Abstract

In the first part of this presentation we connect Aristotle’s philosophy on character development with modern approaches in education and sport emphasizing a subjective definition of success and the pursuit of personal progress goals in sport and physical activity. In line with Aristotle, existing research implies that the pursuit of personal progress goals pursuit in sport facilitates the cultivation of sportspersonship and self-transcendence values, implying concern for the welfare and interests of others. On the other hand, the dominant philosophy in modern societies that rewards tangibly only normatively defined success, such as being better than others, directs individuals to pursue normative performance, such as outperforming others or achieving a high normative score. The latter approach is connected with aggressive and immoral behaviours in sport, education and work, and egocentric values such as power. Hence, sport education programs should emphasize excellence of any kind and its important constituent, personal growth, in order to promote values that can benefit society. In the second part of this presentation an education program emphasising progress across different levels of responsibility is described. It includes a toolkit emphasizing the values of respect, equity and inclusion, which are taught experientially, usually through participation in sport activities and then children reflect on their experiences. Future research should examine how educational programs can make strong a impact on children’s values within a dominant culture that emphasizes only excess and tangibly rewards only normative performance.

Introduction: Values in ancient and modern sport

Since antiquity, sport has been connected with values such as excellence, friendship and respect, which are also the modern Olympic values. In ancient Greece, the birthplace of Olympic Games, sport had a central role in youngsters’ education aiming at the cultivation of their character. The most famous schools of philosophy, the academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle had gymnasia and sport activities at the center of their facilities and curricula respectively. In gymnasia youth were taught to develop excellence of kind, i.e. “arête” (usually translated as virtue). The most elaborative description of “arête”/excellence of any kind/virtue is found in Aristotle’s philosophy, which, despite its 2400 years of age, in the last 60 years it is studied again with particular intensity across several disciplines including ethics (Anscombe, 1958), psychology (e.g., Schwartz & Sharpe, 2006) and biology (e.g., Lennox, 2001).

For Aristotle “excellence” was connected with personal and social progress and flourishing. For Aristotle, virtuous friendship, for example, is the friendship that facilitates excellence between individuals simultaneously. Today what remained from Aristotle’s approach is the focus on the progress of the person, as depicted in IOC’s (2012) definition of excellence:

In the Olympic ideal, this value (excellence) refers to giving one’s best, on the field of play or in life, without measuring oneself with others, but above all aiming at reaching one’s personal objectives with determination in the effort. It is not only about winning, but mainly about participating, making progress against personal goals, striving to be and to do our best in our daily lives and benefiting from the combination of a strong body, will and mind.

Contemporary approaches to flourishing and values

Modern scholars in the fields of psychology, sport and education differentiated the goal towards personal progress from the goal to overcome others. According to achievement goals theory (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Nicholls, 1984), in achievement settings like sport, individuals pursue two types of goals. When success is subjectively defined, achievement is equated with one’s personal progress individuals pursue mastery goals by trying to improve their athletic competence through high effort and to master the task. They find task-involvement intrinsically interesting and they feel satisfaction from progress and task mastery. When success is normatively defined and achievement is equated with higher performance than others or normative scores, individuals try to establish normatively defined perceptions of competence through pursuits to outperform others or normative criteria of evaluation. They feel satisfaction when they establish that their abilities and performance outcomes are higher or better than others.

Achievement goals vary across individuals – for example, athletes and physical activity participants are more or less predisposed to adopt mastery and performance goals (e.g., Duda & Nicholls, 1992). Substantial variation across situations also exists with regard to the emphasis placed on the pursuit of achievement goals. One can find sport teams and physical education classes which are described as more or less mastery and normative performance oriented (e.g. Papaioannou, 1994).

