Professor, Dr. Hab. S.P. Evseev¹
Professor, PhD O.E. Evseeva^2
1Department of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Ministry of Sport, Moscow
²Institute of Adaptive Physical Education under Lesgaft National State University, St. Petersburg

Keywords: adaptive physical education, adaptive sports, socialization, personality development, quality of life.

Background. Adaptive physical education is one of the most actively progressing modern trends subject to multiple discussions and controversies. Adequate common understanding of the missions of adaptive physical education will help develop it on a more efficient basis in our country, improve the conditions for its practical implementation and step up its impacts on the subject groups with health impairments.

Objective of the study was to make a historical progress analysis of adaptive physical education and sports and explore their meanings and further development prospects.

Study results and discussion. Adaptive physical education as a notion first came to the Russian Federation back in 1995 when the first Adaptive Physical Education Theory and Practice (APETP) Department was established at the oldest higher physical education institution of the country now known as Lesgaft National State University, St. Petersburg. The initiative was intended to respond to the new social, economic and ideological challenges and to obtain and generalize the educational experience in a special academic Disabled Physical Education and Sports course that later evolved to a few disciplines (or educational program specializations, as they are called now) [4, 6]. It was S.P. Evseev who headed then and still heads the APETP Department.

The academic team of the newly established APETP Department then prepared all necessary substantiating documents to launch in 1996 the academic Disabled (Adaptive) Physical Education speciality and to have the relevant State Education Standard formally approved in 1997. At the present time, the education is governed by the third-generation higher education standard for the relevant educational program specialization formally called the Federal State Education Standard for Disabled (Adaptive) Physical Education with the bachelor and master education courses. There are also third-generation education standards for secondary vocational Adaptive Physical Education system which graduates are certified as Adaptive Physical Education Teacher.

The project to develop, implement and apply in practice the adaptive physical education standards was a groundbreaking step in the physical practices being first systemically applied in the Russian Federation for training and rehabilitation of people with physical and health impairments, particularly students attributed to special health groups and other relevant groups of those with health issues.

What was the meaning of this new stage for the country? It should be first noted that, in contrast to the global practices, it was traditional for the Russian Federation of those days, that physical practices were applied to these health categories mostly for the therapeutic and rehabilitative purposes.

The country operated a nationally recognized and excellent system of Therapeutic Physical Education (TPE) that proved its high benefits, particularly during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 when it was applied to rehabilitate wounded soldiers and officers, and this was the reason for the system being later dominant in the treatment and rehabilitation of people with impairments including, among other things, special physical education and sport tools and methods.

It should be noted that the TPE system, massage and other tools of physical rehabilitation in a broad meaning of the term and process, are still being actively applied today; and many studies – including works by A.V. Shevtsov, A.V. Aksenov – report sound benefits of the relevant physical practices on the people with physical and health disabilities subject to the integrated rehabilitation systems [16].

Fully acknowledging the benefits and achievements of the TPE system – which, however, was largely limited by the so-called hospital cure paradigm of the health system of those days – the adaptive physical education specialists active in its theory and practice [4, 5, 6, 8, 13-15] have often emphasized the need for overcoming the constraints of the system that considers physical education and particularly sports as the means to develop physicality only, i.e. improve the “natural” organic human body efficiency only – in view of the fact that effects of physical education and sports as regulators of interpersonal relations and interactions of people and improvers of their mental health are virtually inexhaustible.

Based on the core needs of the people having physical and health impairments subject to the physical practices, the following 6 types of adaptive physical education were designed: adaptive physical education (APE); adaptive sports (AS); adaptive motor recreation (AMR); physical rehabilitation (PR) including Therapeutic Physical Education (TPE); creative body-focused practices (CBFP); and extreme motor activities (EMA) [5].

It is obvious that a pathologic process, on the one hand, tends to destroy the person’s natural body functionality in its integral and natural aspects and, on the other hand, triggers a variety of inferiority complexes associated with anxiety and different impairments to the individual confidence and feel of dignity and other disorders including passiveness, isolation trends or, on contrary, selfishness or even asocial behavioural models [12].

Therefore, modern adaptive systems are to be designed not only to provide for medical and biological rehabilitation by means of physical education and sports with the relevant measures to help rehabilitate and develop the physical abilities of people with impairments, prevent and cure associating diseases and secondary health disorders due to the inevitable hypodynamia, but also to facilitate the social adaptation and integration of people with impairments to the modern social environments and improve their life quality based on adaptive physical education on the whole and adaptive sports in particular viewed as the key social institutions [4-6, 12].

Let us now, proceeding within this historical logic, overview the history of adaptive sports, Olympic and Paralympic sports. A historical analysis of the adaptive sport progress in its ideological domain gives the reasons to classify the process in at least the following three stages:

• Stage of adaptive sports being applied on a mandatory basis to cure the military service personnel diagnosed with spinal cord injuries;
• Rehabilitative stage when the adaptive sports were applied both as therapeutic/ rehabilitative and social sports; and
• Disabled sport stage when adaptive sports have become a driving force for the Olympic movement of people with impairments and an important element of the social practices to improve their life quality.

It was starting from 1960 that the Summer Paralympic Games were launched and in 1976 they were followed by the Winter Paralympic Games. It were the people with spinal cord conditions that participated in the first games; in 1972 people with vision disorders joined them; in 1976, people with all kinds of musculoskeletal system disorders were qualified for the Games; in 1980, people with amputations and cerebral palsy joined the Games as well; and in 1992, intellectually impaired people joined the Games community. This is generally the story of how the social attitudes to the people with  physical and health impairments has been changed from rejection and non-admission to the competitive-spirit-based equal-opportunities assurance in personality-centred axiological concept that considers them fully capable members of society that enjoy equal rights in every aspect of life, including sports.

