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Back in the “old days” (I can already see people rolling their eyes and wondering if they should continue reading) there was limited sources of information around sport science that were publicly available. I think I can remember less than 15 sport science related journals that we use to regularly go to look at suitable sources of information. There also really wasn’t any internet or social media and email was something that we did as part of an IT module rather than use routinely. What did this mean? Well, it meant in “those days” that the information available wasn’t always a direct fit for what you wanted. As frustrating as this was for us at the time it had a clear long-term benefit. This benefit came from the clear requirement for you to have to adapt the content in some way for your specific purpose. For example, you may have had to extrapolate the ideas that you had read about to the specific problem that you were trying to solve. I guess it wasn’t the need to adapt the content that was really the benefit. The benefit really came from the critical thinking skills that were needed to arrive support this process of interpretation and application.
The information available today around sport science is now infinitely greater. This seems to mean that there is almost a ready-made answer available for every challenge that we face. Clearly this availability of information has huge benefits for us all. There may also be a negative attached though. This may be the impact that such content has on the development of critical thinking skills. When I chat to students and developing practitioners it seems that there is often a reliance on “received wisdom” from sources of information that they see as important. This in itself is not bad I guess though when this comes at the expense of their own independent thought it becomes problematic. While there are probably a multitude of factors that may lead individuals to adopt this behaviour it seems that we have to think about the learning environments we create for the next generation of practitioners. It doesn’t always feel to me that the modern development frameworks that are in operation do a lot to encourage individuals to have their own ideas. We are often much more focussed on ensuring that people have an understanding of the things that we tell them in the way that we tell them about them. I am not sure that this encourages time spent in critical appraisal, analysis and synthesis and as a result maybe doesn’t permit new ideas about old concepts to be developed. Of course this type of approach won’t be without its failures as it is inevitable that some ideas develop through these processes will be rubbish. This “failure” though seems fundamental to deep learning to me though as it provides a potentially vital template for a future self to problem solve in a number of ways. It’s this type of thinking that continues to drive our approach to education here at the Graduate School of Sport and Professional Practice as we try and develop more meaningful educational experiences for us all to learn from.
B.Drust@bham.ac.uk