In the previous blog, I talked about the need to develop in young athletes awareness in their skills and how to compete. The article below, in this regard, discusses how coaches should be “landscape designers” to provide their students with the best environment in which to discover and practice their motor and sports skills. The name of this approach is: Nonlinear Pedagogy
Chow Jia Yi, Komar John, Seifert Ludovic. The Role of Nonlinear Pedagogy in Supporting the Design of Modified Games in Junior Sports
Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 2021.
In their paper, Woods et al. (2020) described howsports practitioners are seen as “landscape designers” who cansupport learners to find their own way in learning movementskills by perceiving and navigating through emergentperformance-related problems. This would indicate that thelearner is not a passive actor in the journey of acquiring andadapting skills. Athletes and, in the context of this paper, juniorathletes would learn through involvement in practices andperformance environments that challenge them to be problemsolvers in a self-regulated manner. What do these athletes learnfrom a “wayfinding” analogy? Woods and colleagues arguethat through wayfinding, learners can deepen their knowledgeof the environment (also see Sullivan et al., 2021 discussionon this) by being exposed to a continuum of affordances inthe environment as the wayfinding process is one that ischaracterized by embodiment and embedment (i.e., notdecoupling the emergence of movement.
The opportunity is for the young learners to acquire a range of movements that could be transferred to other similar movement contexts. Importantly, it is also about “learning to learn” (Hacques et al., 2021). Individuals learn to make decision, learn to explore, and learn to adapt, and all these can take place over a longer time scale (Hacques et al., 2021).
We want these young athletes to be provided with opportunities to achieve adaptability (i.e., flexibility and stability) in the way they use their repertoire of movement skills in performance contexts.
On the other hand, with multi-sports, the learner would be exposed to a greater range of movement possibilities through the attunement to various informational sources present across different sports contexts. For such involvement in multi-sports, it can potentially expand the repertoire of movement solutions available to the learner where greater adaptable movements (maybe even atypical ones!) can be effective in the target sports subsequently. This is where innovative, spontaneous, and individualized movement solutions become a valuable asset to the individual who has been exposed to a wide variety of sports.
Nonlinear Pedagogy advocates practice contexts that incorporates situations that challenges the learner to “replicate” the movement skill in different and dynamic contexts since many of these more representative “practices” will never challenge the learner in exactly the same way (i.e., the idea of repetition without repetition).
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