Richard Light
Biographic Data
| ID | 3758400 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Light |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Light |
| SIGNATURE | LIGHT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Federation University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6864-2243 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1946 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Everything Plays a Part Doesn’t It?’’
Coach development is typically considered to consist of a complex mix of experiences, including formal, informal and non-formal. Elements of the early research in this area led to the production of a model of long-term coach development (LTCD) over a decade ago, consisting of three core categories of experience: athletic, coaching and education, later published in a number of significant coaching documents. Whilst this model has clearly been of b…
The influence of early life experiences on English and Australian Super League coaches’ learning
This article focuses on the influence of early life experiences and socio-cultural context on coach learning in the sport of rugby league. It draws on the findings of a study that investigated the influence of cultural context on the development of elite-level rugby league coaches in England and Australia. The article focuses on the influence of experience from early childhood to the end of compulsory schooling on the development of three English…
Stories of Indigenous Success in Australian Sport
The experience of teaching using a game based approach
This study focuses on the analysis of collective meaning associated with secondary physical education teachers’ ( n = 12) experiences of teaching games using a game based approach (GBA). Participants taught in one of two different international contexts, southeast Australia or southeast England, and all had some experience of using a GBA to teach games. A phenomenographic research framework was utilised to uncover the qualitatively finite number …
Adolescent girls’ experiences of basketball in Australian and Japanese clubs
Despite recognition of the influence of social and cultural contexts on young people’s participation in youth sport, there are a limited number of studies that have identified how culture shapes the nature of participation and how it influences experience. This article reports on a study that inquired into what adolescent girls (13–16 years) enjoy about playing basketball in Japan and Australia and in which the cultural context emerged as a signi…
The cultural transition of Indigenous Australian athletes’ into professional sport
This article reports on a study that inquired into the journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of the footy to the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) that identified two distinct stages of their journeys. These were: (1) the development of expertize and of a distinctly Aboriginal style of play from their first touch of a footy to around the age of thirteen and, (2) a process of cultu…
Questioning for learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching
Despite the development of a wide body of literature suggesting the efficacy of game-based approaches (GBAs) to teaching and learning, GBAs have not yet been widely adopted by practitioners. A range of challenges face teachers and coaches taking up a GBA with two areas being of particular concern, which are: (1) the teacher’s ability to design practice games, analyze learning, and be able to make the necessary adjustments and (2) the effective us…
Teacher–student interaction, empathy and their influence on learning in swimming lessons
The bulk of interest in the role that interaction plays in learning in sport and physical education (PE) has focused on peer interaction at the expense of teacher–student interaction. This article redresses this imbalance in the literature by reporting on a study that inquired into the nature of teacher–student interaction and its effect on learning in PE swimming lessons in a French secondary school. Informed by an enactivist conceptualisation o…
Socialisation, culture and the foundations of expertise in elite level Indigenous Australian sportsmen
This article reports on an ongoing study that investigates the development of expertise in rugby league and Australian football by Indigenous Australians as a socially and culturally situated process of learning. Focused on the sampling phase of the Development Model of Participation in Sport (6–12 years of age), it combines narrative inquiry and grounded theory methodologies to identify the important role that participation in a range of differe…
Game Sense as a model for delivering quality teaching in physical education
As a well-developed indicator of high-quality teaching in any subject area we use the New South Wales (NSW) Quality Teaching Framework (QTF) in this article to identify what might constitute quality teaching in physical education and to suggest the extent to which Game Sense pedagogy can be seen to meet the expectations of the NSW QTF. We identify and discuss the pedagogical features of Game Sense that our examination suggests can provide quality…
Learner-centred pedagogy for swim coaching
While constructivist theories of learning have been widely drawn on to understand and explain learning in games when using game-based approaches their use to inform pedagogy beyond games is limited. In particular, there has been little interest in applying constructivist perspectives on learning to sports in which technique is of prime importance. This article contributes to redressing this oversight in the sport pedagogy literature by drawing on…
Ethics in Youth Sport
Introduction Richard L. Light and Stephen Harvey 1. Managing ethics in youth sport: An application of the integrity management framework Jeroen Maeschalack and Yves Vanden Auweele 2. Putting the Child Back in Children's Sport: Nurturing Young Talent in a Developmentally-Appropriate Manner (Gretchen Kerr and Ashley Stirling) 3. The First Youth Olympic Games: Innovations, Challenges and Ethical Issues (Jim Parry and Steffie Lucidarme) 4. Youth Spor…
