Hard work or child's play? Migrant coaches’ reflections on coaching gymnastics in New Zealand

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a number of gymnastics coaches from the former Soviet Union (FSU) have migrated to New Zealand where they have taken up full-time employment working as coaches within gymnastics clubs. This study utilized life story interviews with migrant Russian coaches and conceptual resources from discursive psychology to examine how these coaches understand unfamiliar cultural discourses relevant to their coaching practice, and how they respond to, and discursively negotiate, these understandings. We argue that migrant coaches in our sample have constructed discourses around their experiences in New Zealand that involved the recruitment of powerful, broader discourses concerning childhood, parenthood and social ideology. This provides a self-reinforcing narrative that situates their challenges in a complex sociocultural setting. At the same time, the coaches, as migrants, incorporated discursive elements that presented both an understanding and appreciation of the constructed arena of childhood in New Zealand.

Keywords:

• migration
• discursive psychology
• social construction of childhood
• coaches
• Soviet Union