Competences and college training of sports educators in Italy

Abstract

The aim of this article has been to identify the educational competences able to ensure that sport is truly an educational tool aimed at developing the well-being among youth. For this we have detected the competences that coaches and those who are responsible of educational projects think to be fundamental for their profession and if the same competences are usually developed in the curricula of the sport sciences department of Latium Region in Italy. The methodology used has been mixed, qualitative and quantitative, using data collection techniques such as semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. In the first step 20 sports coaches were interviewed and, 2 people responsible, in Italy, of two educational projects focused on sport and social intervention. The results of the interviews allowed us to construct a questionnaire that was submitted to the students of the third year of the Bachelor’s degree course in physical education and sports. The results of the quantitative phase of this research have shown that most students consider as essential, to their future work, the 29 educational competences arising from the content analysis of the interviews that have been analysed in the qualitative phase. The data show that 84.4% of the students interviewed have declared to possess the educational competences but that these have been acquired outside university.