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Open Access 01-12-2021 | Current Opinion

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

Authors: Carl T. Woods, James Rudd, Rob Gray, Keith Davids

Published in: Sports Medicine - Open | Issue 1/2021

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.

Discussed in detail later, it is important that we briefly align our interpretation of ‘attention’. Following Gibsonian ideas, we view being ‘attentive’ as being attuned to information within one’s environment. Thus, the more attentive one becomes, the more attuned their perceptual system at ‘picking up’ subtle features of the environment of use to directly regulate action.

It is worth briefly expanding on the notion of enskilment here. It is a phrase used by Ingold [1] to argue that learning is inseparable from doing in place, in which people learn to become more attentive to various things within an environment they inhabit with others.

We wish to offer some brief context to this quote for readers less familiar with Ingold’s [1] text. This quote was used by Ingold to contrast with that of enculturation to argue that learning does not “entail an internalisation of collective representations or, in a word, enculturation” (page 416, emphasis in original). To Ingold, as indeed to us the authors of this current work, learning and skill emerge as people practically engage in activities with others, in place, progressively attending to things as they are, where they exist.

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Title: Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport
Authors: Carl T. Woods
James Rudd
Rob Gray
Keith Davids
Publication date: 01-12-2021
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Published in: Sports Medicine - Open / Issue 1/2021
Print ISSN: 2199-1170
Electronic ISSN: 2198-9761
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-021-00326-6

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

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