Towards an Evolving Critical Consciousness in Coaching Research: The Physical Pedagogic Bricolage

Abstract

Within this paper we argue that the ontological core of sports coaching is fragile, somewhat narrow and blinkered, and acts to constrict that which counts as knowledge within the field. Through contextualising the field within a corporatised university system that favours instrumentalised forms of knowledge, we challenge the mythopoeic status afforded to the terminology ‘sport’ and ‘coaching’, instead proposing the moniker Physical Pedagogic Bricolage (PPB) to better encapsulate a reconceptualised field. Through opening the field to the deep interdisciplinarity of bricolage, we sketch a more democratic field that promotes understanding, communication, and, creates structures that allow for a better informed, more rigorous, mode of knowledge production which has the power to move the field of sports coaching in a more progressive direction. This is a project that connects coaching to a broader notion of cultural politics designed to further a multiracial, economic and political democracy, a project that connects theory to social change, textual analysis to practical politics, and academic inquiry to public spheres [1]. Of course, we fully recognise that such a challenge to the ontological core of the field will be contested. As such, we intend this paper less as a prescription for coaching research and more of a directional purview that invites—expects—critical dialogue, response and debate as we work towards a set of perhaps competing knowledges, epistemologies, and, axiological approaches that together can ‘do coaching justice.’