#183 Teaching and learning in enskilment

In this episode of the Progressão podcast, we continue our exploration of enskilment and turn our focus toward what this perspective means for teaching and learning.

In the previous episode, we introduced enskilment as a way of understanding how skills develop through active engagement with the environment. Drawing from the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold and the ecological psychology of James Gibson, enskilment invites us to see skill not as something stored inside the individual, but as something that grows in the relationship between the person and the world.

Now we ask a practical question: what does this mean for coaching and teaching?

If skill develops through participation in meaningful environments, then the role of the coach is not simply to transfer knowledge or correct movements. Instead, teaching becomes a process of guiding attention, shaping learning environments, and helping players become more sensitive to the information that matters in the game.

In this episode we discuss how teaching and learning can be supported through exploration and experience, and how coaches can “walk along with” players in the process of becoming skilful.

We also reflect on the role of mistakes, the balance between freedom and guidance in coaching, and how richer learning environments — including interactions across age groups and experiences — may support deeper development in football.

This episode continues our series on becoming skilful, where we explore skill as a holistic human–environment phenomenon.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Rukes Stella is a portugalist where Janne Stalameli and Jussepa Kastabolainen to talk about the themes of our book Rukres Stanala: How we have misunderstood football. We explored the beautiful game, complex relationships between humans and their environment and the nature of skill in football. Welkom to debate.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Last week, and related to skill learning in football and more broadly in human life, we introduced the concept of enskillment. Enskillment is the proces through which a person becomes skillful by engaging with their environment. So, rather than acquiring skill as knowledge storät in the mind, enskillment describes how skill grows through practice attention and participation in a living world of people, materials and situations. If you have not listened to that episode yet, it is worth starting there because today we continue from that foundation.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

In this episode we continue with the end skillment and we move towards themes of learning and teaching. A traditional view of teaching is often something like this: the coach or teacher explains what should be done, gives the learner the correct information and then assumes that once this information is in the learner's head, the learner will be able to perform the action and become more skillful.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Yes, Janny, for example, classical example in football a coach might explain the inside foot pass like this: open the foot, place the supporting foot next to the ball, swing the leg through, and so on. And in this way of thinking, teaching becomes a process of transferring knowledge from coach to player. The coach gives the information, the player stores it, and then skill appears through correct execution.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

But in enskillment, teaching and learning are understood differently. From this perspective, the beginner becomes more skillful by learning to open and refine their attention toward features of the world around them and by learning to place themselves in relation to those features.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

So if we take the example of a master and apprentice, the apprentice is placed in a practical situation and encouraged to attend to things such as what does this feel like? What does this look like? What does this sound like? The learner is helped to direct attention toward the aspects of the environment that matter for skillful action. And in this way the learner gradually learns to see, hear and feel in ways that are vital for any skilled performer.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

This connects directly to James Gibson's idea that learning is the education of attention. In other words, learning is about guiding attention, helping a person become more sensitive to the information that matters. We can also approach teaching and learning through the roots of the words themselves. Tim Ingold, who we talked about already in the earlier episode, points out that the root of the word education can be traced to the Latin ex ducere, which means to lead out. Teaching then can be understood as leading someone out into the world.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

And Ingold also reflects on the word attention, which can be linked to ad tendere, to stretch or reach towards something. So the learner is led outward into the world and in that process begins to reach toward it, to attend it and to become more sensitive to the information it contains.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

And in that process, the teacher can help the learner to stretch outward and become attuned. So when we are in the world, in a specific world, for example, trying to learn football, we try things, we search, we explore, we investigate, and through that process we gradually become more sensitive to the important things. That is how enskillment happens.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

It is similar in some ways to learning in a hunter or gatherer world. It happens inside the world itself and it is inseparable from doing and from place. So what is learned is not explicit knowledge stored in memory and transmitted from teacher to learner. Rather, it's gradually deepening, embodied attentiveness that is closely tied to the environment. So a person learns to become sensitive to a world, for example the football world.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

If we bring this into football practice and focus for a moment on training design, then the important question is not simply what exercise we do, but also how the coach acts within that exercise. And to be clear, this does not mean that players are just left completely free to do anything. That's not the point that it's kind of everything is free. But the point is that the whole situation matters. What kind of practices we design, how the coach acts during them, and also in a wider sense, what possibilities players have to try different things and gain different kinds of football experiences.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