The contribution of the New South Wales Primary Schools Sports Association towards developing talent in Australian 12-year-old female swimmers
This article reports on a case study that inquired into the influence of the New South Wales Primary Schools Sports Association competitive swimming structure on the development of talented12-year old female swimmers. The study focused on ten 12-year old girls in the New South Wales team that contested the 2009 national swimming championships with results considered within the framework of Coté's Development Model of Sport Participation
Women's sport leadership styles as the result of interaction between feminine and masculine approaches
There is a growing body of research focusing on women in the business sector using a transformational model of leadership that identifies the ways in which they lead yet little is known about the style of leadership women practise in sport. In attempting to redress this oversight in the literature, this article draws on data from a larger study to identify how women practise leadership within a sporting context. It identifies the leadership style…
Revisiting ‘Sport and the maintenance of masculine hegemony’
In 1987, in her seminal paper ‘Sport and the Maintenance of Masculine Hegemony’, the Australian sociologist Lois Bryson described sport as ‘a crucial arena in which masculine hegemony is constructe
Improving ‘at-action’ decision-making in team sports through a holistic coaching approach
This article draws on Game Sense pedagogy and complex learning theory (CLT) to make suggestions for improving decision-making ability in team sports by adopting a holistic approach to coaching with a focus on decision-making ‘at-action’. It emphasizes the complexity of decision-making and the need to focus on the game as a whole entity, where players, individually and collectively, attempt to manage disorder in the face of an opposition. It rejec…
Why children join and stay in sports clubs
This article builds upon research on youth sport clubs conducted from a socio-cultural perspective by reporting on a study that inquired into the reasons why children aged 9-12 joined swimming clubs in France, Germany and Australia. Comprising three case studies it employed a mixed method approach with results considered within the framework of Côté and colleagues' Development Model of Sport Participation (DMSP). It identifies the importance of p…
A cross-cultural study on meaning and the nature of children's experiences in Australian and French swimming clubs
This article reports on a study conducted in Australia and France that inquired into the meaning and the nature of children's experiences of being in swimming clubs with a focus on the positive aspects of membership that keep them in their clubs. Three-month long case studies were conducted in a club in Australia and in a club in France, employing Lave and Wenger's (1991) analytic concepts of communities of practice and situated learning. Conduct…
Children's Social and Personal Development Through Sport
Despite the prominence of swimming in Australia and the large numbers of children participating in it, no previous research has been conducted on what the implications of this might be for their social development. Indeed, there is a lack of empirical research conducted on the personal, moral, and social learning that arises from children's participation in sport. Building on research conducted on learning and the formation of identity in an Aust…
Boys, the body, sport and schooling
The papers presented in this special issue of Sport, Education and Society on boys, the body sport and schooling arose from a two-day forum on boys’ education in practice-oriented subjects held at
Learning masculinities in a Japanese high school rugby club
This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based on the premise that particular forms of masculinity are expressed and learnt through ways of playing (game style) and the attendant regimes of training, it examines the expression and learning of masculinities at three analytic levels. It identifies a hegemonic, culture-specific form of ma…
Situated learning in an Australian surf club
The article examines learning and identity formation for young people in an Australian surf club. Drawing on Lave and Wenger's notion of situated learning, it identifies how membership in the surf club from an early age involves highly significant and meaningful learning and identity formation, where learning is co-constructed with other members as a process of negotiating meaning and knowledge. It identifies how membership in the surf club and p…
Culture, embodied experience and teachers’ development of TGfU in Australia and Singapore
Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of research in need of attention in the TGfU literature. In setting out to redress this oversight in t…
The Social Nature of Games
This article reports on a study of pre-service generalist primary school teachers’ experiences of a games unit taught using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach in an Australian teacher education programme. The study sought to make sense of the knowledge and dispositions that pre-service primary school teachers brought into the games unit, the ways in which this shaped their interpretation of the TGfU approach, the impact that thi…
Australian Cultural Capital - Rugby's Social Meaning
(2001). Australian Cultural Capital - Rugby's Social Meaning: Physical Assets, Social Advantage and Independent Schools. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 81-98
High School Rugby, the Body and the Reproduction of Hegemonic Masculinity
