New research programmes in physical education and sport pedagogy

Abstract

During the past decades, significant progress has been made in the development of physical education and sport pedagogy (PESP) research with the field reaching a level of maturity and critical mass. In light of this development, it seems worthwhile to take an overarching view on existing evidence in order to identify a number of emerging challenges that researchers in PESP might want to address in future studies. We argue that there is an emerging consensus (in the English-language research community) that pedagogy is the proper object of study of educational research in physical education and sport, confirmed by the increasing prevalence of studies that explore relations between the components of teachers, teaching and teacher education, curriculum and learners and learning. At the same time, and despite evidence of development, we acknowledge that compared with other Kinesiology fields, PESP research has lacked influence and impact. In the present contribution, three features of future research in PESP are considered: practice-referenced research, a programmatic approach and interdisciplinary research. We conclude that strong leadership will be required to facilitate a future agenda, and that PESP researcher may need to begin to scale up their work and publish it in a wider range of educational research journals.

Keywords:

• Research programmes
• Physical education and sport pedagogy
• Practiced-referenced research
• Relationality
• Interdisciplinarity