As an education researcher and youth sports coach, I frequently look for overlaps related to instruction. One can apply the three pedagogies described by Kalantzis and Cope in New Learning (2022) to either field:

Mimetic Pedagogy

• Schools: “the learner acquires received knowledge and demonstrates this acquisition by repetition.”
• Sports: Players learn skill-based drills that isolate components of a physical action and attempt to repeat them.

Synthetic Pedagogy

• Schools: Learners are asked to “actively get involved in their learning” and transfer knowledge from one area to another.
• Sports: Players apply discrete skills to simulations and situations extracted from game play.

Reflexive Pedagogy

• Schools: This pedagogy “is a more varied and open ended process of knowledge making” requiring learners to creatively make their own knowledge. Learners collaborate in groups and adapt to context and continuous feedback from the learning environment.
• Sports: Players are required to apply skills and strategy in continuously changing game environments.

Pereira et al. (2010) refer to mimetic athletic training pedagogy as “molecular” that enables players to “collect, little by little, the discrete parts and pieces” in learning environments that remove skills from the game context” (p. 121). Conversely, “holistic” coaching centers the learner as “an active constructor of meaning, organizing and reorganizing the understanding of the content as a whole” in a way that is closer to reflexive pedagogy (p. 122). In their study of volleyball coaches, Pereira et al. (2010) noted that coaches prioritize “a molecular perspective” and focus on skill through movement efficiency and accuracy despite voicing a preference for a “game agenda” that hews more closely to “holistic approach” but uses modified game situations rather than open, authentic games (p. 126).

Volleyball is similar to sports such as basketball and soccer; while discrete skills and fundamentals are important, they can be in conflict to creating players who can creatively adapt to the flow of a game environment in which every movement and decision opens up countless others, and players must transition seamlessly between playing offense and defense. Rasmussen and Østergaard (2016) studied this challenge through a review of The Creative Soccer Platform (TCSP), showing that “skill optimization and creativity do not necessarily contradict each other.”

Soccer coaches must create players with the mental and physical flexibility to apply discrete skills and combinations of skills (dribbling moves, passing, moving to space without the ball) to innumerable, unpredictable situations. Coaches must teach creativity, which Rasmussen and Østergaard (2016) cite (Sternberg & Lubart, (1999) as “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., unexpected, original) and appropriate (i.e., useful).” TCSP espouses four principals of coaching that seek to accomplish this:

• “Task Focus”: Activities aligned to this principle ask players to focus on discrete tasks in which the physical action becomes routine creating greater probability that players will be able to apply it to novel situations.
• “Parallel Thinking”: Activities aligned to this principle require all players to have the same focus at all times during an activity. Groups of players have to collaborate towards a defined, common goal such as executing a sequence of passes to move the ball from one area to another.
• “Horizontal Thinking”: This principle is “defined as stored knowledge from one area applied to a problem related to another area of memory.” In example of horizontal thinking, a pair must come up with a novel, unconventional way to use discrete ball skills to get a ball into a bucket.
• “No Experienced Judgment”: This principle requires all players to treat all ideas as good ideas no matter how strange or seemingly ineffective they might be. Players are asked to perform “weird and unusual skills, rarely seen in soccer practice.” This helps players become unafraid of making mistakes and therefore more free to apply learning in unconventional or unpredicted contexts.

(1x1SPORT.com)

If you are inclined to watch the World Cup this coming winter, watch through a creative lens. Try to view player movements and big plays from the position of the different possibilities for each and think about how creativity played a role in developing the players for this global stage.

References

Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (2022) New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Third Edition). Cambridge University Press/Common Ground Research Networks. Cambridge/Champaign.

Pereira, F. R. M., Mesquita, I. M. R., & Graça, A. B. (2010). Relating content and nature of information when teaching volleyball in youth volleyball training settings: POVEZIVANJE SADRŽAJA I PRIRODE INFORMACIJA U POUČAVANJU ODBOJKE MLAĐIH DOBNIH KATEGORIJA. Kinesiology, 42(2), 121–131.

Rasmussen, L. J. T., & Østergaard, L. D. (2016). The Creative Soccer Platform: New strategies for stimulating creativity in organized youth soccer practice. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 87(7), 9–19.

Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1999) The concepts of creativity: Prospects and paradigms. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 3–15). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

1x1SPORT.com (Director). (2015, June 17). Creative Football/ Soccer Drill: The Basketball-Soccer Combination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSp-QbEDrqk