Wacquant (1995) argues that the irony of the body's increasing visibility in the social science literature is the absence of studies that deal with actual flesh and blood bodies. Focused on an elite, independent high school in Australia this paper examines the relationship between young men's experiences of rugby training and the embodiment of a 'traditional', hegemonic form of masculinity. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Foucault and Connell it…
Children's Social and Personal Development Through Sport
Despite the prominence of swimming in Australia and the large numbers of children participating in it, no previous research has been conducted on what the implications of this might be for their social development. Indeed, there is a lack of empirical research conducted on the personal, moral, and social learning that arises from children's participation in sport. Building on research conducted on learning and the formation of identity in an Aust…
Why children join and stay in sports clubs
This article builds upon research on youth sport clubs conducted from a socio-cultural perspective by reporting on a study that inquired into the reasons why children aged 9-12 joined swimming clubs in France, Germany and Australia. Comprising three case studies it employed a mixed method approach with results considered within the framework of Côté and colleagues' Development Model of Sport Participation (DMSP). It identifies the importance of p…
The Social Nature of Games
This article reports on a study of pre-service generalist primary school teachers’ experiences of a games unit taught using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach in an Australian teacher education programme. The study sought to make sense of the knowledge and dispositions that pre-service primary school teachers brought into the games unit, the ways in which this shaped their interpretation of the TGfU approach, the impact that thi…
Situated learning in an Australian surf club
The article examines learning and identity formation for young people in an Australian surf club. Drawing on Lave and Wenger's notion of situated learning, it identifies how membership in the surf club from an early age involves highly significant and meaningful learning and identity formation, where learning is co-constructed with other members as a process of negotiating meaning and knowledge. It identifies how membership in the surf club and p…
Learning masculinities in a Japanese high school rugby club
This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based on the premise that particular forms of masculinity are expressed and learnt through ways of playing (game style) and the attendant regimes of training, it examines the expression and learning of masculinities at three analytic levels. It identifies a hegemonic, culture-specific form of ma…
Socialisation, culture and the foundations of expertise in elite level Indigenous Australian sportsmen
This article reports on an ongoing study that investigates the development of expertise in rugby league and Australian football by Indigenous Australians as a socially and culturally situated process of learning. Focused on the sampling phase of the Development Model of Participation in Sport (6–12 years of age), it combines narrative inquiry and grounded theory methodologies to identify the important role that participation in a range of differe…
Culture, embodied experience and teachers’ development of TGfU in Australia and Singapore
Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of research in need of attention in the TGfU literature. In setting out to redress this oversight in t…
Open it Up a Bit
The playing of team games in Australian schools has long been based on the assumption that it promotes positive social learning, and this is particularly so in elite, independent schools. Yet, in a rapidly globalizing world, both sport and education are undergoing significant changes in meaning and function. Within this context, there is increasing tension between the ideal of sport as an educational medium and the reality of sport as a commercia…
Improving ‘at-action’ decision-making in team sports through a holistic coaching approach
This article draws on Game Sense pedagogy and complex learning theory (CLT) to make suggestions for improving decision-making ability in team sports by adopting a holistic approach to coaching with a focus on decision-making ‘at-action’. It emphasizes the complexity of decision-making and the need to focus on the game as a whole entity, where players, individually and collectively, attempt to manage disorder in the face of an opposition. It rejec…
Boys, the body, sport and schooling
The papers presented in this special issue of Sport, Education and Society on boys, the body sport and schooling arose from a two-day forum on boys’ education in practice-oriented subjects held at
The influence of early life experiences on English and Australian Super League coaches’ learning
This article focuses on the influence of early life experiences and socio-cultural context on coach learning in the sport of rugby league. It draws on the findings of a study that investigated the influence of cultural context on the development of elite-level rugby league coaches in England and Australia. The article focuses on the influence of experience from early childhood to the end of compulsory schooling on the development of three English…
The experience of teaching using a game based approach
This study focuses on the analysis of collective meaning associated with secondary physical education teachers’ ( n = 12) experiences of teaching games using a game based approach (GBA). Participants taught in one of two different international contexts, southeast Australia or southeast England, and all had some experience of using a GBA to teach games. A phenomenographic research framework was utilised to uncover the qualitatively finite number …
The cultural transition of Indigenous Australian athletes’ into professional sport
