In sports, as in other areas of Higher Education, drawing activities are rarely seen as a teaching and research method capable of producing knowledge, sustaining arguments or addressing theoretical content. And yet, visualization methods such as time-motion analysis, motion capture or performance analysis rely on visual-spatial content that we apprehend as a drawing skill: diagrams of movement, free-body diagrams, visual models, and graphic notation. The same cognitive processes of selecting, organizing and integrating information regarding the movement in sports are the basis of drawing activities (Wu & Rae, 2015, p. 5).

Since 2021, we have been studying the use of drawing activities within sports training and research in the Faculty of Sports of the University of Porto (FADEUP) in Portugal and the Porto Biomechanics Laboratory (LABIOMEP). We intend to contribute to the visibility of drawing as a skill in sports education and to develop a framework to promote research and implementation of drawing activities in dynamic sports situations.

Can the visual and performative properties of drawing activities produce a new knowledge of the physical and collective body in sports? What kind of perceptions about the game and human movement in sport are constituted in the drawing activity that could not be constituted in any other way?

Using an a/r/tographic approach to the learning processes in sports, our presentation proposes a reflection on the intersection of two territories: sports sciences and drawing-based practices. We intend to discuss distinct ways of representing the body in motion as weight, flow, space and time. Beyond drawing as an observational and visualization process, recent literature has shown that drawing in sports also opens up a space for introspection in which we can understand the limits of our bodies and the emotional and physical contours that we create between ourselves and the world (Namkung, 2016; Gravestock, 2010).

Despite their differences, there are significant parallels between sports performance and drawing-based performance practices that can benefit from a common approach to the different layers of the physical body in motion. As Bernard Suit argued in his provocative statement, sport is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" involving physical activity with a comprehensive level of stability. Sport is also a field where social norms and values are embodied, and the ideologies that permeate our culture materialize as effects in the representation of athletes' bodies (Mahon, MacDonald & Owton, 2017). By intertwining different modes of perception, such as vision or touch, body movement and introspection (Kantrowitz, 2012, p. 4), drawing can be a means of accessing the awareness that athletes, coaches and scientists have of the states and emotions of the body in sport. These states are rarely represented only by verbal language or statistical data (Theron et al., 2011, p. 19).

This background implies advocating for an expanded sense of observation and motion in sports, with an impact on the assessment of movement in qualitative/formal sports, the development of reflective practices in exercise and sports for social change.

Our research combines ethnographic research with an a/r/tography approach to sports' observational practices and performance analysis. We reviewed previous research that relates sport, visual representation, notation and drawing. In this review, we identify three major concerns regarding drawing in sports: data visualization and creation of interpretive models, qualitative assessment of movement in qualitative/formal sports, self-knowledge and social change. We have privileged articles from the sports sciences focused on drawing activities that involve performance analysts, scientists, coaches and students. We have also included studies in drawing research publications, which addressed sports performance, intertwining natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This epistemological triangle is a critical lens to identify the angles from which the body's physical movements become expressions of the field we call sport (Jönsson, 2019). A second moment of this study focused on the representations accompanying publications in sport sciences, particularly in biomechanics and notational analysis. We intend to find out if drawing, in its various modalities, is used as evidence and demonstration of research results and what relationships it establishes with text and other visual forms of representation. In the third moment, we relate this review with the drawing activities observed between 2021 and 2022 at the Porto Biomechanics Laboratory (LABIOMEP) and the Faculty of Sports of the University of Porto (FADEUP). These activities stem from pedagogical contexts associated with different modalities. They also refer to the investigation and biomechanical analysis of hyper-performance situations – focused on improving the body's response in high competition – and hypo-performance, which results from injuries or conditioned systems. Different forms of mediation are therefore involved: the digital, the performative and the hand-made drawing. To help synthesize these different activities, we applied the model proposed by Ainsworth and Scheiter (2021, p. 61) to distinguish the different forms of cognitive engagement through drawing: the interactive, constructive, active and passive modes (ICAP). Along the research process, we have undergone an interdisciplinary practice blending motion capture in a biomechanics laboratory, performance in a natural environment and drawing in the studio. Informed by my training as an artist, my work as a drawing teacher and my research on drawings for sport, an exploratory experiment was staged as a performance in response to the provocative statement of Bernard Suit: the game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles". Combining different visualization and notational processes, we have explored aesthetic approaches as possibilities to figure movement analysis.

Developing a shared framework between sports visualization procedures and drawing-based methodologies can enhance a wider understanding of the moving body both in sports and in the arts. As a cognitive tool that facilities memory and thinking, drawing can allow sport students to assess their own performances and the performance of others. As the art historian David Rosand recalled, drawing is, in its essence, the projection of a performing body, and especially when viewing a representation of a human figure, we are inevitably reminded of that.

Ainsworth, S. & Scheiter, K. (2021). Learning by Drawing Visual Representations: Potential, Purposes, and Practical Implications. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 30(1), pp. 61-67. Anderson, G. (2017). Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science. Bristol: Intellect. Bredekamp, H. & Dünkel, V. & Schneider, B. (2015). The Image - A Cultural Technology: A Research Program for a Critical Analysis of Images. In The Technical Image - A History of Stlyles in Scientific Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drucker, J. (2020). Visualization and Interpretation – Humanistic Approaches to Display. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gravestock, H. (2010). Embodying Understanding: drawing as research in sport and exercise. Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, 2(2), pp. 196-208. Jönsson, K. (2019). Situated Knowledge, sports and the sport science question. Sport in Society. 22(9), pp. 1528-1537. Kantrowitz, A. (2012). The Man behind the Curtain: What Cognitive Science Reveals about Drawing. The Journal of Aesthetic Education. Vol. 46(1), pp. 1-14. McMahon, J. & MacDonald, A. & Owton, H. (2017) A/r/tographic inquiry in sport and exercise research: a pilot study examining methodology versatility, feasibility and participatory opportunities. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. 9(4), pp. 403-417. Namkung, M. (2016). Drawing for Sport. Drawing: Research, Theory and Pactice, 1(2). Quillin, L. & Thomas, S. (2015). Drawing-to-Learn – A Framework for Using Drawings to Promote Model-Based Reasoning in Biology. CBE–Life Sciences Education. 14(1), pp. 1-16. Rosand, D. (2002). Drawing Acts – Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmons III, Seymour (2021). The Value of Drawing Instruction in the Visual Arts and Across Curricula – Historical and Philosophical Arguments for Drawing in the Digital Age. New Yor: Routledge. Theron, L.; Mitchell, C.; Smith, A.; Stuart, J. (Eds.) (2011). Picturing Research ‒ Drawing as Visual Methodology. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Tversky, B. (1999) What does drawing reveal about thinking? In Gero, J.S. & Tversky, B. (Eds.). Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design. Sydney: Key Centre for Design Computing and Cognition pp. 93-101. Wu, S. & Rau, M. (2019). How Students Learn Content in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Through Drawing Activities. Educational Psychology Review, 31(1), pp. 87–120. Parry, J. (1989). Sport Art and the Aesthetic. Sport Science Review. 12. 15-20. Forde, S. (2022) Drawing your way into ethnographic research: comics and drawing as arts-based methodology. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. 14:4, pp. 648-667.