Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore a different, more relational worldview of skill, learning and education in sport. To do this, we turn to the work of social anthropologist, Tim Ingold, leaning on the notion of enskilment, which proposes that learning is inseparable from doing and place. From this worldview, what is learned is not an established body of knowledge, transmitted into the mind of a passive recipient from an authorised being, but is a progressively deepening embodied-embedded attentiveness, where an individual learns to self-regulate by becoming more responsive to people and environmental features by ‘looking, listening and feeling’. As we discuss, Ingold’s perspectives on enskilment are rooted in the etymological connotations of education—ex-ducere, which roughly means ‘to lead out’. In applying this notion to sport, we unpack three of its entangled components, taskscapes, guided attention, and wayfinding, detailing the implications of each for the growth of enskilled sports performers. To promote the translation of these ideas, in addition to encouraging their inquiry beyond the scope of what is discussed here, sporting examples are threaded throughout the paper.

Social and Cultural Constraints on Football Player Development in Stockholm: Influencing Skill, Learning, and Wellbeing

“…To investigate the interacting constraints that continually shape relations between a society, culture, community and peoples psychological wellbeing, and skill development, we combine ecological approaches with transdisciplinary inquiry (Vaughan et al, 2019 ; Woods et al, 2021a ). Transcending disciplinary boundaries allows us to function in-between, through and beyond disciplinary conventions (Mahan, 1970 ; Woods et al, 2021b ), placing the phenomenon of interest, in this case, football player development, at the core of the research program, not a disciplinary way of doing or being per se (Montuori, 2013 ). Transdisciplinarity allows us to extend ecological approaches and illuminate the intentionality of a player-environment ecology , rather than merely highlighting the intentions of individual athletes (Vaughan et al, 2021 ).…”

Learning and performing: What can theory offer high performance sports practitioners?

“…In the next section we provide an alternate viewpoint where learning and performing are seen as being tightly interconnected and in fact, performing requires direct learning and learning take place through performing in representative environments 41 . In this approach, motor learning is predicated on a transdisciplinary focus on movements in action rather than an isolated disciplinary view 42 .…”

What is there to learn from the Open Gym? Developing new pedagogical notions of sports by an empirical engagement with a DIY sports infrastructure

“…Next to this, sports pedagogy comprises conceptual studies that have, for instance, built on the framework of ecological dynamics and non-linear pedagogy to advance the notion of 'skill acquisition', which highlights how individuals learn sportive skills by adapting their bodies to affordances and constraints of performance environments (Chow & Atencio, 2014;Chow, Shuttleworth, Davids, & Araújo, 2019). Other conceptual studies have combined this ecological perspective with anthropological work to propose the notion of 'enskilment', which denotes how individuals learn in a self-regulated manner while engaging with dynamic tasks and knowledgeable others in the environment (Woods, Rudd, Gray, & Davids, 2021). These studies thus share the assumption that connections between sports and pedagogy are largely shaped by where they are taking place.…”