This article reports on a study that inquired into the journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of the footy to the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) that identified two distinct stages of their journeys. These were: (1) the development of expertize and of a distinctly Aboriginal style of play from their first touch of a footy to around the age of thirteen and, (2) a process of cultu…
Teacher–student interaction, empathy and their influence on learning in swimming lessons
The bulk of interest in the role that interaction plays in learning in sport and physical education (PE) has focused on peer interaction at the expense of teacher–student interaction. This article redresses this imbalance in the literature by reporting on a study that inquired into the nature of teacher–student interaction and its effect on learning in PE swimming lessons in a French secondary school. Informed by an enactivist conceptualisation o…
Training Teachers Across Cultures
Atacama Revisited
Atacama Revisited
Training Teachers Across Cultures
High School Rugby, the Body and the Reproduction of Hegemonic Masculinity
Wacquant (1995) argues that the irony of the body's increasing visibility in the social science literature is the absence of studies that deal with actual flesh and blood bodies. Focused on an elite, independent high school in Australia this paper examines the relationship between young men's experiences of rugby training and the embodiment of a 'traditional', hegemonic form of masculinity. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Foucault and Connell it…
From the Profane to the Sacred
As an attempt to address the paucity of research on sport in Asian settings, this paper uses a case-study approach to examine young Japanese men's participation in pre-game rugby rituals. Drawing on Durkheim's seminal work, it is argued that the pre-game ceremonies have much in common with rituals conducted in similar western settings. However, many of the ritual activities were performed in distinctly Japanese ways, suggesting that they also exp…
Australian Cultural Capital - Rugby's Social Meaning
(2001). Australian Cultural Capital - Rugby's Social Meaning: Physical Assets, Social Advantage and Independent Schools. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 81-98
Open it Up a Bit
The playing of team games in Australian schools has long been based on the assumption that it promotes positive social learning, and this is particularly so in elite, independent schools. Yet, in a rapidly globalizing world, both sport and education are undergoing significant changes in meaning and function. Within this context, there is increasing tension between the ideal of sport as an educational medium and the reality of sport as a commercia…
The Social Nature of Games
This article reports on a study of pre-service generalist primary school teachers’ experiences of a games unit taught using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach in an Australian teacher education programme. The study sought to make sense of the knowledge and dispositions that pre-service primary school teachers brought into the games unit, the ways in which this shaped their interpretation of the TGfU approach, the impact that thi…
Situated learning in an Australian surf club
The article examines learning and identity formation for young people in an Australian surf club. Drawing on Lave and Wenger's notion of situated learning, it identifies how membership in the surf club from an early age involves highly significant and meaningful learning and identity formation, where learning is co-constructed with other members as a process of negotiating meaning and knowledge. It identifies how membership in the surf club and p…
Culture, embodied experience and teachers’ development of TGfU in Australia and Singapore
Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of research in need of attention in the TGfU literature. In setting out to redress this oversight in t…
Boys, the body, sport and schooling
The papers presented in this special issue of Sport, Education and Society on boys, the body sport and schooling arose from a two-day forum on boys’ education in practice-oriented subjects held at
Learning masculinities in a Japanese high school rugby club
This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based on the premise that particular forms of masculinity are expressed and learnt through ways of playing (game style) and the attendant regimes of training, it examines the expression and learning of masculinities at three analytic levels. It identifies a hegemonic, culture-specific form of ma…
A cross-cultural study on meaning and the nature of children's experiences in Australian and French swimming clubs
This article reports on a study conducted in Australia and France that inquired into the meaning and the nature of children's experiences of being in swimming clubs with a focus on the positive aspects of membership that keep them in their clubs. Three-month long case studies were conducted in a club in Australia and in a club in France, employing Lave and Wenger's (1991) analytic concepts of communities of practice and situated learning. Conduct…
Children's Social and Personal Development Through Sport
Despite the prominence of swimming in Australia and the large numbers of children participating in it, no previous research has been conducted on what the implications of this might be for their social development. Indeed, there is a lack of empirical research conducted on the personal, moral, and social learning that arises from children's participation in sport. Building on research conducted on learning and the formation of identity in an Aust…
Why children join and stay in sports clubs
This article builds upon research on youth sport clubs conducted from a socio-cultural perspective by reporting on a study that inquired into the reasons why children aged 9-12 joined swimming clubs in France, Germany and Australia. Comprising three case studies it employed a mixed method approach with results considered within the framework of Côté and colleagues' Development Model of Sport Participation (DMSP). It identifies the importance of p…
