AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning, udvikling og idéudveksling i ...

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AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning, udvikling og idéudveksling i professioner body part – a part which is central to the execution of the movement, e.g., the elbow in the crawl arm movement above the waterline, or the movement of the hand in the end phase of a lay-up in basketball. • Attention on specific movement sequences: Similar to the last exercise, with the difference that the focus here is on a specific sequence of the movement, e.g., the movement of the hips in tipping movements on the horizontal bar. • Attention on environmental conditions. It is not always good to have the attention directed inward, especially when things do not work well. In such a situation, it can be beneficial, e.g., for a jogging run in the morning, not to focus on one’s body, but on the sounds in the environment (e.g., birds’ singing, the rustling of the leaves in the trees, etc.). In skiing, it can be beneficial for the execution of a carving turn to listen for a time to the sound the skis make in the snow. In doing so, the skier can receive a lot of information with regard to the run. In other areas of life, similar attention exercises are developed to improve the individual’s positive attitude towards life. For this purpose, Buddhist meditation for example offers a number of exercises which are becoming more and more popular among Western people and which find acceptance in psychiatry and psychology (see Dalai Lama & Cutler, 1998) Being in the rhythm A greater consciousness of rhythm as part of our activity pattern in many life situations can support the quality of our lives. There are the major daily rhythms like being awake and being asleep, like work and rest, biological rhythms like breathing, etc. In the following, I will focus on the importance of rhythm in exercise, movement and sport, and how rhythm can improve the performance and quality in different motor activities. In this area, rhythm has a prominent experiential dimension which gives it a specific pre-reflective meaning. Rhythm structures time and gives the movement a kind of periodicity. In that sense, rhythm develops coordination and movement flow (Laban, 1963). Here flow describes one central quality of our movement. Being in the rhythm, e.g., in a dance, skiing or crawl swimming, means that you are and have to be in the present moment. You cannot be fully in the rhythm and at the same time focus on and think about something else. Being in the rhythm will automatically make you loose yourself in the movement. You will adopt the rhythm as an embodied dimension of yourself. The rhythm will strengthen your pre-reflective orientation to the environment and your action. Rhythm can be defined as a central category of a focusing on tacit knowledge, which in a non-discursive way intensifies the interplay between person, situation and the specific task at hand. Being fully in the rhythm of the movement builds up a mental state which Csikszentmihalyi (1975) describes as “flow”. Unlike before, flow is here a psychological category and can be characterized by the following aspects: Equilibrium between challenges and skills, clear goals, immediate feedback, “distorted” sense of time, consciousness of self is vanishing, the involvement in the task is rewarding in itself. It is the teacher’s or coach’s task to draw attention to the rhythmic dimension in different movement situation. Some examples: How can you combine your breathing with your steps while jogging? How can you combine your arm stroke in crawl swimming with the rhythm of your legs? How can you in a dribble training exercise find your rhythm through a slalom course? How does your swinging of the skies improve if you sing a waltz? Intentional orientation In our effort to understand the world, we traditionally search for causal relationships and reasons. A statement could be: I came to this point because of that. This causal orientation may sometimes work, but especially in complex (cooperation or movement) situations we do not come closer to either an www.cvustork.dk/agora/ 18
AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning, udvikling og idéudveksling i professioner understanding or a solution. Therefore it is beneficial and more productive to focus on our intentional relation to the environment, which also is forward-oriented. Here the statement could be as follows: I will do this in order to reach that. As described earlier, this “in order to” is based in our pre-reflective and embodied intentional directedness on the one hand and/or on an investigation of affordances in the environment on the other. Two strategies – which can easily merge with each other – are valuable to strengthen the intentional orientation of the individual towards specific environmental conditions: • Becoming aware of the embodied intentional dialogue Our embodied intentional relationship to a specific environment and task is normally pre-reflective and based on implicit knowledge. But, in situations where we intend to improve a skill or technique, it seems to be beneficial to “intensify” this dialogue. This process can be initiated by being aware of what actually happens in the situation – without being judgemental. This procedure has similarities with attention training which has been described further above. Now we could go a step further: We want not only to be attentive to what is happening – this would be the first step of the exercise, but, furthermore we want to gain a better understanding of how we can deepen our dialogue with the situation and thus improve our skill or technique. In this situation, it is beneficial to be supported by a coach or partner. Working with intentional orientation will be illustrated with an example from soccer: The skill we would like to improve is to control the ball when receiving it from another player. In the first part of this exercise the two partners shoot the ball back and forth. Their attention is inward without being judgemental, and by focusing on one question at a time: What am I doing with my free leg? How do I approach the ball with my whole body? How do I approach the ball with my playing leg? What do I do with my hands? What do I do with my upper body when receiving the ball? What do I do with my breathing? In the second part of the exercise, the task is to reflect on the experiences with the partner: What did I (my partner, respectively) become aware of in the different exercise? In which situation did I have full control of the ball? What did I do precisely in this situation? When I think about experts, what do they do in similar situation? What is the intention behind their way of doing? – The dialogue should integrate attentive experiences and relate these experiences to possible intentions by asking: What can I do when receiving the ball in order to…? Here it is always important to anticipate a future situation (e.g., being approached by an opponent just a second after receiving the ball). • Relating to affordances in the environment Affordances are possibilities in the environment which the individual sees and evaluates as “invitations” to act upon. Relating to affordances and acting on the basis of them is, for example, essential in training for cooperation in ball games. In normal ball games, the player is confronted with complex situations. To read this complexity, e.g., delivering the ball through a defence row of opponents is based on relating to specific affordances in the situation and on acting according to these affordances. A coach can support the players’ ability to relate to affordance by starting out with simple and less complex game situation in the beginning of the training and later on by continuing to arrange more complex situations when the players are ready to act on affordances in more complex situations. For this training to be of value, it is important to have a dialogue with the players on how they see and understand the situation, and in which way they intend to act upon it. In that sense, players’ actions are grounded on intentions which build on a clear and action-oriented understanding of the situation. Forming and developing narratives Many working and learning situations tie together a bodily involvement of the individual with a community orientation, like, for example, in craft, physiotherapy, nursing, theatre, surgery, and sports. Situated action in these areas can be understood as a community of (embodied) practice, which – as Wenger (1998) describes – is based on joint enterprise, mutual engagement and a shared repertoire. To shape and improve the community of practice means building up common narratives on the basis of www.cvustork.dk/agora/ 19
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accoustic images.” 25 Paul Scheel
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