ProfessorRichard Light

Professor Richard Light’s program of research focuses on the body, movement, culture and learning with a focus on sport and physical education pedagogy. His early work was in the sociology of sport with a focus on culture and embodied learning but over the past decade he has drawn on this work to inform a distinctive program of reasearch focused on a socio-cultural approach to pedagogy and on the body's role in learning. He draws on learning theory and some social theory to inform this work. This is evident in his collaboration with Associate Professor John Evans (University of Sydney) in an ARC Discovery Indigeious grant funded project that inquires into the development of expertise by elite level NRL and AFL Australian Indigenous players as a socially and culturally situated process of learning.

Professor Light has a broad background in teaching and coaching across a wide range of cultures, having coached and taught in Australia and Japan and having held academic positions in Japan, France, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. This background encourages him to establish a dialectic between practice and theory that is a feature of his research and his teaching. He enjoys a strong international profile, is widely published and has published in Japanese, Portuguese and French aswell as English.