PhD I.Y. Vaganova²
M.Y. Biktuganova¹
PhD S.V. Kazantsev³
Master of Teacher Education A.V. Razumova⁴
E.V. Kharitonova^4
1Ministry of Physical Culture, Sports and Youth Policy of the Sverdlovsk Region, Yekaterinburg
²Expert Council "Science" under the Ministry of Physical Culture, Sports and Youth Policy of the Sverdlovsk Region, Yekaterinburg
³Public Council of the Ministry of Physical Culture, Sports and Youth Policy of the Sverdlovsk Region, Yekaterinburg
⁴Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, Yekaterinburg

Keywords: physical culture, healthy lifestyle, mental universe, world outlook.

Background. Today the Russian society and government rank public health among the top priorities, with the public health improvement policies designed on an integrated basis with the relevant contributions from modern education science, psychology, medicine, physical culture and sports theory and many other sciences. A special emphasis in these policies and practices is made on the disease prevention initiatives including the health lifestyle cultivation and physical education expansion ones. The initiatives are supported by the National Physical Culture and Sports Development Strategy of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2020 that prioritizes the projects to increase the share of population engaged in habitual physical training practices [4].

Policies to encourage a broader engagement of the national population in mass physical culture and sports include special health projects in the relevant educational establishments (including the third physical education class at schools, and fixed classes for the academic Physical Education and Sports curriculum as required by the valid Federal State Higher Education Standards – FSHES); initiatives to expand the sport assets and facilities; healthy lifestyle promotion campaigns (including the GTO Complex reinstatement project) etc. We believe, these initiatives should be designed so as to secure due physical culture values being increasingly accepted in the individual values system to successfully develop a conscientious need for a healthy lifestyle and habitual self-reliant health activity upon graduation. In our opinion, due focus shall be made in the national health policies on the notion and meaning of mental universe interpreted as the linguistic and cognitive phenomenon [1] applicable as a driver for a variety of social goals (including the information policy goals) being attained with the human cognitive process logics being recognized and factored in the process. Mental universes accumulating knowledge of the relevant domains of reality may be further interpreted as elementary ‘bricks’ used to build up an individual world outlook. When the individual mental universe is selectively designed of the relevant cognitive, emotional and valuation components, the individual world outlook and values system may be productively shaped up and modified.

As far as the healthy lifestyle cultivation goal is concerned, mental universe may be limited to the physical education domain. The mental universe of physical education may be viewed as formed by a collective entity interpreted, as provided by the V.F. Petrenko’s classification, as the unity of individuals that build up, in their ‘practical discourses’, the relevant polyphonic reality to combine their individual perception and interpretations of the latter [3]. Such a mental universe is built up using a variety of relevant information sharing codes including linguistic, auditory, visual ones etc.

Objective of the study was to analyze the physical education domain of the mental universe created by a collective entity/ community.

Methods and structure of the study. In the attempt to identify the key perceived meanings (‘vectors’) of physical culture, we run a psycholinguistic experiment with 40 people aged 22-35 years sampled in the IT industry being subject to the experiment. The experiment was designed to find their immediate free associations in response to ‘physical culture’ as a verbal stimulus. We believe, the free associations generating experiment made it possible to identify the key perceived meanings of the notion and classify them into cognitive, emotional and valuation components.

Study results and discussion. As a result of the experiment, we obtained an array of immediate associative responses and analyzed them to identify the core and peripheral zones of the association area. The core association area was found to include the following responses: sport (7), school (6), dumbbells (6), and horizontal bar (4). The association area periphery was formed by the following immediate responses: school lessons (3), race (3), gym (3), culture (2), hatred (2), humiliation (2), health (2), morning exercises (2), Lorem, pain, discrimination, brown color, cross country race, fist in the face, on Comintern street, bends on the bench, ipsum, voice tone, dark first floor, man in track suit, thugs in track suits, I don’t attend, drills, violence, dressing room, workout, track suit, morning, physical therapy, I forgot the track suit, good physical training, wall bars, mats, I’ve got a release note, school shoes, release note, session, stadium, two circles around the school, endurance, and pleasant pain in muscles. Sports-related associations were dominating in the immediate responses that may be due to the closeness of physical education and sports perceived as synonymic by the common consciousness [2].

Having analyzed the above immediate responses, we found the key perception vectors of the subject notion dominated by physical culture being perceived as one of the disciplines in the curriculum (school (6), school lessons (3), on Comintern street, I don’t attend, workout, drills, forgot the track suit, I’ve got a release note, school shoes, release note, session, stadium, two circles around the school). The second perception vector implies physical culture being perceived as a physical training process with the relevant attributes: dumbbells (6), horizontal bars (4), race (3), gym (3), morning exercises (2), cross country race, bends on the bench, strength, dressing room, training suit, stadium, endurance. This vector may furthermore be classified into the sport assets related associations including the sport equipment (dumbbells, horizontal bars, gym, stadium, dressing room); physical practices (race, bends on the bench); and physical qualities (strength, endurance).  

It may be pertinent to mention separately the emotional/ valuation associations triggered by the verbal stimulus including pain, discrimination, humiliation, hatred (2) and violence; with the responses being dominated by the expressed negative feelings with the only exclusion for pleasant pain in muscles. Ranked among the negative responses should also be Lorem and ipsum, with Lorem ipsum applied by the subject professional community as an emotional senseless formula used to fill in a blank. Having compared the new study data with the previous study findings [2], we found certain coincidence of the core perception vectors both in the semantics and emotional/ valuation domain, albeit the negative responses were less expressed in the student community that may be due to the more positive individual experiences in the relevant sample.

