Critical Friendship

Coaches play a highly influential role across the whole spectrum of sport. Their proficiency is crucial to the progression, welfare and even the personal development of the athletes under their charge. Maximising the development of that proficiency is therefore a crucial concern of numerous sporting and community organisations. Effort must be directed to continuous improvement of learning and development programs for coaches, with consideration given to the differing requirements of coaches operating in different contexts. Historically, most coach education initiatives have entailed formal instruction in "classroom" situations, but feedback from participants suggests that this is sub-optimal. Better outcomes might be achieved through methods designed to promote informal learning within real-world coaching environments. There is evidence that experiential learning resulting from repeated cycles of action and reflection can contribute substantially to the development of expertise. Observation and imitation of significant others is also a powerful learning mechanism. Here, we review and summarise literature relating to these matters, while also addressing topics such as the nature of coaching, the characteristics of expert coaches, and the ways in which coaches currently learn. We touch upon the concepts of situated learning, cognitive apprenticeship, and mentoring, and identify known barriers and facilitators to adult learning. We then provide a suggested framework for the practical design, implementation, evaluation, and continual refinement of a program emphasising informal but guided nurturing of coach learning and development. The suggested approach is consistent with classical learning theories and incorporates the establishment of critical friendships and communities of practice.

The Council of Europe is the continent's leading human rights organisation. It comprises 47 member states, 28 of which are members of the European Union. All Council of Europe member states have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty designed to protect human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights oversees the implementation of the Convention in the member states. The Council of Europe's Pestalozzi Programme promotes the message of the Organisation and its values – human rights, democracy and the rule of law – in the practice of education (formal, non-formal and informal) and aims to support member states in including these ideals in their education systems. Basing its approach to professional development firmly on social constructivism and social constructionism, it invests in educators who create new practices. This book represents an example of a transformational enterprise in which several practitioners from different parts of Europe gather in the Pestalozzi Programme community of practice and set out to learn how to become action researchers. While many books focus on how to carry this out, this publication is action research in action. In addition, it features examples of how participants can use online social platforms and affordable web applications in their collaboration and learning practices. ENG

Critical friendship is often used in the field of education to refer to relationships based on support and critical critique of professional practice. However, we posit that critical friendship has the potential as both a protective measure and mode of functional support for individuals negotiating the lived experiences and consequences of being working-class in the academy. Based on the auto-ethnographic narratives of two self-defined working-class doctoral students living and working in Ontario, Canada, we find that (mis)perceptions of incompetence; negotiating the academy as women; income, debt, and the tensions this creates result in the need for this redefined understanding of critical friendship.

Coaches play a highly influential role across the whole spectrum of sport. Their proficiency is crucial to the progression, welfare and even the personal development of the athletes under their charge. Maximising the development of that proficiency is therefore a crucial concern of numerous sporting and community organisations. Effort must be directed to continuous improvement of learning and development programs for coaches, with consideration given to the differing requirements of coaches operating in different contexts. Historically, most coach education initiatives have entailed formal instruction in "classroom" situations, but feedback from participants suggests that this is sub-optimal. Better outcomes might be achieved through methods designed to promote informal learning within real-world coaching environments. There is evidence that experiential learning resulting from repeated cycles of action and reflection can contribute substantially to the development of expertise. Observation and imitation of significant others is also a powerful learning mechanism. Here, we review and summarise literature relating to these matters, while also addressing topics such as the nature of coaching, the characteristics of expert coaches, and the ways in which coaches currently learn. We touch upon the concepts of situated learning, cognitive apprenticeship , and mentoring, and identify known barriers and facilitators to adult learning. We then provide a suggested framework for the practical design, implementation, evaluation, and continual refinement of a program emphasising informal but guided nurturing of coach learning and development. The suggested approach is consistent with classical learning theories and incor- porates the establishment of critical friendships and communities of practice.

• Reflectivity is an important professional competence of contemporary teachers. In order to explore how to encourage students' reflection, we conducted a two-year action research project impelling them to become mutual critical friends. For critical friendship communication and other project activities, we utilised Moodle – an online learning management system. On the basis of the analysed data that were gathered at the end of each action research cycle, we determined that the students felt comfortable in the role of critical friends and that critical friends' reflections were particularly pleasant for them. They experienced the comments of their critical friends as friendly, encouraging, useful, specific, interesting, detailed, positive, professional and clear. The majority of students (91%) think that the critical friendship discussion should be continued within the course Correlated-integrated systems in Croatian language teaching, and 85% of them suggest introducing this approach in other teachers' education courses. We determined that the technical mode of reflective thinking prevails in the students' correspondence. The practical or contextual level could rarely be observed while critical reflection was completely absent in 11 of 14 discussions. Reflective thinking of students (future teachers) should be fostered from the beginning of their studies within various courses, particularly in the pedagogical and methodological ones. To encourage their students to be critically reflective, university teachers should embrace reflective thinking by becoming critically-reflective practitioners and conducting action research in their teaching practices.

This short paper highlights the voices of four recent MA graduates as emerging second language (L2) literacy teacher-scholars. In my Fall 2015 graduate seminar, Second Language Literacy, the teacher-scholars, who are co-authors here (Ryosuke, Charlotte, Alejandro, and Shyam), developed as language teachers who understand literacy as situated social practice, which is informed by users’ socially and historically constructed identities (Gee, 2015), and who consciously and systematically reflected on their L2 literacy teaching for positive change (Farrell, 2007). In this graduate classroom context, they explored critical readings, interactive discussions, content applications, and individual reflections. Now, as doctoral students and full-time teachers, they continue to engage in L2 literacy reflection with each other and their former adviser (Sarah) through a critical friendship, or teacher collaboration “which encourages talking with, questioning, and even confronting, the trusted other, in order to examine planning for teaching, implementation, and its evaluation” (Hatton & Smith, 1995, p. 41). The reflective snapshots shared in this paper stem from the teacher-scholars’ collaborative exploration of L2 literacy as social practice across four unique teaching contexts.