ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that sport pedagogy researchers, that is, those interested in teaching and learning in physical education, constitute a loosely structured social organization called a research learning community. Researchers in a learning community are bound together by social customs through sharing their conceptions of the research enterprise, ethics and principles governing appropriate behavior (e.g. toward their participants), ways of conducting their business (e.g. within paradigms, researchers share methodologies), and their results. This chapter presents an adaptation of Rosenholtz’s (1991) work on schools as social organizations, drawing out three important values that differentiate learning-enriched from learning-impoverished organizations. For researchers, these values can facilitate progress toward greater sophistication and more powerful payoffs in understanding the practices of teaching and the conditions for learning. Much future research on learning and teaching in physical education can be built profitably on the research reviewed earlier in this book. This chapter offers analysis of how our research community might work better to insure such profits.