Based on the experimental findings, we may now apply the key perception vectors to design the mental universe of physical education geared to cultivate healthy lifestyles. It should be noted that every relevant social initiative should be designed, among other things, to overcome the negative perceptions of the physical education process. Since the key perception vectors are dominated by physical education being viewed as an academic discipline, due efforts need to be taken, predominantly in the didactic domain, to cultivate more positive attitudes to the process, and success of such efforts will largely depend on the teacher’s personality and skills, i.e. on how constructive his/her relationship and communication are with the trainees. One more solution to this task implies a special emphasis being made on the off-class trainings to drive the biased perceptions of physical education beyond the frame of the academic process. This should help both popularize the advanced and off-class education options and system and promote it as health (physical development, health protection and improvement) rather than purely competitive (centered on sport accomplishments) domain. It should be mentioned that modern children and adolescents have little if any knowledge and skills in active team games and sports and, hence, often unable to self-organize an active sporting life in their local communities. The relevant sporting and entertainment services (like sporting grounds and ropes in parks) may, on the one hand, promote some forms of physical culture, and on the other hand, cultivate erroneous perceptions of special conditions, grounds and equipment being required for active practices.

Despite the fact that the notion of physical culture is widely associated with health, this association still dominates in the peripheral part of the association area (including health (2), physical therapy, good physical fitness) with the relevant responses being rather occasional. For success of the efforts to cultivate healthy lifestyles via the mental universe of physical culture, this association shall above all be activated by a variety of actions: first, the relevant public awareness campaigns geared to inform people on the positive effects of modern physical culture on health. It is important that these campaigns are designed on a rather specific than general basis – i.e. on different physical education tools and their benefits for health supported by fair knowledge of safety measures and contraindications for one or another physical education service. Second, the positive associations may be advanced by the relevant cultural discourse including positive affirmations cultivated via special literature on the subject. It should be noted that the above experiment found no culture-associated responses despite the fact that the national and world culture offers a wide range of creative material (verses, fairy tales, songs, movies, cartoons etc.) demonstrating benefits of conscientious physical culture and healthy lifestyles. Focused initiatives to have the physical education process engaged in the wider cultural flow with activation of the relevant responses and associations will help cultivate more positive attitudes to it and overcome the common perception of physical culture being ‘non-intellectual’ (with the relevant stereotype being noted in such responses as thugs in track suits, men in track suits etc.). The positive associations may be further supported by a broader use of idiomatic expressions, catch phrases, slogans, quotations from popular songs, movies and verses (like temper your body to be healthy; sun, air and water are your best friends; cardio trainer works better than cardio stimulator etc.).

Furthermore, the mental universe building efforts shall be designed to keep up the natural associations of physical culture being connected with sports, with a special emphasis on this aspect in the academic training process so that every trainee should know that he/she can anytime make progress from habitual physical training for health to competitive sports, since for many it may be a great incentive for the physical education practices. Such attitudes may be heavily boosted by the relevant mass amateur sport events (like the traditional Europe Asia International Marathon and Maiskaya Groza (Engl. May Thunder) Race in Yekaterinburg).

Conclusion. Mental universe of physical culture shall be shaped up and expanded by the relevant positive information on the physical education options, models and tools, with due basic competency being developed in the associating sectors and sciences like anatomy, physiology, medicine etc. The initiatives to build up a facilitating mental universe of physical culture and promote healthy lifestyles may be highly successful if addressed to counter the common negative stereotypes that still dominate in many people’s minds and cultivate more positive attitudes to physical progress.

References

1. Vaganova I.Y. Mentalnoe prostranstvo kak mehanizm prodvizheniya VFSK GTO [Mental space as a mechanism for promoting RPCSC GTO]. Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie v Rossii, 2014, no. 9, pp. 18-21.
2. Vaganova I.Y., Racheva V.A. Fizicheskaya kultura i sport skvoz prizmu yazykovogo soznaniya studentov [Physical culture and sport through the lens of language consciousness of students]. Pedagogicheskoe obrazovanie v Rossii, 2016, no.11, pp. 199-203.
3. Petrenko V.F. Osnovy psikhosemantiki [Fundamentals of psychosemantics]. Moscow, 2010.
4. Strategiya razvitiya fizicheskoy kultury i sporta v Rossiyskoy Federatsii na period do 2020 goda (utverzhdena Rasporyazheniem Pravitelstva Rossiyskoy Federatsii ot 07.09.2009 g. no.1101-r) [The strategy of development of physical culture and sports in the Russian Federation for the period until 2020 (approved by the Order of the RF Government 07.09.2009, no.1101-r)]. Available at: https://www.minsport.gov.ru/activities/federal-programs/2/26363/ (Date of access 1.09.2017)

Corresponding author: marina-bik@yandex.ru

Abstract

The study analyses the ways to secure due information flow to promote the public health improvement and healthy lifestyle cultivation initiatives ranked among the top-priority social goals. It is the mental universe viewed as a special linguistic and cognitive phenomenon with its mission of humanitarian knowledge accumulation that may be described as the key driver for the process. This approach makes it possible to design the information flow with account of the human cognitive process with a special emphasis on the modelled world outlook that is basically built up as a complex multilevel structure. This structure in an individual consciousness is subject to permanent changes when it is expanded, complemented and transformed by the information inflow that gives not only descriptions of reality but also develops a system of guiding values deterministic for the individual behavioural models and choices in the social environments. This system of values includes, among other things, such category as healthy lifestyle closely connected with physical culture. We applied experimental data to analyse the mental universe of physical culture collectively created by communities with its key elements, related categories, dominating types of information and the most resourceful cognitive, emotional and valuation process vectors.