To Swim or to Splash...?

Specificity has been a key area of interest of mine ever since I was taught the topic in my GCSE Physical Education class, some time ago now... In a nutshell the concept is simple, runners should run, swimmers should swim and power athletes should train power.. However, since my GCSE school days I have come to understand this concept in more depth and how it now guides my thinking towards curriculum design. On average, 400 people die of drowning each year in the UK according to nationalwatersaftey.org, which got me thinking about what specificity now means for PE, learn to swim and swimming curriculums. Is teaching the 4 competitive strokes in a reductionist linear model representative of the task/ objective? I am starting to believe it isn't...

Traditionally swimming is taught through the introduction of water competency skills and the introduction; through levels of tasks; of competitive strokes (Duijn et al 2021). NGB's around the world write up levels/checklists which provide the step by step linear progressions to learning swimming, usually influenced by distances and performing recognised strokes. Which, based on specificity makes perfect sense when the guiding influence is to support a pathway into competitive swimming. However, what seems to have happened is a crossing over and dominance of competitive swimming into, well just 'swimming'. By just swimming, I am speaking about the fundamental movements that a person needs to survive and thrive in water. Duijn et al (2021) highlight the limitations of traditional pool based swimming lessons and how they are taught and offer suggestions changing the environmental constraints to support more dynamic learning through interactions with novel environments, ie use rivers, lakes etc. However this might be difficult to access, but it isn't difficult to use swimming pools to create representative learning environments and manipulate constraints to create tasks that are representative to the needs of more open environments. Ie remove lane ropes, create turbulence, limit sight through modified goggles etc etc. What is important is that the overuse of deliberate practice at young ages limits the scale of skills learners can access, but is common practice in many settings (Cote & Erickson 2015; Davids 2000; Tucker & Collins 2012). What is also interesting is the effect limiting affordances does to human motivation, something highlighted by Moulds et al (2022). This is a tangent from my original point but if this is having an impact of drop out then that also contributes to a reduction in physical/water literacy.

Using models designed to be specific to improving/learning the competitive strokes we are reducing the landscape of affordances on offer to learners. After all the rules that shape these strokes in a non-competitive context are simply unnecessary constraints. I am not saying strokes aren't useful, but an appreciation of a continuum of specificity should be acknowledged. These affordances are opportunities for learners to interact with through a concept called perception-action coupling (Gibson 1967), which supports the emergence of self-organisation, metastability attunement and functional movement solutions (Bruineberg et al 2021; Hacques et al 2021). A rich landscape in affordances promotes creativity and innovation through exploratory behavior (Woods et al 2021). Children in regions around the world in water based cultures learn to swim using a wide range of techniques, as demonstrated in Apple Tv's Becoming You documenting the Bajo tribe, but they aren't limited by trying to learn competitive swimming strokes.

By supporting a more general approach to task representativeness to support a greater level of general transfer of skills and also re- thinking what specificity looks like, I believe that there is scope to change the paradigm around how swimming is taught. Increasing a general transfer of skills can support a wider repertoire of skills and we can look at supporting a deeper entrenchment of learning in specific skills once we identify what is guiding task specificity in our programmes. Using a more ecological approach, learners can develop a better understanding of the knowledge 'of' their environment rather than just the knowledge 'about' it (Woods et al 2021). This concept after all, could be the difference between life and death, but also the ability to utilise energy systems and stroke biomechanics to optimise skillful performance. With a deeper level of attunement with water, physical literacy can be greater developed, perhaps changing what we value in swimming lessons in a pre competitive setting, but also informing us on supporting learning for a journey into competitive swimming when it becomes relevant to place constraints on swimmers to swim within the rules of the sport.

My next article will be based around task generality and task specificity in developing competitive swimming skills and skill periodisation in swimming.

References

Bruineberg, J., Seifert, L., Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2021). Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior.?Synthese,?199(5–6), 12819–12842. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03355-6

Cote, J & Erickson, K. (2015). Diversification and deliberate play during the sampling years. In J. Baker & D. Farrow (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Sport Expertise. (pp. 305-316). Routledge.

Davids. K. (2000). Skill acquisition and the theory of deliberate practice: It ain't what you do its the way you do it! International journal of sport psychology. 31(4).

Duijn. T., Ng, J., Burnay, C., Anderson, N., Uehara, L., Cocker, K., Button, C. (2021). The Influence of Equipment and Environment on Children and Young Adults Learning Aquatic Skills. Frontiers in Psychology. 12. 733489. 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733489.?

Gibson, J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception . Dallas ;: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Print. 2 & 3.

Hacques, G., Komar, J., Dicks, M., & Seifert, L. (2021, June 1). Exploring to learn and learning to explore.?Psychological Research. Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01352-x

Tucker, R & Collins, M. (2012). What makes champions? A review of the relative contribution of genes and training to sporting success. British journal of Sports Medicine, 46(8), 555-561.

Woods, C.T., Rudd, J., Davids, K., 2021. Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport. Sports Medicine - Open 7. doi:10.1186/s40798-021-00326-6