|
Abstract
|
When Larry Bruya and I wrote Aquatic Readiness: Developing Water Com- petence in Young Children (1995), we coined two terms: aquatic readiness and water competence. I continue to be surprised and humbled at the longevity and impact of these two terms on the field of aquatics over the past 20 years. In fact, the origins of these terms reflect several important philosophical perspectives that underpin their use and importance. Paradoxically, neither Larry nor I recognized the full potential of either term at the time of their origin.
Aquatic Readiness
The concept of readiness can be traced back at least to Edward Lee Thorndike, the father of educational psychology and the connectionist movement in behavioral psychology. Readiness was one of Thorndike's laws of behavioral learning. He intended it to explain why and how some behaviors can be learned more efficiently and readily at certain points in time than at others (i.e., when stimulus-response bonds for any behavior by a learner have a sufficient degree of probability) (Thorn- dike, 1932).
Interestingly, decades later, Jerome Bruner, a noted cognitive psychologist, also proposed the critical importance of readiness as part of his constructivist theories of learning and education (Bruner, 1966). Bruner proposed several cognitive learning-teaching principles that seem to me to have application also to the psychomotor domain, including aquatics. For example, he proposed that learners must experience tasks and situations that increase the likelihood that the learner will be motivated and capable (i.e., ready) to learn. Further, Bruner felt that the instructional curriculum ought to be designed so that students could learn in the easiest manner possible. The specific instructional model has been called the Bruner Spiral Organization for Learning. Finally, Bruner insisted that learning-teaching experiences should increase the probability that students will be able to achieve beyond the immediate information or skills learned. This suggests that students should be able to transfer their current state of learning to other contexts and at higher levels of understanding. I return to these key progressive concepts identified by Bruner later in this paper ...
Language: en |