The Two Continua Model for Life Skills Teaching

Life skills refer to a person's ability to do life well through the successful completion of everyday tasks and a meaningful engagement at school, at work, at home and in the community. However, several scholars have critiqued existing approaches to life skills teaching in sport, often situated as individualistic and focused on economic productivity and integration in predetermined social orders. For the teaching of life skills in sport to instigate social change, coaching approaches must consider broader structures of power, privilege and oppression. The purpose of the paper is to propose a two continua model coalescing implicit/explicit approaches and normative/transformative dimensions of how coaches can teach life skills through sport. The model is designed to account for how coaches can be implicit or explicit in their approaches to teaching life skills, doing so in manners that can be normative or transformative. Within each of the model's quarter-circles, examples are offered as to how coaches can teach life skills in approaches considered normative implicit, normative explicit, transformative implicit and transformative explicit. In the transformative explicit quarter-circle, the concept of social justice life skills is expanded to include dignity, reciprocity, transformative leadership and critical consciousness. Implications for research and practice are offered in terms of situating youth development from a relational perspective and positioning transformative change as a complex process that carries certain challenges and risks for coaches and youth. The two continua model for life skills teaching offers researchers and coaches a conceptual framework that delineates actions that can be taken to enact transformative pedagogies, while also opening new horizons for what life skills can become when envisioned with social change in mind.