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

WOODS, Carl T., RUDD, James, ROBERTSON, Sam and DAVIDS, Keith (2020). Wayfinding: How Ecological Perspectives of Navigating Dynamic Environments Can Enrich Our Understanding of the Learner and the Learning Process in Sport. Sports Medicine - Open, 6 (1), p. 51.

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Open Access URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40798-0... (Published version)
Link to published version:: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-020-00280-9

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: ** From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications Router ** Licence for this article: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ **Journal IDs: pissn 2199-1170; eissn 2198-9761 **Article IDs: publisher-id: s40798-020-00280-9; manuscript: 280 **History: collection 12-2020; published_online 28-10-2020; online 28-10-2020; registration 15-10-2020; accepted 14-10-2020; submitted 12-05-2020
Uncontrolled Keywords: Current Opinion, Ecological dynamics, Wayfinding, Affordance landscape, Learning design, Perception-action coupling, Knowledge of/about
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-020-00280-9
Page Range: p. 51
SWORD Depositor: Colin Knott
Depositing User: Colin Knott
Date Deposited: 28 Oct 2020 17:50
Last Modified: 17 Mar 2021 21:30
URI: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27509

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