Background
It is widely assumed that organised youth sport programmes can play an important role in shaping young people’s broader development, and offers a valuable learning experience. The European Commission’s (2007) White Paper on Sport, for example, suggests that ‘sport has an educational dimension and plays a social, cultural and recreational role’ (p. 3), and that ‘through its role in formal and non-formal education, sport reinforces Europe’s human capital’ (p. 5). However, some scholars in physical education have argued that there is a striking lack of clarity on what this educational dimension of sport and physical activities actually is and what exactly is being learned. Similarly, in youth sport programmes it has been suggested that positive developmental outcomes are far from automatic outcome from participation and also negative developmental experiences can occur. However, much of the research on learning in youth sport has been drawing on a Positive Youth Development framework that focuses exclusively on the positive and productive forms of learning. In this project, we theorised and studied existential learning as an alternative framework to understand youth learning in sport.
Importance for society
Informal learning in and through sport could be especially important for talented and elite athletes, because they have to be making a significant investment in sport from a young age, in some cases at the expense of formal education and work experience. The European Commission has taken an active role in the promotion of sustainable sport development and highlighted the need to invest in the education and training of talented athletes to be able to flourish during and after their athletic careers. At the same time, it is acknowledged that increasingly competitive and professionalised sport can place at-risk athletes’ education and employability. European researchers have found that many talented athletes find it challenging to realise their potential both in sport and education. Athletes also often lack work experience to support the transition to the labour market during/after their athletic careers. Being able to recognise informal learning in and through sport can be a vital aspect of helping athletes recognise how their identity, values, and skills learned through their sporting experiences can help them orient to life beyond sport.
Objectives
The Learn2 project had the aim of theorising and studying informal learning in sport through an existentialist theory of education. We aimed to (1) To study the phenomenological structures of learning in sport within student-athletes’ lived experiences; (2) To explore gendered patterns of meaning in learning and development in and through sport; and (3) To create knowledge that can form a theoretical basis for future research and inform policy on validating informal learning.
