2020 Volume 27 Issue 4 Pages 443-460
In athletic skill learning, an athlete, i.e. a learner, should be able to keep questioning the relation between a given ideal form and his or her own body. He or she questions that relation through listening to what the own body feels and raising significant issues as an athlete. We argue that the learner may want to derive questions even through various considerations in the daily life. This way, the learner is able to truly realize what that given form means. The first author, an athlete specializing in decathlon, has been aiming to learn skills of running. The objective of this paper is to story-tell how he lives as an athlete, in a way in which skill learning in competition and in daily life are mixed together. In the beginning, he has attended to various variables and raised issues around the whole body. Further, in order to deliberately consider arm swing, he has devised a tool for motion visualization using LED. The light trail of the arms in running enabled him to deepen his body feeling as if touching his own body. During a long period of his injury, he has come to regard standing and walking in his daily life as the basic skill of employing the body (BSEB). Moreover, he has come to reinterpret objects in his daily life as tools that encourage him to question about BSEB. We can interpret his learning process as a typical example of the concept of going savage advocated by Lévi-Strauss. Then, we have analyzed how his running form has changed through these practices, comparing the sequences of photographs in several runs during these periods. This type of study, an inventory of story-telling of the detailed thoughts and activities in the real life of a learner of embodied skill,is highly significant in cognitive science.
