(Dis)joint(ed) action, reciprocity, and professional status: an ethnographic investigation of two UKCC CL4 awards

ABSTRACT

Coach education research has focused on studying coaches’ perspectives about coach education programmes with limited studies investigating the practices of other key stakeholders involved in programme design and delivery (e.g. managers, educators). The purpose of this study was to investigate the interactions and practices of coaches, coach educators, and coach education managers in two contexts of the United Kingdom Coaching Certificate Coach Level 4 (UKCC CL4) award. Over a period of 18 months, ethnographic fieldwork was conducted with 53 participants, comprising of 250 h of participant observations and informal conversations, as well as 51 semi-structured interviews. Symbolic interactionist writing by Blumer ([1946]. The field of collective behavior. In A. McClung Lee (Ed.), New outline of the principles of sociology (pp. 167–169). New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc.; [1969]. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc.), Mead ([2015]. Mind, self & society – The definitive edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.), and Strauss ([1997]. Mirrors and masks: The search for identity. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.) was utilised to make sense of the processes, relations, and tensions created by the UKCC CL4 award. The themes explore consequences and challenges of novel collaborations between course organisers from Governing Bodies (GB) and Higher Education institutions (HEi), opportunities and issues arising when university lecturers mediate theoretical course content for practitioner cohorts, and the value of postgraduate study to coaches’ professional lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Coach education
• Learning
• Postgraduate study
• Elite coaches
• Coach educators
• Ethnography
• Fieldwork
• Symbolic interactionism

Acknowledgements

We thank the management teams and participants involved in the combat and water sport UKCC CL4 award for enabling access to the courses. Thanks to UK Coaching for the part funding of the field elements of the research. Thanks to the ‘Cluster for Research into Coaching’ (CRiC) at MMU for additional funding to support this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.