Reorientating grassroots coach education – the selection-box metaphor for curriculum design

Formal coach education provision, particularly those courses targeted at participation and grassroots coaches, often resembles a linear, time-bound pathway, somewhat devoid of choice for coaches who are typically presented with a predetermined curriculum. To advance beyond such approaches, this conceptual paper presents our ‘Selection-Box’ (S-B) metaphor. Rooted in our personal experiences, empirical evidence, and Bernsteinian theory (i.e. classification and framing), the S-B seeks to depict the image of an excited coach, eagerly choosing what coach education provision to access, when, and in what order. Through this metaphor, we seek to prompt a discussion and potentially a reorientation of formal coach education design. Specifically, the S-B metaphor encourages policy makers and course designers to imagine and potentially move beyond a primary focus on content or assessment and (re)orientate towards a focus on the process of learning within the coach’s biographical, temporal, and spatial contexts. To operationalise the metaphor, the paper explains how choice, time, and knowledge may facilitate greater learner agency such that coaches can begin to select, sequence, and pace learning that they deem relevant to them and their coaching context. To illustrate, we cautiously provide examples not as prescriptions, but as further aids to policy makers and course designers. In doing so, the paper moves beyond deconstruction and towards reconstruction by (1) challenging existing content or assessment-led coach education to move towards a more process-focused approach to coach learning; (2) highlighting theoretically informed ways that policy and course design could empower coaches to frame and classify material; and (3) providing a discursive tool (i.e. the S-B metaphor) to prompt internal and external discussions and action within policy makers’ and course designers’ context.