Enskilment: An Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport
🚀 Article in 3 Sentences
- Starts by exploring different views of skill learning and education in sport. They turn to the work of Tim Ingold as the notion of Enskillment to present a more relational view of this
- They talk through the Enskillment and the ideas behind it. Enskillment proposes learning is inseparable from doing and/in place, meaning individuals become more actively self-regulating in performance through deepening their attentiveness to environmental feature
- They discuss in detail how the key entangled components (Taskscape, Guided Attention and Wayfinding) can be applied within sport
🤝Impressions
This was one my favourite papers that I’ve read. Really enjoyed reading it and it really got me thinking. It’s full of great content but written at quite an accessible level. In fact, I think it simplifies some of the words around skill acquisition or presents them in a really nice way.
👨🏫Who should read this?
I think every coach/teacher should read this. Lots of examples from sports that make it relevant for practitioners.
🎾How Article will influence my coaching
- I really liked the ‘ex-ducere’ which means to lead out.
- Tell them where to look but not what to see
- Learning is a process of active self discovery
- Players need to be aware of even the most subtle changes
- ‘Hands on softly’- Guide their attention towards the useful information
- The are a number of ways to guide attention. Nudging, designing and manipulating
📃Takeaways for coaches
- What is learned is not a body of knowledge transmitted to a passive recipient, but a progressively deepening ‘’embodied-embedded attentiveness” where the person learns to self regulate their behaviours by becoming increasingly ‘’sensitive’ to the people and environmental features by ‘’looking listening and feeling”
- 4)Etymology is the study of the history/origin of where words came from. Education derived from ‘ex-ducere’ which means to ‘lead out’
- Ingold got to actively and directly experience the ‘sights, smells and tastes of things’ in a safe and supported manner which allowed him to experience and discover things for himself.
- Ingold’s father viewed teaching “in the sense of helping others to learn the affordances of objects and tools within the context of a given skill. This is grounded in the roots of ex-ducere
- Ingold’ was learning to become more attentive to things by self discovering and actively engaging while under the guidance of an experienced other (father)
- Other view of skill and learning is ecological dynamics where organism-environment interactions are the level of analysis. To educate is to guide the attention of the individual towards specifying environmental features they can pick up to support and (self) regulate emergent adaptive.
- The way practioners view learning has a big influence on how they go about educating to ‘acquire’ a skill
- Skill is not something that is acquired, instead it's an evolving and functionally adaptable fit that emerges between the performer and the constraints of the environment as they become more attuned to the specifying information for action
- Individuals need to directly experience things for themselves. This helps them ‘grow’ their knowledge as they explore their various performance landscapes. During this process they are continuously guided, mentored and supported by an experienced other.
- Learning is inseparable from doing and is embedded in a context of a practical engagement in the world.
- Experienced Practitioner is an integral part of the taskscape that guides the less experienced other along different paths of inquiry
- Task- A practical goal directed activity undertaken by an individual interacting with an environment. The taskscape is all the tasks that are being completed in the environment. Tasks are never completed in isolation. They exist within an enmeshment of people interacting with each other and the environment
- Coaches are learning designers that work with athletes to make sure the interaction of the individual and environment are at the heart of practice design.
🥇Top Quotes
💡 From this worldview, what is learned is not an established body of knowledge, transmitted into the mind of a passive recipient from an authorised being, but is a progressively deepening embodied-embedded attentiveness, where an individual learns to self-regulate by becoming more responsive to people and environmental features by ‘looking, listening and feeling’
💡 The other, situated in an ecological approach, sets its unit of analysis at the level of organism-environment interactions, implicating the idea that to educate (ex-ducere) is to guide the attention of individuals toward the perception of environmental features that could be used to support and (self)regulate emergent, adaptive behaviours
💡 Rather, skill ‘acquisition’ is viewed as pertaining to a dynamic and evolving fit between the action capabilities of an organism, the task to be achieved, and the environmental niche which they inhabit
💡 During enskilment, individuals are encouraged to experience the sights, sounds, feelings and smells of things, attending to these sources of information directly as they are, embedded into the context in which they exist.
💡 Thus, becoming enskilled cannot occur separately, in isolation from context or experience, as it grows in the messiness of the noisy ‘real-world’
💡 This means that an enskilled sports performer cannot pre-programme actions but must be adaptive and responsive to the ever-changing environment, submitting to the unpredictability of the environment every time they head out to ‘play’
💡 From this dwelling perspective, a task can be understood as a practical, goal-directed activity undertaken by an individual interacting with an environment
💡 What this means for the enskilled performer, then, is that they must be sensitive and responsive to even the most subtle of changing rhythms, as it is this attunement to the information of a performance environment that likely preserves functionality and self-organising tendencies in the taskscape.
💡 Thus, far from being a minor part of the learning process, the experienced practitioner is an integral part of the taskscape, walking with the less experienced other along paths of inquiry that open as they go,
💡 For example, sports practitioners functioning within this framework are often encouraged to view themselves through a ‘learning designer lens’ [25], working with athletes to place the individual-environment interaction at the core of the practice design
💡 In sum, the role of the coach in an enskilment approach is predominantly one of guidance, and while at times this guidance may require slight nudging or even showing, it rarely starts and ends in the ‘hard pedagogical act’ of instructing, engrained in a specific way of doing
💡 sports performers could (metaphorically) be viewed as wayfinders, progressively learning to self-regulate in dynamic, complex performance environments by using perceptions, emotions, cognitions and actions to solve emergent problems within the taskscape
💡 For example, in helping a young tennis player learn to wayfind through the emergent problems of a competitive match, a coach could use carefully targeted questions that show the player where to look, but that do not prescribe what to see
💡 This approach accepts that at any time, an enskilled individual is both prepared and unprepared for the demands of the taskscape—prepared in that they are responsive or ‘tuned in’ to the opportunities for action, but unprepared in that they appreciate nothing is given in an environment that is constantly changing:
🔍Resources
Link to full paperCheck out the full paper below
Reference
Woods, C. T., Rudd, J., Gray, R., & Davids, K. (2021). Enskilment: An ecological-anthropological worldview of skill, learning and education in sport. Sports Medicine-Open, 7(1), 1-9.
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