Ecological Football: not just to know more (knowledge about) but to know better (knowledge of)
Referencing: Ecological Football - not just to know more (knowledge about) but to know better (knowledge of)
Mark O’Sullivan:
Constraints were first categorised by Newell in 1986 (14) (see Figure 1) as:
- Individual (e.g., height, speed, cognition, emotions and motivation,)
- Task (e.g., specific to the activity to be performed such as rules, boundary markings and information present in the learning environment design)
- Environmental (e.g., surface, light, facilities, values, societal/cultural expectations) These three classes interact and evolve over varying timescales. A change (e.g., pubescent growth spurt) in one category (individual constraints) may lead to a change in emergent movement behaviors (sense of balance, co-ordination and timing), resulting in changes in the way an individual interacts with the environment (ball, teammates, opponents, surface), highlighting the nonlinearity of the learner and the learning process. From this perspective, skill learning and performance can be understood as an ongoing ‘functional fit’ between an individual and an environment over time.
This shift in perspective offers a broader, holistic, and contextualised understanding, repositioning players as active agents in their learning. From this perspective, skill is the ability to adaptivly attune to the opportunities for action (affordances) that the environment provides (4, 8, 9). These opportunities or affordances for action are relational, emerging from the interaction between an individual’s action capabilities and environmental properties. For example, a gap directly perceived on field may afford dribbling for one player but passing for another due to their differing action capabilities. Skill learning for a footballer is about learning to become attuned to information that specifies opportunities for action that are matched to their action capabilities.