In this week’s episode I speak with Dr Don Vinson & Victoria Huckle. Don is a principle lecturer in Sports Coaching at the University of Worcester with a particular interest in athlete and coach learning and coach development. He is also a coach and coach developer with England Hockey within the talent development programme.

Victoria is a PhD student at the University of Worcester in the School of Sport and Exercise Science. Victoria’s main research interest is how coaches learn. In addition to working towards her PhD, Victoria has worked with the UK Invictus team, and now works as a professional rowing coach with Bedford School Boat Club.

Don and Victoria, along with Dr Andy Cale, have written paper about understanding how sports coaches learn outside of their coaching community. Recent approaches to facilitating coach development place considerable emphasis on social interaction aimed at enhancing participants’ learning through collaboration and discussion. This investigation examined the usefulness of utilising the Landscapes of Practice (LoP) framework to better understand such “social” learning.