Author: Dr. Tim Fletcher taught high school health and physical education for five years. Current research focuses on how teachers implement pedagogies that support meaningful experiences for learners in physical education, highlighted in a recent co-edited text Meaningful Physical Education: An Approach to Guide Teaching and Learning (2021, Routledge) with Déirdre Ní Chróinín, Doug Gleddie and Stephanie Beni. He is also interested in various practitioner research forms, particularly self-study methodology.
In this blog post, CHYDS member Tim Fletcher describes his involvement in the Meaningfulness in Youth Sport (MiYS) project. This international collaborative project is led by Dr. Déirdre Ní Chróinín from Mary Immaculate College (Ireland) and is funded by the European Union, through an Erasmus+ Small Collaborative Projects grant.
What keeps kids returning to sport? For some, it is spending time with their friends or the opportunity to make new ones. For others, it is the opportunity to learn new skills or enhance those that have already been encountered. For others still, sport provides an avenue to be creative and experience pure joy. This is not an exhaustive list but when these and other features of positive sporting experiences are lumped together, they might be considered personally meaningful. At the other end of the spectrum, sporting experiences that do not promote positive social interactions, are too easy or too hard, or are not fun can, for a variety of reasons, be described as meaningless, or, at their worst, harmful.
We have been involved in ongoing research where our aim has been to focus on the ways that teachers in schools can make physical education experiences meaningful for students. We found out that, while many teachers aim to offer these types of experiences for students, they often struggle to identify how to do this with intention and regularity. This led to our working with several teachers around the world to develop pedagogies that support meaningful experiences for learners. Over time we have demonstrated that meaningful experiences for learners in physical education tend to involve teachers using democratic (inclusive and learner-centred) and reflective approaches, where learners’ voices, needs and interests are valued and prioritized. In a nutshell, the quality of the learners’ experiences is the main priority for teachers.
Our work in physical education led us to see similar things that applied to the world of youth sport. Just as students might elect not to enroll in physical education because it lacked meaningfulness, youth sport participants will drop out of sport for similar reasons. If having a meaningful experience might keep kids coming back to sport – experiences that are equitable, personalized, appropriately challenging, provide a sense of belonging, and are personally relevant — then supporting coaches to provide these types of experiences seems paramount. But when many youth sport coaches are volunteers and lack formal coach education, it can be challenging to understand how to approach this task.
Our project involves researchers from several European universities, each of whom has partnered with a sports club or organization that is local to the university:
- Déirdre Ní Chróinín and Richard Bowles (Mary Immaculate College, Ireland) have partnered with Oola Ladies’ Gaelic Football Club
- Biljana Popeska (Goce Delcev University, North Macedonia) has partnered with Volleyball club Stip UGD
- Nicola Carse and Paul McMillan (University of Edinburgh) have partnered with Access Parkour
- Mats Hordvik and Bård Solstad (Norwegian School of Sport Sciences) have partnered with Monolitten Floorball and Bandy Club.
- Tim Fletcher is acting as a consultant on the project given his involvement in the Meaningful PE project.
At each site, university faculty members are working with one or more coaches to consider ways they might make the youth sport experience more meaningful for participants at their clubs. This involves using several key ideas from recent research on Meaningful PE and adapting them to the youth sport context. You can check out a webinar here to get a sense of what this involves. Since 2020, university personnel work has been working collaboratively with the coaches to understand, from the coach’s and their players’ perspectives, what is and what is not working, and the reasons why. Ultimately, this work will lead to the development and sharing of a resource that is designed for volunteer coaches working with youth sport participants who share a vision of making youth sport meaningful and keeping participants wanting to come back, week-to-week and season-to-season.
Further information about MiYS can be found at the project website or by following the Twitter account @in_miys. You can also check out the website and blog for Meaningful PE , where coaches will share their insights and experiences about using this approach in their clubs.