Conference:
ECER 2008
Format:
Paper
Session Information
PRE_F2, Preconference; Paper Session F2
Paper Session
Time:
2008-09-09
08:30-10:00
Room:
C E33
Chair:
Jonas Emanuelsson
Discussant:
to see how different components and variables interplay and form a whole The aim is to understand a bounded context in depth
Contribution
In high-level athletics and notably in throwing sports (shotput, discus, javelin and hammer)., the relationship “ trainer / trained”, distinguished by the alternation of a large number of throws and technical instructions, is often considered as relevant to exercising acquired skills. However, the heavy saturation of instructions in the training sessions leads us to confer a didactic status in the majority of training situations studied.
This paper aims at showing that typical ways of teaching and learning in athletic throws can be revealed by a comparative didactic approach.
The technical points, which characterise the interventions, are essentially concentrated on a part of the the body at a given moment in the course of the movement. The trainer can repeat the same command many times before suddenly changing to something else. This is typical of high level sports training. The athlete’s movement also changes suddenly, often when his trainer does not expect it. Some periods are characterised by typical patterns, more or less effective than others.
We support our didactic comparative approach on the comparison of the temporal distribution of motor variations and technical points. We interpret these points in turn by studying the medium. Chevallard (1992) considers the medium as the sum of what is possible and necessary, of resources and constraints on action. The medium only makes sense in the sight of mutual expectations, according to the contract and recalling the dyad (Brousseau and Centeno, 1991). Indeed the allusive side of the interactions comes back to personalised signs, gathered over the years. To understand the technical words of the trainer as supplying a medium for the athlete’s action it is necessary to take account of the development of :
- successive instances “instructions/technical movements of the athlete” ;
- the way in which the instructions are interpreted (development of the contract) and giving way to motor changes.
Method
That is why we used interviews to complete the analysis of training sessions filmed, including simple and crossed auto-confrontation (Clot, 1999) interviews for the four dyads we investigated. The necessary “still frame” of the technical movement – in a context of transcription – led us to develop a praxeology based on the identification of the typical patterns et motor changes of each athlete, associating the level of performance reached.
For each technical point (trainer’s instructions), among several analyzers, we distinguished the “locus” of the action (of its object or source) along the kinetic range – from the feet to the head – : segment, articulation (….), at the beginning, in the middle, end of the range or on all the range.
Expected Outcomes
Trainers insist more and more on the beginning of the movement and on the action of the lower limbs. The aeras of the athlete’s body involved in the beginning of the movement tend to correspond to those referred in trainer’s last instructions. It thus appears that the didactic influence of the factor “position of the indicated part of the body” prevails upon that of the factor “the timing of the action of the part of the body” (as indicated by the trainer). Indeed, at the beginning of the cycle, trainers come back more to the action from the upper body in the final phase and the more they tend to insist on this action, the more the “contribution” of the upper body is important at the level of the initial movement of the athlete (the run up). Then we have phenomena that we have called “didactic disagreements” and “driving contagion” : the athlete tends to modify the action of the part of the body indicated by the instruction (on the lines of the trainer’s expectations or not) ; this modification is accompanied by an integration of this entity to a movement placed chronologically “upstream” of that which the trainer would wish to see as the place of integration of this modification (for the athlete, the final phase of this movement “impairs” the start of the action, situated upstream).
At the end of several sessions, the athlete more often manages to produce a movement meeting expectations, more often turned towards using the lower limbs at the time of starting the movement and on the need for keeping the upper body behind. An overall gain in performance is noticed.
References
Brousseau, G., Centeno, J. 1991. Rôle de la mémoire didactique de l’enseignant. Recherches en didactique des mathématiques 11/2.3, 167-210. Grenoble : La Pensée Sauvage. Chevallard, Y. 1992. Concepts fondamentaux de la didactique : perspectives apportées par une approche anthropologique. Recherches en didactique des mathématiques 12/1, 73-111. Grenoble : La Pensée Sauvage. Clot, Y. 1999. La fonction psychologique du travail. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
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