In line with Aristotle’s philosophy, extensive research over the last two decades has established that an emphasis on personal progress (mastery) goals but not normative performance goals is the optimal approach to promote adaptive results for the person and society (Duda, 2005; Papaioannou, et al., 2012; Roberts, Treasure & Conroy, 2007). Briefly, the pursuit of personal progress goals entails high effort and performance in sport, high intrinsic motivation to learn and perform, increased positive affect and decreased negative affect in sport and physical activity, positive thinking and adaptive cognitive processes including task focus, deep processing strategies and effective metacognitive (e.g., know how to learn) strategies. The adoption of personal progress goals in sport benefits athletes and exercise participants beyond sport, through increase in subjective well-being including satisfaction in life, vitality, high general self-esteem, increased positive affect and decreased negative affect in life. Several of the aforementioned positive outcomes do not emerge through the adoption of normative performance goals. Most crucially, individuals with low perceived competence are likely to adopt normative performance avoidance goals which results to negative affective, cognitive and performance outcomes, leading eventually to dropout from sport and lower levels of vigorous physical activity (e.g., Law, Elliot, & Murayama, 2012). This and other related research implies that an emphasis on normative performance approach goals excludes the less competent youth. However, inclusion rather than exclusion is likely to emerge when coaches and Physical Education (PE) teachers emphasize personal progress (Papaioannou, 1995).

With regard to societal outcomes, research has established that ethical behaviours in sport are more likely to emerge across athletes and teams espousing a predominant emphasis on mastery and personal progress goals than their peers and teams prioritizing normative performance goals (e.g. Sage & Kavussanu, 2007). This research has shown that the adoption of normative performance goals is associated with increased aggressive and immoral behaviors in sport and lower levels of sportspersonship (e.g. Van Yperen, Hamstra, & Van der Klauw, 2011). Within sport teams, while the adoption of personal progress goals facilitates peer support and collaboration, the adoption of normative performance goals leads to egocentric thinking, interpersonal conflict and the perception of others as opponents (e.g. Smith, Balaguer & Duda, 2006).

Modern research has established that while most people connect the term “values” with societal benefits, in fact some values are often egocentrically defined, like “achievement” and particularly “power” (Schwartz, 2012). Egocentric values emphasize pursuit of one’s own interests, normative success and dominance over others, such as a normative conception of achievement (i.e. doing better than others) and power (defined as social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources, e.g. “wealth”, “social power”, “authority” “preserving one’s public image”). At the opposite end of the egocentric-self-transcendence continuum are values indicating concern for the welfare and interests of others, like benevolence (e.g., “helpful”, “honest”, “forgiving”, “responsible”) and universalism (defined as understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature, e.g., “social justice”, “equality”, “a world at peace” etc.).

Recent research revealed that while a priority on mastery/progress goals approach is positively associated with benevolence and universalism values and negatively with power, a prioritization of normative performance goals pursuit has a strong positive association with power and normative achievement and negative links with benevolence and universalism values (Papaioannou et al., 2012).

The sum of the aforementioned findings are but one indication that Aristotle’s virtue ethics philosophy is the most likely to promote values that will benefit societies. Aristotle’s philosophy emphasises the progress and flourishing of individuals and the cultivation of youngster’s character through critical thinking within an autonomy-supportive environment until they develop practical wisdom. The latter will enable them to subjectively define excellence across various situations and select to pursue excellence too. High mastery-oriented athletes pursue personal growth, which is an important attribute of excellence as defined by Aristotle. On the other hand, when success is defined based on social norms, such as “achieving superiority” in order to acquire external goods such as “wealth” and “status”, individuals are likely to pursue goals which do not benefit societies but they can possibly harm others. Unfortunately, modern societies emphasise: 1) normative conceptions of success and competence by offering disproportionally more benefits to those who are better than others, without recognizing substantial progress of the weakest individuals; and 2) an egocentric conception of utility. This emphasis stems from deontologist and utilitarian philosophies that predominate particularly in the Western world. These philosophies have shaped modern cultures, which either covertly or cynically emphasize the priority of the individual good over the common good. On the contrary, Aristotle devoted his last major work, Politics, to establish that individuals can actually flourish within societies that help all individuals flourish and be happy. These societies consist of excellent citizens who primarily aim at the promotion of the common good.

Education, including sport education, plays a very important role in the creation of optimal societies like the ones described by Aristotle. For Aristotle, education aims to form excellent character that is predisposed to promote the common good, i.e. the welfare of all, which is a precondition for a stable happy society where everyone can flourish and be happy. Central to education should be an emphasis on students’ and athletes’ personal progress and self-determination, which create the substratum to implement effective teaching strategies aiming to cultivate the excellent character. Below follows an education program aiming at the cultivation of values such as respect and increased interest in the promotion of equity and inclusion. At the core of this program is youngsters’ progress through stages of different levels of responsibility following critical thinking and decisions made by youngsters.

