showing 4 related works from this author
Restoring Harmony in the Lifeworld? : Identity, Learning, and Leaving Preelite Sport
2020
Sport provides many youth participants with a central life project, and yet very few eventually fulfill their athletic dreams, which may lead them to disengage from sport entirely. Many studies have explored the processes of athletic retirement, but little is known about how youth athletes actually reconstruct their relationship with sport and embodiment postretirement. The authors explored these issues in the story of “Pilvi,” a Finnish alpine skier who disengaged from sport in her late adolescence. Employing an existential-phenomenological approach, they conducted six low-structured interviews with Pilvi, combined with visual methods, and identified key themes relating to the body, space,…
Beyond life-skills: talented athletes, existential learning and (Un)learning the life of an athlete
2022
Following developments in educational discourse more broadly, learning discourses in youth sport have been shaped by outcome-based and instrumental goals of developing useful life-skills for ‘successful’ lives. There is, however, a need to expand such traditional understandings of sport-based youth development, which we undertook by exploring existential learning in sport through encountering discontinuity. We conducted in-depth qualitative research with 16 Finnish athletes (seven men/nine women, aged 19–20), five of whom had recently disengaged from the athlete development pathway. In the interviews, we used creative non-fiction vignettes to invite reflections on learning experiences in sp…
Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect
2020
New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dual-career discourses that construct the combination of high-performance sport and education as a normative, ‘ideal’ pathway. The pressed time perspective inherent in dual-careers requires athletes to employ a variety of time-related skills, especially for young women who aim to live up to ‘superwoman’ ideals that valorise ‘success’ in all walks of life. Drawing on existential phenomenology, and in-depth interviews with 10 talented Finnish sportswomen (aged 19–22), we explored their experiences of lived time when pursui…
Learning in sport : from life skills to existential learning
2020
Youth sport is habitually promoted as an important context for learning that contributes to a person’s broader development beyond sport-specific skills. A growing body of research in this area has operated within a life skills discourse that focuses on useful, positive and decontextualised skills in the production of successful and adaptive citizens. In this paper, we argue that the ideological discourse of life skills, underpinned by ideas about sport-based positive youth development, has unduly narrowed the research on learning in sport to only what is deemed functional, teachable, and economically productive. After considering the problems associated with the currently dominant life skil…