Towards the Teaching of Motor Skills as a System of Growing Complexity

The teaching of motor skills has been strongly influenced by the conception of motor learning process teachers and coaches adopt. Current theories of motor learning are basically concerned with the stabilization of performance, that is, with a process seeking for functional stabilization by means of negative feedback. These theories do not account for the open system nature of human beings. Open systems by exchanging mater, energy, and information with the environment are able to break down the achieved stability and seek growing complexity. Thus, an alternative model of motor learning is proposed, which considers motor skill acquisition as a cyclic and continuous process of instability and stability. In this model, motor learning takes place through two hierarchical processes: stabilization and adaptation. The first refers to the functional stabilization, that is, pattern formation by the spatiotemporal organization of the action. This is the current emphasis in the teaching of motor skills. The second refers to the reorganization of the acquired patterns in response to the perturbation (new task demands or goals), that is, adaptation. In this process the basic question is what kind of pattern or structure should be formed to account for the perturbation or what type of competence is required from the motor system to perturbation become an agent of change towards complexity? The motor skill cannot be represented as a fixed pattern but as a pattern that reorganizes itself in the context of new learning process. In other words, it has some degree of stability but can reconstruct itself when destabilized by perturbation. From this perspective, factors related to disorder as uncertainty, variability, error, and diversity should be focused as a means to promote adaptation. In the educational context how to teach motor skills with the adaptive process in mind is a big challenge. That is the question addressed in this chapter.