And this brings us to an important question for coaches and teachers: what is the best way to guide a learner on the way towards something new? And the answer depends on how we understand human behavior and learning. Traditionally, when the learner is treated as an isolated individual, the questions become like this: What can I change inside the learner? Or how can I help the learner bring out the potential in a performance situation? But in an ecological approach where behavior and learning emerge in the learner environment system, the questions become different. How can I build an environment that supports learning? Or how can I help the learner come into a more skillful relation with the environment?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

There is also an important point here about mistakes. In older approaches, mistakes were often something to be avoided, and the goal was to move as quickly as possible toward the correct execution and the perfect execution, and there was only one. But when we speak about searching, exploring and experiencing, then mistakes become an important and valuable part of the process. In ecological dynamics, mistakes are not feared in that similar way. Of course, we want to help the learner find effective solutions in game situations, but the mistake itself is not dangerous. Often it is part of the learner beginning to search in a new way.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Then comes another important coaching question. How strongly should we guide players towards something? Should coaching always be on the freer side, or can it also at the times be quite strict and restrictive? So, this is probably something that even people working in ecological dynamics would debate. Our view is that the coach has access to a fairly broad range of methods. Sometimes the situation can be more open with less direct feedback and more freedom for the players to explore. But sometimes it can also be more constraints with clearer guidance and tighter limits. So we think all of these can have a place in coaching, right, Jani?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Yeah, exactly. The purpose should be to help players move towards something meaningful and important, not simply to make them repeat a movement perfectly over and over again. There may be situations where a player or a group has developed a very strong tendency to do something that is not helpful. In that case, it can make sense to constrain that tendency so that they do not keep returning to the same unhelpful behavior but begin to search for something else that might help them function better. Of course, the key is the balance.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

And that balance may be in a different place for every player in every group. That too is part of the art of coaching: finding the best means for that particular situation and helping the player or team move forward. And this brings us to another idea connected to skillment, learning and teaching. Walking along with. Many thinkers from different fields have spoken about this one form or another. Ingold has written about going along together, and the philosopher Jan Marschelein has also reflected on related ideas.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

In football, this could mean metaphorically that the coach walks together with the players. So teaching and coaching become a form of moving with players through the world where all of us are, in a sense, on the path of end skillment. The coach helps players on that path to notice certain forms of information. Again, structured specific information that can help them become more skillful, and the coach can work with players in many different ways. Sometimes the coach may stay more on the edge, observing from the outside in exercises for example, and other times the coach may step inside the activity and be more directly involved.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Traditionally, the coach has often been placed outside the team or outside the exercise. The coach plans the practice, delivers it and observes it from the outside as the one who implements the plan. But when we sift the perspective, this can also lead to different methods. So the planning becomes more agile, the coach moves with the process, says what kinda challenges and successes emerge and adjusts the plan accordingly, not chaotically but responsively.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

There is a history of a coach who has coached on both football and ice hockey in Finland. He described how he had previously positioned himself more outside the training area, where he could observe the ejercile more objectively and see the so called bigger picture. Mutta then moment he began to experiment with something different. In football he stepped inside the practices, either playing or guiding from within the activity. In ice hockey he even entered the drills in full equipment, again either playing or coaching from inside. But he also felt that he came much closer to the players' world. He experienced the practices and the players' actions differently than before. The sessions became livelier both for him and for the whole practice process. In that sense he was walking with the players inside the activity.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

This also raises another question. What about a situation where a coach enters a normal game in training, plays in a particular position and asks a player in that position to follow closely what the coach does. Could that have value? We think it certainly could. Imagine for example an experienced former top center back working as a youth coach and playing together with a young center back during training. The younger player might learn a huge amount just from seeing in real time how the coach positions themselves in relation to the ball, how they orient toward opponents, how they organize the line, how they communicate, how they move and so on.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

That kind of shared activity can be super rich. And from there we can widen the thought even further. Could clubs create more opportunities for players of different ages and genders to train together? Could younger players learn from older players in direct shared practice? Could boys learn from girls and vice versa.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

And this is not only about younger players learning from older players. Older players can also learn from the younger ones. The learning goes both ways. Everyone learns because everyone has been exposed to somewhat different words and different forms of information. So perhaps one conclusion here is that we have not yet really explored the full possibilities of what enskillment could mean in practice. So there is still a lot to experiment with. We could challenge the clubs, the associations as well to try more.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Let different age groups train together more often, let girls and boys train together more, create richer and more varied learning environments. We might then begin to see very interesting kinds of learning and development emerge. And that is enough for today.