ABSTRACT
In university and college departments offering kinesiology, exercise science, and sport management programmes, the utility of teaching sports history is often unclear and, in many cases, hard to justify in the face of shrinking budgets and fewer specialist positions. In addition to exploring why sports history should be taught, this chapter also considers how sports history can be taught. Sports history lends itself well to student-centred and authentic learning approaches, given most students have physical experience of sport and can bring their embodied experience to their study of sporting cultures and practices. Broad-based physical education programmes have given way to narrow exercise science or sports management degrees, where the history of sport has not always been regarded as core to a more scientific or business-focused curriculum. For those teachers looking to embed the student voice more meaningfully, adopting a ‘students as partner’ model, which invites students to contribute as equal partners to the curriculum design, can be transformative.
