoor education are a prominent part of the curriculum. This emphasis on the outdoors begins early. Outdoor activities are an important part of most primary schools whether they are public or private. Likewise at secondary level and at university outdoor education is still an i...

Background: Recent developments in games and sport teaching such as that of Teaching Games for Understanding, Play Practice and Game Sense suggest that they can make a significant contribution toward the development of tactical understanding, ability to read the game, decision-making and a general ‘sense of the game’, yet empirical research conduct...

Interest in constructivism has fueled enthusiasm for the development of games and team-sport pedagogy over the past decade, but individual sports have yet to receive the same attention. In this article we redress this oversight by suggesting that constructivist perspectives on learning can be used to develop student-centered, inquiry-based approach...

This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based on the premise that particular forms of masculinity are expressed and learnt through ways of playing (game style) and the attendant regimes of training, it examines the expression and learni...

'Sport in the lives of young Australians' offers an informative look into the practice of sport, the nature of children's and young people's experiences of it, and its significance in their development. Drawing on close-focus studies conducted in schools and sorts clubs in Australia, it provides valuable insights into youth sport from the children'...

This paper contributes to research on the scholarship of teaching in the physical education/sport studies fields by examining the responses of study abroad students from overseas studying in Australia to a unit of study in sport studies that placed the interpretation of experience as the centre of the learning process. It draws on research conducte...

Following on from the beginnings of interest in Action Research in the coaching literature this paper reports on a study that inquired into the capacity of AR to assist in a rugby coach's attempts to introduce player-centred (Game Sense) pedagogy into his coaching through a modified approach to AR. This approach, referred to here as Collaborative A...

Within the context of rapidly changing social conditions in developed societies, traditional approaches to teaching and learning that view learning as a simple process of internalising a fixed body of knowledge have become outdated and ineffective. The traditional emphasis on content, or what we feel our students should learn, has thus become less...

While certain patterns of masculinity can assume hegemonic status to operate at an unquestioned, common sense level use of the concept of hegemonic masculinity runs the risk of missing multiple patterns of masculinity operating within and in relation to hegemonic masculinity in and around sport. Drawing on research conducted on rugby in an Australi...

The article examines learning and identity formation for young people in an Australian surf club. Drawing on Lave and Wenger's notion of situated learning, it identifies how membership in the surf club from an early age involves highly significant and meaningful learning and identity formation, where learning is co-constructed with other members as...

Large numbers of children and young people spend their weekends and holidays engaged in the activities of over 300 surf clubs across Australia each summer. Long term membership in these clubs, beginning from as young as five years of age, forms a significant part of children's and young people's development yet surf clubs have yet to receive recogn...

Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of...

This paper examines teacher development of TGfU in teacher education programmes in Australia and the USA by taking a cross-sectional snapshot across a sequence covering the final two years of a teacher education programme in which TGfU is emphasised, and the first two years of teaching after graduating from the same programmes. It explores the inte...

This paper draws on a series of interviews conducted in 2002 with practising Australian coaches working with an Australian variant of TGfU, Game Sense. It examines their experiences of Game Sense in a range of sports played from introductory, grassroots levels to sport played at the most elite levels. The views of the coaches in the study lend supp...

The “discursive turn” in the social sciences points to the potential in Teaching Games for Understanding pedagogy (TGfU) as a means of providing a holistic learning experience for students and a platform from which to reposition physical education among institutional forces that define boundaries between academic disciplines in the school curriculu...

This article reports on a study of pre-service generalist primary school teachers’ experiences of a games unit taught using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach in an Australian teacher education programme. The study sought to make sense of the knowledge and dispositions that pre-service primary school teachers brought into the game...

The playing of team games in Australian schools has long been based on the assumption that it promotes positive social learning, and this is particularly so in elite, independent schools. Yet, in a rapidly globalizing world, both sport and education are undergoing significant changes in meaning and function. Within this context, there is increasing...

As an attempt to address the paucity of research on sport in Asian settings, this paper uses a case-study approach to examine young Japanese men's participation in pre-game rugby rituals. Drawing on Durkheim's seminal work, it is argued that the pre-game ceremonies have much in common with rituals conducted in similar western settings. However, man...

Wacquant (1995) argues that the irony of the body's increasing visibility in the social science literature is the absence of studies that deal with actual flesh and blood bodies. Focused on an elite, independent high school in Australia this paper examines the relationship between young men's experiences of rugby training and the embodiment of a 't...

Learning masculinities in a Japanese high school rugby club Richard light Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia Abstract This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based upon the premise that particular f...

Work on the social construction of gender over the past few decades has identified how masculinities assume multiple class and culture specific forms. This suggests that studies on the role that sport plays in the construction of masculinity cross diverse cultural settings offer an ideal means of highlighting the central role that culture plays in...

This article explores the implications that the success of the J League has for the practice and meaning of sport in Japan, its place in Japanese schools as a form of social and moral education and its role in the promotion and maintenance of a homogenous 'Japanese' culture. The promotion and organisation of the J League as a community-based 'sport...

We argue in this paper that wholesale criticism of contact sport fails to recognize some of the positive aspects for boys' social and personal development that are possible in team sports such as rugby, rugby league and AFL. To make our point we draw on an incident in a study on GPS high school rugby where the school 1st XV challenged the tradition...

In this paper we reject the Cartesian view of the mind expressed as speech and the body expressed through action as separate entities. Instead, we argue for the more holistic concept of an ?embodied mind'. that recognises practice as an indissoluble blend of speech and action. It highlights the opportunities that games offer, when appropriate pedag...

This paper reports on studies of pre-service primary school teachers' first experiences of a physical education unit using Game Sense pedagogy at two Australian universities. Taking into account the particular values, experiences and beliefs that pre-service teachers brought to the teacher preparation programs this paper examines the participants r...

Although rugby is not as popular as baseball or soccer (since 1993) its national championships attract considerable media attention that is evenly split between the soccer championships held in Tokyo and the overlapping rugby championships held in Osaka. There are approximately 1200 high schools and 300 junior high schools fielding rugby teams in J...