A Toolkit to promote values

A Toolkit of teaching practices for the promotion of values like respect, equity and inclusion was prepared through an international project involving research institutions from different continents and major organizations (namely WADA, IOC, UNESCO, IPC, ICSPPE, IFPC and AIESEP). The involved research team (coordinator: University of Padua IT; partner universities: University of Augsburg – DE, University of Basel – CH, University of Queensland – AU, University of Hong Kong – HK, University of Limerick and University of Cork – IE, University of Londrina – BR, University of Lincoln – NZ) contributed in the development of a Toolkit for teachers aiming to support the delivery of the curricula across the globe, while promoting the overall value of fairness.

To design and implement a quality, character-nurturing resource through sport, significant state-of-the-art recommendations have informed the content of the Toolkit and materials have been prepared in light of the recently updated version of the International Charter for Physical Education and Sport (2015). In this document, it was highlighted that:

the provision of quality physical education, physical activity and sport is essential, to realize [students’] full potential to promote values such as fair play, equality, honesty, excellence, commitment, courage, teamwork, respect for rules and laws, respect for self and others, community spirit and solidarity, as well as fun and enjoyment” [emphasising that] “physical education, physical activity and sport should seek to promote stronger bonds between people, solidarity, mutual respect and understanding, and respect for the integrity and dignity of every human being.

The proposed Toolkit is grounded in a holistic, student-centred curriculum framework, the Personal and Social Responsibility model (PSR, Hellison, 1985), with contents developed according to cross-curricular and cross-cultural perspectives, and employing active-learning strategies. The adopted PSR model was originally designed to use physical activity as a vehicle to teach life-skills and promote positive youth development (Hellison et al., 2000), but it is widely used in educational contexts to help students learn to be responsible citizens in class, school, home and community. This is done by carefully designing learning tasks that give students increasing amounts of responsibility, thus shifting a significant portion of decision-making responsibilities from teacher to student as lessons progress.

The PSR model promotes both individual (self) and social responsibility by empowering students to take more responsibility for their actions and, ultimately, lives. It also helps them to learn to be concerned about the rights, feelings, and needs of others. The model strives to help students feel empowered, to experience making commitments to themselves and others, to live by a set of values and principles, and to be concerned about the well-being of others. The model emphasises effort and self-direction as critical to the achievement of personal well-being. Respecting others’ rights, considering others’ feelings, and caring about others are essential to the achievement of social well-being (Hellison, 2011). As with the purpose of the PSR model (to take responsibility for one’s own development/well-being and for contributing to the well-being of others), the purpose of teaching fairness underpinning the Toolkit corresponds to the awareness and responsibility for fairness as a way of thinking and behaving. For this reason, in the Toolkit, fairness has been outlined according to the five levels of the PSR model (Table 1; Hellison, 2011), to support teachers’ recognition of student learning and helping them in educating students accomplishing goals for fair behaviours progressing through the five levels.

Table 1. Hellison’s five levels of Personal and Social Responsibility

(adapted from Hellison, 2011).

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The proposed curriculum is divided into three areas: Inclusion, Respect, and Equity. For each area, contents and learning outcomes are focused on three levels of behavioural influences – individual, relational and societal:

1. Education concerned with micro-level influences addresses individual variables such as beliefs, emotions and understanding.

2. Meso-level education involves variables determined by relations with and within students’ social environments.

3. Macro-level incorporates community factors that are reflected in the proposed parent, carer and community involvement. As an example, the learning outcomes identified for the micro level on the three areas are:

• Inclusion: students recognize and communicate their needs effectively using verbal and non-verbal communication to express emotions and establish positive relations;

• Respect: students recognize positive responses to different situations, by identifying both personal strengths and areas of improvement;

• Equity: students communicate with all people showing willingness to positively participate in collaborative tasks.

It is important to note that activities in the Individual-level units form an important foundation for other units (relational and societal levels) because they address the personal abilities, beliefs and emotions that underpin and sustain the group work and relational skills relevant to the meso- and macro-order levels.

Each of the Toolkit’s main curricular area, which address the values of inclusion, respect, and equity, has a brief introduction that includes a section “Activities for teachers”, providing opportunities to question teachers’ prejudice or misconceptions from the outset. These activities aim to stimulate teachers’ reflection on the personal concepts of the proposed values, while also familiarising them with the didactic worksheets. This phase of pre-lesson teacher preparation is a vital step in the process of adapting curriculum content provided in the Toolkit to the context within which the students are living and learning. These preliminary activities will guide teachers’ efforts to draw out prejudice, plan appropriate class activities, set goals for their students, and contextualize the Toolkit’s values within the cultural, social, economic and political backgrounds of their students.

