Abstract des Autors

Australia has made as great a commitment to sport as any nation on earth. This commitment can be attributed in large measure to the coaches of this country who have helped to increase both the number and standard of participants. This, in turn, reflects the range and quality of Australia's coach education programs and would suggest that they are at least as well organised and taught as those in comparable countries. However, the purpose of this paper is to question present approaches and to suggest possible alternatives. There is ongoing and worldwide debate about the best way to prepare professionals in many fields. While it is relatively easy to identify the knowledge and skills necessary to practice a profession, the task of structuring and sequencing the most appropriate learning experiences is invariably a difficult one. When there a time constraints, as with coach education in Australia, the task is even more complicated. The critical mistake that has been made in most professional preparation, including coaching, has been to employ a "pedagogical" approach rather than one based on the more appropriate and effective "androgogy". In simple terms, pedagogy involves teaching children the knowledge and the skills necessary to prepare them to deal with the problems of the future, while androgogy is concerned with the education of adults and involves a process in which knowledge and skills are acquired as needed to solve real "here and now" problems. This approach is superior because students dealing with real issues and problems have a strong "set to learn" and quickly come to "own" their new knowledge and skills so that what is learned is more likely to be remembered and applied. Another major advantage is that when they go through this process students develop the skills necessary for lifelong learning. Verf.-Referat