Conceptualizing cultural leadership in physical education and youth sport: outlining a pedagogical concept

ABSTRACT

Physical education (PE) and youth sport comprise two different pedagogical contexts, but one thing they have in common is that coach and teacher play a managerial role in developing and maintaining the culture of the sports team or the class. We will therefore argue that they can be seen as cultural leaders. However, the concept of cultural leadership has received only scant attention in literature concerned with the role of coaches and teachers. The aim of this paper is to establish and illustrate the relevance of the cultural leadership in PE and youth sport. We used a heuristic approach, which involved creatively forming our various inputs from the literature and repeatedly discussing and revising the different ideas derived thereby. The paper proposes five cultural leadership practices that we see in the literature: (i) Designing purposeful practice, (ii) Managing inclusion and heterogeneity, (iii) Acting as a role model, (iv) Creating a motivational climate and (v) Communicating values and paying attention to discourses. As a cultural leader, the coach and the teacher make a substantial impact on the cultural values that are (re)produced in the context in which they are operating. This highlights the importance of raising awareness of cultural leadership as a pedagogical concept, and this study underpins the case for more research into this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural leader
• critical pedagogy
• context-driven sport psychology
• youth sport
• physical education
• holistic ecological approach

Acknowledgements

While the paper has two authors, it draws upon the ideas of a larger research team. We are especially grateful to Kristoffer Henriksen, Natalia Stambulova, Carsten Hvid Larsen, Andreas Küttel, Robert Book Jr., Ole Mathorne and Lars Elbæk for their invaluable contributions. Thanks to John Mason for linguistic correction and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based upon research funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture [Kulturministeriet] (Award reference FPK.2020-0049). We are grateful for their funding and support.