The Toolkit’s areas are composed of worksheets that have a uniform structure which can easily be adapted to the teachers’ and students’ context and needs. The worksheet structure is composed of an introductory section where objectives, materials, time and safety notes as well as learning strategies used in the worksheet are presented. The second part of each worksheet describes the content activities and includes images, questions to drive discussion, detailed explanation of games, and teacher hints for better implementing the teaching/ learning situation. Each worksheet within the units can be delivered in isolation; however, meaningful connections across worksheets are recommended according to the purposes and implications for building similar knowledge and skills. Teachers should feel free to adapt the order of learning materials to suit their students’ needs and learning contexts. Contents have been prepared specifically advocating the potential of sport and its positive values as a context to secure 8-12 year-old students’ engagement and positive youth development. According to Binder (2012), attention has been focused on “how to teach”, therefore, learner-centred approaches to teaching, that have gained wide advocacy within the education literature (Wright, Macdonald, & Burrows, 2004), were adopted and suggested in the delivering of the Toolkit contents. With respect to the learning theory informing life-skills programs, Koh & Camirè (2015, p. 246) advocate the use of Kolb’s experiential learning theory that involves four phases within the learning cycle:

• concrete experience (feeling);

• reflection observation (reflecting/watching);

• abstract conceptualisation (thinking);

• active experimentation (doing)

As recommended, teachers of life-skills must provide explicit learning opportunities in which students participate in a physical experience and then “reflect on their experience at the end of that particular activity by asking specific questions” (p. 246).

In the PSR model that informed the Toolkit contents d/evelopment, students are encouraged to learn by doing, i.e. by using active learning strategies. Active learning strategies have been proven to be the most efficient strategies to teach competences, in particular those that are cross-curricular. The Toolkit is therefore based on different active learning strategies, often including physical activity, games and sport as core-contents. This is not surprising, since move ment activities provide a pre-eminent example of learning experience that aims to teach values through active strategies.

Preliminary studies on the Toolkit adoption in Italian schools are still in progress and results will be briefly presented as regarding the effects on students’ empathy and their perception of the school caring climate and strength and difficulties.

Conclusion

Despite recent progress such as that described in this article, we are still far away from knowing how sport and education programs can make strong impact on the promotion of self-transcendent values that will shape children’s character and their behaviours in the long-term. We have yet to develop research programs investigating how to cultivate the predominant value in sport and life, i.e., “arête” (excellence of any kind) as was defined by Aristotle. To develop such programs we must firstly understand how to develop the excellent character, the “phronimos” (individual with practical wisdom). Educational programs like the one described here and modern theoretical frameworks emphasizing mastery/personal progress goals, critical thinking and self-determination in decision making are promising towards this end. These theoretical frameworks should be further developed, integrating within their frameworks elements of Aristotle’s philosophy such as the development of “phronimos character”, the integration of individual good with common good, and the concept of excellence as Aristotle defined it:

a state of mind concerned with choice, consisting of the mean relative to us, as determined by a rational principle, that is, as a “phronimos” (i.e., man of practical wisdom) would determine it. It is a mean between two vices – one stemming from excess, the other from defect – and, once again, while the vices either exceed or fall short of what is appropriate in feelings and actions, “arête” finds the mean and chooses it. Thus, concerning its essential quality and the definition which states what it really consists of, “arête” is the mean, but concerning what is best and right, it is an extreme (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book 2 part 6; 1107a).

Future research should aim to understand how, within the current system of affairs that prioritizes only excess (e.g., Faster, Higher, Stronger) and tangibly rewards only high normative performance, athletes can develop practical wisdom that will enable them across situations to always find and select the mean relative to them, the mean between excess and defect (Papaioannou, 2015).

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PAPAIOANNOU Athanasios, GOBBI Erica, "Sport as a tool to achieve quality education through values-based learning",in:K. Georgiadis (ed.), Olympic values-based learning as an effective tool forenvironmental protection, 56th International Session for Young Participants (AncientOlympia,11-25/6/2016), International Olympic Academy, Athens,2017, pp.161-172.

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