Providing a positive experience of learning: An Australian football (AFL) experience

My profile of experience is typical of the ‘sporty’ profile of those entering PETE
courses (Dewar and Lawson, 1984; Sikes, 1988; Valtonen, Kuusela and Ruismaki,
2011) and of a custodial orientation that favours the teaching styles and programs
experienced and which they were successful with (Morgan and Hansen, 2008).
Lortie (1975) called this experience the ‘apprenticeship of observation’, which has a
distinct and traceable influence on a practitioner’s perspective as it informs the
value orientation of the individual. On reflection, my experience of PETE in the
mid-1980s confirmed my apprenticeship of observation of sport coaching and the
primacy of what Kirk (2010) has called sport as sport techniques. That is, sport taught
in physical education and sport teams coached through a sequence of drills leading to
a game or ‘scratch match’ at the end, with the coach commanding and controlling
practice, frequently demanding replication and conformity to a technique which
they had demonstrated.
Light and Harvey (2019) explained how positive pedagogy enhances the inherently
positive experience of learning that game-based approaches promote and that the
notion of positive pedagogy for sport coaching draws on the Game Sense framework. The
session I recall in this chapter came after 20 years of ‘playing with’ the idea of Game
Sense coaching and coming to understand the Game Sense approach as a positive
pedagogy for sport coaching.