Sport: Football for Peace
Lecturer Gary Stidder demonstrates how students from Sports Education degrees can graduate with an understanding not just of sport itself but of the power of sports to catalyse social change. Although not a formal part of the Sports Studies degree, each year a number of Gary’s students choose to take part in this optional summer project as a supplement to their formal studies and as a way to gain some real-life experience of being a sports trainer.
The Project
The Football for Peace project aims to facilitate intercultural co-existence, using youth football training to help two conflicting cultural groups learning to live alongside one another. The project is based in Israel and brings together Israeli and Palestinian youth in week-long football courses. Through games, warm up activities and positive re-enforcement techniques, the coaches teach the participants humanitarian values such as trust, respect and responsibility. The main emphasis of the week is the learning of these values, rather than becoming good at football.
The Student Experience
Those who opt to join the Football for Peace project start off with two weeks of training at a German University alongside German students from the equivalent sports degree. Through this training, they learn about the philosophy of Football for Peace. They are equipped with the coaching skills to run a week long football training project for children and teenagers of Israeli and Palestinian backgrounds, and to use each day of the training work to engage the participants in a new aspect of intercultural co-existence. The training involves discussion about how to teach the humanitarian values effectively, ranging from trust building exercises to the practice of actually pausing the football game to praise the display of positive values in the participants.
In explaining what he had learned, one student remarked
‘That positive reinforcement thing goes on all the time. Like those moments... teachable moments; if a kid falls over and someone helps him up, like that’s the most important thing in the session’
When asked about whether he expected such an opportunity in his degree, another student said
‘…the reason I did the course in the first place was because that’s what interests me...the humanistic side of it and the values and everything, rather than whether the kid’s good at football or cricket or whatever else...you do get a set of skills that will help when we become PE teachers, the skills we learn through the project...but there’s something so much more than that.’
From the lecturers point of view, there have been many benefits in making Football for Peace an optional aspect of the Sports Training degree; on the students, Garry commented
‘They come back different people, more mature. [The students who take part in Football for Peace] are the first to get jobs, they’re more confident in their teaching, their success rate is higher’
Lecturer Graham Spacey is impressed by the development of their critical faculties through involvement in the project:
‘It changes them significantly as individuals and human beings...they come back with a realistic view not a media generated view...they become very critical, more critical of what’s going on around them and they don’t take that for granted.’
A further benefit to the course has been increased marketability:
‘We have become increasingly well known for the football for peace project... [it] has added a significant kudos and of course, it’s being marketed for recruitment purposes’
Potential for Replication
For other sports institutions to replicate this approach, the infrastructure is already in place for Brighton University to run a four day training course that would equip participants with the know how to apply the same approaches to their own community. The Irish football association has recently received training to integrate football for peace into the Gateway Project for relationships across the Irish-Northern Irish border.