UNESCO in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development establishes respect for the environment and sustainability education as key elements for the challenges of society in the coming years. In the educational context, physical education can have a vital role in sustainability education, through Traditional Sporting Games (TSG). The aim of this research was to study from an ethnomotor perspective the different characteristics of two different groups of TSG (with and without objects) in the Canary Islands, Spain. The corpus of this investigation was made up of 513 TSG, identified by two analysis techniques and collected in a database. The categories corresponding to the variables of the internal logic of the game were the type of motor interaction, related to space, relationships with time (competition), and relationships with objects. The study also examined the variables of external logic or sociocultural conditions such as the protagonists, playing areas, and game moments. The data analysis was carried out using descriptive and inferential statistics: cross-tables, effect sizes, classification trees (CHAID), and the identification of frequency areas. Of the total number of playful activities identified (n = 664), most were physical activities (n = 513/664; 77.26%) (non-physical activities: n = 151/664; 22.74%). These activities were Quasi-games without rules (n = 87) and TSG (n = 426) as well as activities with Objects (n = 299) and without material (n = 214). This research confirms that the TSG in the Canary Islands is a mirror of traditional culture and, from a pedagogical approach, shows great potential for material and social sustainability.
The aim of this present study is to investigate the influence of three learning contexts on the development of motor creativity of young footballers (8–9 years old). In team sport, creativity is a fundamental issue because it allows players to adapt in an environment of high social uncertainty. To carry out this work, we suggest a method for assessing motor creativity into ecological situations based on the analysis of praxical communications. Creativity originates from an interaction between divergence and convergence. In our case, the number of communications (fluidity) and the diversity of updated communications (flexibility) are our divergence indicators. Convergence, understood as the ability to make good decisions, is assessed by two expert judges (R > 0.90). Sixty boys’ football players (M = 8.67; SD = 0.3) coming from three football clubs participated in this research. The study lasted 2 years. Each year, a team of 10 players from each club participated in the research twice a week for 32 weeks (8 months), these groups attended different training sessions: (a) the control group (n = 20) followed a classical learning; (b) the decoding group (n = 20) attended training focused on learning the praxemes of football; (c) the traditional sporting games group (n = 20) followed a training session that was jointly focused on praxemes and the practice of traditional sporting games. The motor creativity of players and groups was assessed both at the beginning and at the end of the year during football matches. Compared to the control group, in the post-test, the group with the highest fluidity is the decoding group (p < 0.001) and the one with the highest fluidity is the traditional sporting games group. The latter group is also the one with the best convergence (p < 0.001). The results showed that traditional games can help develop players’ creative abilities. This research invites us to investigate the complementarity between the different offered training.
Through games a motivating learning climate is provided, generating mainly positive emotions among the students by the very nature of the game. However, while the early stages are the most important for emotional well-being development, research about scientific knowledge of emotional physical education in children is still scarce. The aims of this study were to analyze the intensity of emotions (positive or negative) produced when players took part in games of different social structure, with or without competition (winner or loser), with or without sport experience and to examine the explanations given by the participants for these emotional experiences. Participants (N = 152) were recruited from two Spanish elementary school. We applied Student’s t-test and one-factor ANOVA. Students’ subjective comments were classified through content analysis in macro-categories and we used the Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID, implemented in SPSSTM Answer Tree® 13.0). The application of a mixed-methods approach identified statistically significant differences in four variables: (a) the type of emotion, (b) motor domain, (c) type of outcome (winning, losing, and non-competitive), and (d) sport experience. The intensity of positive emotions was higher (M = 3.71, SD = 0.893) than negative emotions (M = 1.18, SD = 0.253, p < 0.001). Furthermore, negative emotions were felt with different intensities (F3 = 3.82, p = 0.011, ES = 0.071), depending on the motor action domain. Comments referring to negative emotions were more frequent in individual games. Winning was associated significantly (p < 0.05) with the highest intensity ratings of positive emotions, whereas losing produced the highest values for negative emotions. The intensity ratings for positive or negative emotions not were different between non-competitive games and competitive games. The sport experience relativizes the mean of emotional intensity, both positive and negative. The present study brings the value of considering games as a key role to promote a physical education addressed to the education of social-emotional well-being in schoolchildren, as the basis of academic training. Furthermore, the results could benefit teachers as well as coaches have scientific input to organize teaching content, generating the desired motor behaviors together with positive experiences.
The so-called traditional motor games are group situations that function like small-scale societies, full of emotionally rich vicissitudes and proper objectives, alliances, and antagonisms. Traditional games have certainly been the object of many dispersed, really interesting studies, but no general conception of them, based on a scientifically supported methodological approach, has been developed so far. How do these games work? Does their development depend on sheer chance? Does it respond to any underlying structures? Is this development anyhow related to the socio-emotional dynamics of the group of players? As a whole, do these games, so different from each other, have any common characteristics that generate similar effects on the personality of the players? In the end, is what we know about a given game comparable and generalisable to any other one?
Frontiers in Endocrinology
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