Do you know the name?
Natalie Barker was a Swiss gymnast.
Natalie’s research interests include learning in high-performance sport, sport coaching and sport coaches, and the coach-athlete relationship. The perspective she adopts to analyse these areas is socio-critical in nature. Currently, Natalie is conducting research on coaching practices in high-performance sport, coaching careers of top-level women football coaches and the trend of ‘older’ gymnasts in women’s artistic gymnastics. …
Click PLAY or watch an interview on Vimeo.
Here’s one of her research projects – “They Must Be Working Hard”: An (Auto-)Ethnographic Account of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics:
… observing six Australian women’s elite artistic gymnasts and their two coaches.
Using creative nonfiction and auto-ethnography, the stories’ plots describe the gymnasts’ daily training realities and include personal reflections on the author’s gymnastics experiences and reactions to what she saw during the observations.
The stories illustrate how, despite differing levels of authority, the coaches’, gymnasts’, and parts of her own identity and behaviors are shaped by a dominant gymnastics model.
This ideal coerces the coaches and gymnasts to regulate their selves and behaviors according to its dominant characteristics. Although potentially beneficial and satisfactory, the training model’s discourses and practices can have debilitating effects.
Gymnastics Coaching.com 