Author

Ministry of Football

In our latest hangout we caught up with Mark Carter, the Director of Ministry of Football. MoF is a youth football programme that takes an innovative approach focussed on providing young people with environments that support their holistic learning and development needs through the game.

Their methods are informed by Mark’s varied and extensive international experience as a coach and educator and we thoroughly enjoyed discussing both what makes MoF special and the theories and experiences that underpin their approach.

As an example of their thinking, they constrain the ability of coaches and parents to talk at the kids too much by playing music during games. We thought this would be a step too far for the hangout but Mark’s video dropped out early on to give us something of a related communication constraint although we’re sure you’ll enjoy hearing from him all the same.

Mark is always looking for ways to improve and develop what they do at MoF so we know he would welcome hearing from anyone interested in discussing or even getting involved in their work. You can check out the MoF website at http://www.ministry-of-football.com and connect with Mark on twitter @MinistryOfFooty.

the less travelled path of the learner’s journey

I remember feeling deeply bewildered for a good fifteen minutes or more whilst the aisle filled with people shuffling, as politely as they could muster, for the exit. I glanced at Sue and we shared a silent pause but before either of us could summon a word the slow, careful, deliberative movements and dysarthric drone of Herod drew us calculatingly back to the stage.

“Ttthhhee mmmooooooonnn hhaaaaasss aaaa sssstttrraaaannnggee llloooooookkk ttooooonniiiigghhtt. Hhaaass sshheee nnooott aaa ssttrraaannggee llooookk?”

I’ve always felt strangely indebted to Steven Berkoff, and the wonderful cast and crew of his interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, for an experience that remains the first to surface in contemplative thought whenever I’m feeling deeply uncomfortable in a public place. The feeling has to reach deep down inside me to conjure the memory but each time it comes it continues to surprise, delight and inform with every retelling.

On this particular time around I’ve come to understand with deeper appreciation the sheer beauty of what was executed on that stage in Glasgow some twenty years ago and the reason why it’s etched in my mind. In creating a vehicle of palpable theatrical power Berkoff invited his audience to experience in visceral terms the story that lay at the heart of the play — that of the cleaving of the patriarchal bond under several of its archetypal guises: between father and daughter; King and subject; man and woman.

By lulling his audience, at least those who could bear it, into an uncomfortable alliance where time slowed and senses numbed, Berkoff was able to deliver a blow filled with the sheer force of nature that must come to bear on that strongest of ties that subserves and sustains the patriarch. The ferocious intensity with which the prophet, Jokanaan, entered the scene was wrought large by the laboured pace at which the audience had now come to view the world. His wild gestures of arm and tongue bore witness to both the strength and fragility of Herod’s hold on his daughter as she sought to position her guile in the role of kingmaker by pitting her pater against his heretical foe.

You see I’ve been thinking a lot about identity of late and I’ve come to realise that patriarchal power is getting in the way of progress in both my inner and outer worlds. Some eighteen months ago I reached a crisis in my professional career and exited stage left to walk into the long grass and take a deep breath of fresh air. Amongst the revelations that were to follow this momentous upheaval was a growing awareness of my own latent patriarchy. In accepting that I was no longer the household bread winner and recognising my dependence on the woman who fills my life with love and kindness I began to surface an uncomfortable truth about my manhood.

Ever since my working class childhood in the west of Scotland I’ve carried within me a manhood that’s measured in strength and stoicism — an independence and invulnerability that belies deeper needs and begets an unnerving ability to be alone in a crowd. This functional facade has seen me through all manner of challenges but in so doing has also built a void of meaning that I can no longer contain. The emancipation of my patriarchal urges has been a hugely liberating experience that has opened me up to new ways of being whilst leaving an inviting space for a new manhood to fill.

Through this journey of self discovery I’ve travelled into varied and fruitful terrain that has prompted a reimagining of the purpose behind my passion for sport. For many, sport is the ultimate domain of the patriarch, although in this sense like many others I’d argue that sport is simply a mirror of wider societal dynamics. Nonetheless, at a personal level I’ve come to realise that my patriarchal urges were fuelling a desire for status that drew me up the food chain of high performance sport but paradoxically drew me away from the necessary discomfort and vulnerability that are crucial to the learning that sits at the heart of any journey to excellence. I’ll return to this tension between elitism and excellence at another time, but what this current revelation has brought squarely into focus for me is a growing awareness that the biggest blocker to progress for many in the sporting domain is the latent patriarchy that sits within our sporting organisations and keeps us from getting vulnerable enough to go into that space where the learning is — from getting comfortable with staying there no matter how much we realise that its never going to get comfortable.

So what exactly is it that we need to get comfortably uncomfortable with? Discomfort in itself of course is not the answer, although a great many leaders of the ‘rocket up the arse’ mould would have you believe otherwise. For me all journeys to excellence are journeys of learning, and at its heart there’s a necessary tension on the edge of learning between the known and the unknown — between the certainty of where we’ve been and the uncertainty of where we’re going. The trouble is that uncertainty doesn’t sit well with the patriarch and in too many of our sporting organisations the patriarchal urge for control leads to the ever more elaborate means of providing an illusion of certainty that secures the status quo.

With subtle sweep of hand the patriarchal organisation paints itself as upholder of greatness and champion of progress, whilst all the while stifling learning and innovation by ensuring compliance with the hierarchy through a careful coercion and control that serves only to protect the powerful. The allure of the algorithm is its latest enchantment with the beguiling promise of a future bestowed if only you’ll comply with the predictive power of its pejorative prose. For a certain future is an enchantment indeed that we seem destined to seek despite our better knowing.

