Sport Education in Community-based programmes: a research on social workers implementation

Youth disaffection is a complex phenomenon encompassing a wide range of behaviors, attitudes and experiences (Newburn & Shiner, 2005). Sport Education (SE) is a pedagogical model which has been found effective for personal and... [ view full abstract ]

Youth disaffection is a complex phenomenon encompassing a wide range of behaviors, attitudes and experiences (Newburn & Shiner, 2005). Sport Education (SE) is a pedagogical model which has been found effective for personal and social development, when using specific ethical strategies (Harvey, Kirk, & O'Donovan, 2014). Social workers and volunteers usually develop community-based programs. In this research we tried to explore what difficulties are observed and solutions are provided by social workers when implementing SE in an extracurricular setting with disaffected children, and how SE influences on the behaviors of disaffected children. Participants were three social workers and 31 children from three low-social neighborhoods of a Spanish city. The principal investigator performed as a participant observer. The SE season lasted 30 lessons of 60 minutes. Social workers attended a 20 hours course, and every two lessons a coordination session was held to analyze the difficulties encountered by social workers and to plan the next two lessons. One in every three lessons was video recorded, as well as all work meetings were audio recorded. The main researcher carried out a diary and four focus groups were developed. Data analysis was transcribed verbatim, and qualitative analysis of data was conducted. Results indicate that it takes much longer to implement the SE in this setting, the roles have to be introduced more slowly, some important roles such as that of the referee and coach should be modified regarding their usual status, reinforcements to fair play must be intensified. Social educators have been able to apply the model following the corresponding benchmarks, although they needed more time to understand and carry out the pedagogical resources of the models. Pedagogical tools as SE should be used in extracurricular sport, so it is recommended that university programs expose social workers to this model.