Ethics in Youth Sport
Introduction Richard L. Light and Stephen Harvey 1. Managing ethics in youth sport: An application of the integrity management framework Jeroen Maeschalack and Yves Vanden Auweele 2. Putting the Child Back in Children's Sport: Nurturing Young Talent in a Developmentally-Appropriate Manner (Gretchen Kerr and Ashley Stirling) 3. The First Youth Olympic Games: Innovations, Challenges and Ethical Issues (Jim Parry and Steffie Lucidarme) 4. Youth Spor…
The contribution of the New South Wales Primary Schools Sports Association towards developing talent in Australian 12-year-old female swimmers
This article reports on a case study that inquired into the influence of the New South Wales Primary Schools Sports Association competitive swimming structure on the development of talented12-year old female swimmers. The study focused on ten 12-year old girls in the New South Wales team that contested the 2009 national swimming championships with results considered within the framework of Coté's Development Model of Sport Participation
Women's sport leadership styles as the result of interaction between feminine and masculine approaches
There is a growing body of research focusing on women in the business sector using a transformational model of leadership that identifies the ways in which they lead yet little is known about the style of leadership women practise in sport. In attempting to redress this oversight in the literature, this article draws on data from a larger study to identify how women practise leadership within a sporting context. It identifies the leadership style…
Revisiting ‘Sport and the maintenance of masculine hegemony’
In 1987, in her seminal paper ‘Sport and the Maintenance of Masculine Hegemony’, the Australian sociologist Lois Bryson described sport as ‘a crucial arena in which masculine hegemony is constructe
Improving ‘at-action’ decision-making in team sports through a holistic coaching approach
This article draws on Game Sense pedagogy and complex learning theory (CLT) to make suggestions for improving decision-making ability in team sports by adopting a holistic approach to coaching with a focus on decision-making ‘at-action’. It emphasizes the complexity of decision-making and the need to focus on the game as a whole entity, where players, individually and collectively, attempt to manage disorder in the face of an opposition. It rejec…
Game Sense as a model for delivering quality teaching in physical education
As a well-developed indicator of high-quality teaching in any subject area we use the New South Wales (NSW) Quality Teaching Framework (QTF) in this article to identify what might constitute quality teaching in physical education and to suggest the extent to which Game Sense pedagogy can be seen to meet the expectations of the NSW QTF. We identify and discuss the pedagogical features of Game Sense that our examination suggests can provide quality…
Learner-centred pedagogy for swim coaching
While constructivist theories of learning have been widely drawn on to understand and explain learning in games when using game-based approaches their use to inform pedagogy beyond games is limited. In particular, there has been little interest in applying constructivist perspectives on learning to sports in which technique is of prime importance. This article contributes to redressing this oversight in the sport pedagogy literature by drawing on…
Questioning for learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching
Despite the development of a wide body of literature suggesting the efficacy of game-based approaches (GBAs) to teaching and learning, GBAs have not yet been widely adopted by practitioners. A range of challenges face teachers and coaches taking up a GBA with two areas being of particular concern, which are: (1) the teacher’s ability to design practice games, analyze learning, and be able to make the necessary adjustments and (2) the effective us…
Teacher–student interaction, empathy and their influence on learning in swimming lessons
The bulk of interest in the role that interaction plays in learning in sport and physical education (PE) has focused on peer interaction at the expense of teacher–student interaction. This article redresses this imbalance in the literature by reporting on a study that inquired into the nature of teacher–student interaction and its effect on learning in PE swimming lessons in a French secondary school. Informed by an enactivist conceptualisation o…
Socialisation, culture and the foundations of expertise in elite level Indigenous Australian sportsmen
This article reports on an ongoing study that investigates the development of expertise in rugby league and Australian football by Indigenous Australians as a socially and culturally situated process of learning. Focused on the sampling phase of the Development Model of Participation in Sport (6–12 years of age), it combines narrative inquiry and grounded theory methodologies to identify the important role that participation in a range of differe…
Adolescent girls’ experiences of basketball in Australian and Japanese clubs
Despite recognition of the influence of social and cultural contexts on young people’s participation in youth sport, there are a limited number of studies that have identified how culture shapes the nature of participation and how it influences experience. This article reports on a study that inquired into what adolescent girls (13–16 years) enjoy about playing basketball in Japan and Australia and in which the cultural context emerged as a signi…
Physical Education and Pedagogy (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (11 works) · Sport Psychology and Performance (10 works) · Motivation and Self-Concept in Sports (8 works)