Wayfinding: How Ecological Perspectives of Navigating Dynamic Environments Can Enrich Our Understanding of the Learner and the Learning Process in Sport

Abstract

Wayfinding is the process of embarking upon a purposeful, intentional, and self-regulated journey that takes an individual from an intended region in one landscape to another. This process is facilitated through an individual’s capacity to utilise temporally structured, functional actions embedded within a particular environmental niche. Thus, individuals learn of their performance landscapes by experiencing them through interactions, detecting and exploiting its many features to ‘find their way’. In this opinion piece, we argue that these ecological and anthropological conceptualisations of human navigation can, metaphorically, deepen our understanding of the learner and the learning process in sport, viewed through the lens of ecological dynamics. Specifically, we consider sports practitioners as (learning) landscape designers, and learners as wayfinders; individuals who learn to skilfully self-regulate through uncharted fields (composed of emergent problems) within performance landscapes through a deeply embodied and embedded perception-action coupling. We contend that, through this re-configuration of the learner and the learning process in sport, practitioners may better enact learning designs that afford learners exploratory freedoms, learning to perceive and utilise available opportunities for action to skilfully navigate through emergent performance-related problems. We conclude the paper by offering two practical examples in which practitioners have designed practice landscapes that situate learners as wayfinders and the learning process in sport as wayfinding.

Physical Literacy - A Journey of Individual Enrichment: An Ecological Dynamics Rationale for Enhancing Performance and Physical Activity in All

“…A key to sustainable engagement in physical activity is "enrichment": the design of a rich and varied range of athletic, participatory experiences, opportunities, challenges, and activities that will require skill adaptation (Button et al, 2020) across a practice landscape from generality -specificity (Woods C. T. et al, 2020). In the next sections, we suggest how enrichment in physical activity has been operationalized through an ecological dynamics rationale and has led to innovation of two contemporary learner-centered pedagogies, that employ non-linear principles of learning: Non-linear Pedagogy (NLP) and Athletic Skills Model (ASM), each of which reflects the inherent complexity involved in the learning process.…”

“…An observed output from the continuous adaptation of actions under changing constraints are movement innovations, emerging through interactions with the environment, task and individual constraints. In this ecological dynamics conceptualization, executive functions play an integral role in planning and preparation underpinning the intentionality, and "knowledge of " the environment (Woods C. T. et al, 2020) that frames the self-organization tendencies that emerge under interacting constraints. The deeply entwined relations of intentions, perception and action provides a boundary for the self-organization tendencies that can be exploited for the functionally innovative and adaptive actions during the continual transitioning between environmental information and the intrinsic dynamics in sport performance (Fajen et al, 2009;Hristovski et al, 2011;Araújo et al, 2019;Seifert et al, 2019).…”

Specialist Coaching Integrated into a Department of Methodology in Team Sports Organisations

“…For example, gaps perceived in defensive lines may invite opportunities for attackers to exploit and penetrate in rugby union, whilst the positioning of defenders closer to the hoop may afford more three-point scoring opportunities for an offensive team in basketball. As such, an important challenge for coaches and sport scientists is to coordinate activity and ideas on designing affordance landscapes in practice to challenge individuals and teams, based on performance information [1,3,4].…”

“…In ecological dynamics, this has been captured within the notion of representative learning design [4,10], a concept describing the importance of practice tasks simulating (i.e., faithfully representing) the informational constraints present in competition. For example, practitioners can design in representative informational constraints (i.e., opposition ball movement strategies in football, the strategic placement of fielders in cricket or the use of a goalkeeper in hockey) to guide the attention of performers towards the perception of opportunities for action (i.e., affordances) that enable the achievement of a task goal.…”

“…Access to sport science support and coaching can be administered by staff in a Department of Methodology (DoM), where service unification is guided by principles of ecological dynamics [3,4]. Yet, little is known about how coaching and sport science support can be provided for athletes with specialist roles [1].…”