Designing Affordances for Health-Enhancing Physical Activity and Exercise in Sedentary Individuals
Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that offer opportunities for physical activity (PA), exercise and play in sedentary individuals. They imply how exercise scientists, health professionals, planners, designers, engineers and psychologists can collaborate in co-designing environments and playscapes that facilitate PA and exercise behaviours in different population subgroups. Here, we discuss how concepts in ecological dynamics emphasise the person-environment scale of analysis, indicating how PA environments might be (re)designed into qualitative regions of functional significance (affordances) that invite health-enhancing behaviours according …
Understanding Action and Adventure Sports Participation—An Ecological Dynamics Perspective
© 2017, The Author(s). Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms and definitions which has led to confusing discourse and contradictory research findings. Traditional narratives have typically considered participation exclusively as the pastime of young people with abnormal characteristics or personalities having unhealthy and pathological tendencies to take risks because of the need for thrill, excitement or an adrenaline ‘rush’. Conversely, recent research has linked even the most extreme forms of action and adventure sports to positive physical and psychological health and well-being outcomes. Here, we argue that traditional framewor…
Designing Environments to Enhance Physical and Psychological Benefits of Physical Activity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective.
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Designing environments to enhance physical and psychological benefits of physical activity : a multi-disciplinary perspective.
An Ecological Conceptualization of Extreme Sports
Currently, there are various definitions for extreme sports and researchers in the field have been unable to advance a consensus on what exactly constitutes an ‘extreme’ sport. Traditional theory-led explanations, such as edgeworks, sensation seeking and psychoanalysis, have led to inadequate conceptions. These frameworks have failed to capture the depth and nuances of experiences of individuals who refute the notions of risk-taking, adrenaline- and thrill-seeking or death-defiance. Instead, participants are reported to describe experiences as positive, deeply meaningful and life-enhancing. The constant evolution of emerging participation styles and philosophies, expressed within and across…
An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Understanding Human-Environment Interactions in the Adventure Sport Context – Implications for Research and Practice
The last few decades have witnessed a surge of interest in adventure sports, and an emerging research focus on these activities. However, recent conceptual analyses and scientific reviews have highlighted a major, fundamental question that remains unresolved: what constitutes an adventure sport (and are they ‘sports’ at all)? Despite several proposals for definitions, the field still seems to lack a shared conceptualization. This deficit may be a serious limitation for research and practice, restricting the development of a more nuanced theoretical explanation of participation and prac-tical implications within and across adventure sports. In this article we address anot…
An ecological dynamics framework for the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills in climbing
Uncertainty in extreme sports performance environments, like rock and ice climbing, provides considerable psycho-emotional and physiological demands which challenge the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. An ecological dynamics theoretical framework adopts concepts and tools of nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology to investigate and model the relationships that emerge in extreme sports between athletes and their performance environments. In this relation, the interactions of athletes with key objects, surfaces, events and significant others during a sport like climbing emerge from interdependent personal, task and environmental constraints on performance. Performance behaviours …
Preservice teachers implementing a nonlinear physical education pedagogy
Background\ud In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the evolution of physical education teaching practice from a traditional teacher-centred approach to a student-centred approach. Consequently, research has focused on questions about the changing conceptions of the teaching and learning process, that is, from how ‘we’ teach to how ‘they’ learn. A contemporary theoretical model of the teaching and learning process could underpin learning design and delivery adopted in physical education. The constraints-led approach (CLA) is a viable alternative as its practice design and delivery is grounded in the contemporary motor learning theory of ecological dynamics within a nonlin…
Overcoming acculturation: physical education recruits' experiences of an alternative pedagogical approach to games teaching
Background: Physical education teacher education (PETE) programmes have been identified as a critical platform to encourage the exploration of alternative teaching approaches by pre-service teachers. However, the socio-cultural constraint of acculturation or past physical education and sporting experiences results in the maintenance of the status quo of a teacher-driven, reproductive paradigm. Previous studies have reported successfully overcoming the powerful influence of acculturation, resulting in a change in PETE students' custodial teaching beliefs and receptiveness to alternative teaching approaches. However, to date, limited information has been reported about how PETE students' accu…