But what other way might there be? If not the comforting illusion of certainty then how might we better face an uncertain future. I wonder if this is of those special moments where sport can offer up a lesson to life. For the very best of sporting champions and sporting leaders have grasped the paradox of performance and purpose. Theirs is the less travelled path of the learner’s journey — in putting the process of perpetual improvement in the service of their purpose they enable performance to emerge by being vulnerable enough to embrace the uncertainty and let learning lead the way.

And for organisations seeking to break the patriarchal bond and travel the learning path I would offer the thoughts of an insightful sporting leader who signalled the seeds of change when he described his challenge thus: “we need to change the perception that athletes need to earn the right to be part of this programme to one where the programme needs to earn the right to be part of the athlete’s journey”. In this I see hope for a better future and a place where my own maturing manhood might emerge.

Whilst not wishing to hold a mirror to the theatrical majesty I bore witness to in Glasgow, in some small way I think we’ve been trying to do something of this ilk with relearn — the learning events we’re running for those who share our passion for learning in sport. Whilst its jarring to see someone disengage from the stage you’ve crafted for their pondering, I take some comfort from knowing that such experiences, if they can be borne, can hold long in the fire and surface when the need arises to bring meaning to the emerging stories of our lives. I’m sure my evening with Berkoff holds many more mysteries that it is yet to reveal and hope to remain both able and grateful to receive them whenever they are bestowed upon me.

be excellent to each other and party on, dudes!

In the final quarter of 2015 we set forth on a most excellent adventure. Our aim was to bring together a diverse group of practitioners to explore the future of learning in sport. At myfastestmile our primary passion is to understand how people learn so that we might support others in the curation of learning environments that help people be their best. We established relearn so that we can work towards co-creating that future by exploring an alternative approach to professional development that is rooted in our emerging principles.

With the benefit of that first experience behind us, along with the feedback of those who were brave enough to join us in that first step, we are now planning a series of relearn events for 2016 that will begin on January 27th with relearnSouth.

One of our key reflections on the relearn launch event was that we made a lot of assumptions about how much people attending already knew about our principles and approach through previous social media interaction and we’ve wondered since about what impact that had on what people brought to and took away from the experience. We also underestimated the desire people would have to join the conversation and left too little time to fully explore the issues that were raised.

To improve on our offering this time we’ve extended the duration of the event from two and a half to four hours and decided to share more details here of our underlying principles and therefore approach to facilitating the learning experience of those who join us on the night. We hope that by doing so we will inspire you to bring your game to the challenge that relearn represents.

 

For Bill and Ted the task of completing a school history assignment did little to inspire them. It was only by circuitously following their passion, with some gentle guiding from Rufus the cosmic meddler, that they were able to embark on a journey to ‘excellent’ (queue air guitar riff) that involved travelling into uncharted territory and making unexpected discoveries that led them to new levels of insight and awareness of what had come before them. The story of these happy hapless travellers is allegorical of much of what is wrong with formal education in many of its current guises and also much of what might be done to improve matters given what we are now learning about effective learning.

We’ve spoken at length in blogs and hangouts about what we think is wrong with current approaches to the curation of learning in sport and we’ve gathered, through our collective experience, insight and networking, an emergent view of what we believe to be a more fruitful if messier and less travelled path. Along the way we’ve converged on a number of principles that shape our thinking and guide what we do. Whilst we draw on a wide range of sources from the sciences and the arts to inform our practice much of our approach is anchored to the combined tenets of self-determination theory, dynamical systems theory and, in its application to sport, constraints based learning theory.

 

For us, the expression of these theories is framed jointly by the notions that behaviour is goal directed and learning is dynamically situated. To be effective in helping people bring their game we believe therefore that a learning environment must meet three core needs:

1. create space for engagement by tapping into personal curiosity
2. provide an opportunity for aspirational exploration in problem setting
3. enable people to connect their efforts and resources to problem solving

 

Our approach to relearn is based on these principles and therefore, like the adventures of Bill and Ted, it can appear somewhat messy and unstructured at first glance. It may even look like we don’t know what we’re doing, because at times we won’t, but we’ll definitely know why and we’ll have a pretty good grasp of how — the what is up to you. You see, at relearn we predominatly see ourselves in the role of Rufus (minus the time travel!) and therefore our aim is to faciltate for the people in the room an exploration of their collective interests and a gentle guide through the process of discovering new insight by sharing the story of their experiences whilst listening to and learning from the stories of others.

We frame this process as a transition from monologue to dialogue and always aim to follow it with a focussed attempt to explore solutions to the problems we’ve been collectively marinating in so that people have new ideas to take away and try. Or in the language of our principles we start by providing people with an opportunity to engage by sharing a story about why they’ve come; we then explore how we might collectively aspire to improve by aligning to the issues of common interest and clarifying the challenges we face; finally we shift attention to problem solving by shaping an opportunity to connect to the insight and expertise of others in the room.

Of course, we hope to add value to the conversation ourselves wherever possible by sharing our own experiences, insights and ideas but we actively seek to avoid falling into the traditional educational format of playing the sage on stage as it would feel not only like a betrayal of the very principles we hold to but more importantly would deny people the opportunity to give to and draw from the collective capabilities of the community of learners we hope that relearn will foster. We were delighted to draw an eclectic mix of attendees to the launch event with conversations striking up between grassroots coaches and skill acquisition researchers or PE teachers and performance directors. We see this as a great chance to look at the issues we all face from a variety of different perspectives that offer new insight and opportunity.

We also aspire to make learning as much fun as it was for Bill and Ted when Rufus stepped in so we invite you then to be excellent together and join us at relearnSouth for a rethink of learning…