And now for something completely (?) different: Sustainable Elite Youth Sports

The field of sustainability and education in the context of sustainability is rather fluid and not easily defined or delineated, Part of the challenge is to look for connections and relationships. As a scholar in the field I try to do that and this sometimes gets me in, for me at least, somewhat unusual areas. When a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg I connected with two scholars who we also in the Faculty of Education but working in quite a different area from my own – the interface of sports and health science & education science – Dean Barker and Nathalia Barker-Ruchti. The were intrigued by the heuristic Bob Jickling and I developed on instrumental authoritative and emancipatory relational approaches to education. They figured that this heuristic might be relevant for characterizing different coaching styles that can be found in high performance sports. It led to this paper back then: Barker, D., Barker-Ruchti, N., Wals, A.E.J., Tinning R. (2014) High performance sport and sustainability: a contradiction of terms?, Reflective Practice, 15, (1). Now over 10 years later this paper travels further into a new collaboration led by Astrid Schubring @schubring that was (pre)published this week in Sustainable Development in an article titled: Sustainable Elite Youth Sports: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Social Dimensions Sports have been identified as an important contributor to social sustainability, and the benefits for health, well-being, and social learning in young people are well evidenced. Youth elite sports, however, have been criticized as being unsustainable. Following calls for a more socially sustainable development of youth elite sports, research on the topic has increased. However, studies vary in disciplinary origin, concepts, content, and methodology. The aim of this systematic scoping review is to identify and synthesize the current disciplinary research knowledge. You can read the article here!

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