The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
Our mission is to bring evidence-based research, theory, and practice to life in an engaging, enjoyable, and practical manner. We aim to foster a vibrant community where knowledge meets application in the realms of adventure, lifestyle, and equestrian sports.
Join us as we delve into spontaneous and insightful conversations with practitioners and researchers across the fields of learning, skill acquisition, movement sciences, ethics, and philosophy, particularly in relation to adventure and equestrian sports. Our focus is on sports that embrace fluidity and lack rigid boundaries or rules, inherently involving risks that cannot be completely eliminated. We believe that these sports present unique challenges and opportunities that differ from those found in many traditional sports. However, we aspire for our podcasts to resonate with coaches and participants across a diverse spectrum of sports and activities.
Become part of our passionate community, nurture your skills, forge connections, uphold ethical standards, and revolutionise your approach to acquiring movement skills.
The River Tiger Podcast from Dynamics Coaching
Part 2. Exploring Learning Theories with David Farrokh: An ecological (systems) approach in practice.
In this second part of me conversation with David Farrouk we explore the intricate relationship between ecological psychology, constraints, and the practical implications for coaching and learning. The discussion delves into the differences between behaviourism and ecological psychology and systems approaches, emphasising how the latter offers a more dynamic understanding of behaviour by considering wider time frames, nested events, broader environmental contexts and the fluidity of various interacting scales.
Key themes arise around the concept of constraints, highlighting how both broad laws of nature and local constraints influence behaviour. David points out that effective coaching requires an understanding of these interactions, enabling practitioners to manipulate constraints to promote desired outcomes.
The conversation address the nature of learning and its measurement, advocating for an integrated perspective where learning leads to measurable changes, reflecting a deeper understanding of environmental interactions.
The role of theories is examined as tools that help practitioners navigate their environments and facilitate learning. As theories evolve through practical application, they bring new insights into how constraints affect behaviour and performance.
Through a metaphor of building a dam in a stream, David illustrates how constraints shape dynamics in movement. This conversation invites listeners, particularly coaches and practitioners in sports and animal learning, to re-examine their understanding of learning and leans into a more ecological viewpoint that considers the fluidity of interaction between an organism and their environment in skill acquisition and performance.
This blog post provides an overview to support the main themes of the conversation https://dynamics-coaching.com/learning-and-pedagogy/learning-theories-behaviourism-and-ecological-psychology/
My guest on this episode: David Farrokh is a PhD candidate in the College of Health, Wellbeing and Life Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. His research adopts an ecological dynamics perspective to investigate multiscaled properties of flow experiences, context-sensitivity, and co-adaptation in sport.
X @bigpicsoccer
Further reading
Fultot et al What are nervous systems for
Polanyi Life's irreducible structure
Johnston & Turvey A sketch of an ecological metatheory for theories of learning