The transition to the third development stage of Paralympic sports was driven both by the specific and social emphases of the sports as such and the ongoing social humanization process with a broad-based progress of the ideas of Olympism and fair play conceptions. Let us list some aspects of adaptive sports as one of the forms of adaptive physical education, as follows:

1. Adaptive sports and adaptive physical education give the means to meet an individual demand for self-assertion and self-fulfilment to ensure the personal abilities being fully proved in a fair competition with other people having the same health impairments [5], [6];

2. Adaptive sports are highly beneficial for improvement of individual mental qualities and skills, i.e. individual mental culture on the whole, since the competitive training process and competitions as such provide excellent volitional and emotional schooling and strong-character building opportunities [10, 11];

3. Adaptive sports and adaptive physical education make it possible for the people with physical and health impairments to cope with their mental conditions including inferiority complexes and change their attitudes to the health condition and life in general with improvements in self-rating and life-satisfaction situations. Significant support in the process was provided by the Universal All-Russian Sport Classification (UARSC) system being developed and applied to this category of athletes (S.P. Evseev, O.A. Evseeva, Y.Y. Vishnyakova, N.N. Aksenova). The UPRSC system made it possible for people with impairments to get the same sport grades (Junior Classes I, II, III; senior Classes I, II, III; and Candidate for Master of Sport) and sport titles (Master of Sport, International Class Master of Sport) as their healthy peers [7, 9].

4. Adaptive sports make a valuable contribution to cultivation of behavioural models with an emphasis on the democratic norms and concepts and tolerance-building in society. These values of adaptive sports are particularly important for the people with acquired disabilities that have to re-socialize on a new basis with top priority being given to the re-adaptation to the valid social norms, standards and rules. The re-socializing effects of competitive sports are due to the fact that the latter require from a person to accept a set of rules with the relevant restrictions imposed by the rules of games/ competition, competitive regulations etc. in much the same way as the common social rules control the individual behaviour. It is also important that adaptive sports help the people with impairments accept the process result regardless of whether or not they are happy with it. To put it in other words, adaptive sports help athletes accept life as it is with all its challenges and potential defeats and recognize that other people/ athletes may be more gifted, skilled or knowledgeable at this juncture. Therefore, sport motivates them to get better prepared to accept defeats rather than blame something or somebody, analyze the reasons for the defeats and acknowledge own weaknesses and errors to plan own ways out of the crises to new accomplishments and successes.

5. As far as the people with acquired disabilities and intellectual deficiencies are concerned as the groups of highest demand for the (re-)socialization, special emphasis in adaptive physical education and adaptive sport application are to be made on the individual competitive ability development agenda.

Competitiveness as the pivotal element of adaptive sports and every type of physical education should be viewed as a key factor of self-awareness/ reflexion that is centred on oneself being matched with the others. There is no way for a person to identify him/ herself in definite terms unless his/her abilities and qualities are matched with that of the other person having the same qualities and abilities (N.N. Vizitey, 2006, 2009). When doing so, the individual with certain health limitations that matches him/herself with the other people cannot stay indifferent to the process on the whole and the process outcomes in particular. Both the process and outcomes are always very emotional and highly valuable and, hence, influential on the self-discovery and self-rating processes. As was mentioned by Immanuel Kant, the most fundamental and basic element of identity is our “human” element that can be, first, rated only on a comparative basis; second, as an assessment measure; and, third, within the frame of total self-experience and self-love and with its content and one or another emotional and volitional composition [1]. This is the reason why the (re-)socialization processes of the people with health limitations centred on the abilities to comply with the commonly accepted behavioural rules, accept one or another social function/ role and adapt to the relevant social and living conditions based on newly developed self-respect – are much more efficient when supported by the adaptive sport practices as compared to any other social-environment modelling practice.

6. Adaptive sports play an important role in the planning abilities and skills being developed in the trainees to help them design their own training and competitive processes followed by the skills being effectively applied in their lives on the whole. Any sport discipline, including adaptive sports, help the trainees improve the goal-setting abilities, the goals being naturally and duly customized for the health limitations on the whole and intellectual deficiencies in particular. The objectives and goals set in adaptive sports will be adequately formulated and set as follows:

First, objectives and goals in adaptive sports are to be always and expressly positively featured so as to answer the questions like: what I am going to achieve (jump further, pull up more, lift heavier weights etc.), rather than what I do not want to do.

Second, accomplishments in adaptive sports will depend mostly on the person’ own determination, i.e. his/her diligence, persistence, purposefulness, ability to concentrate and cope with reluctance etc.

Third, the accomplishments in adaptive sports are always tangible, i.e. obviously demonstrated by clearly felt criteria. Muscle growth, for instance, may be easily measured.

Fourth, objectives and goals in adaptive sports never come in conflict with the other individual values as they rather help than impede the individual’s other missions and goals being fulfilled and attained.

7. Sport history, including the adaptive sport one, gives many cases of highly ethical sporting behaviour of athletes driven by fair game spirit. And this sporting spirit is indispensible in the children and adolescents’ education process for it fosters the excellent culture of being “humble winner and dignified loser”.

We could continue listing other factors of rehabilitating, socializing and culturing effects of the adaptive sport system, but we feel the above ones are convincing enough to appreciate its immense potential for the subject mission.

It may be pertinent to underline that the social rehabilitation aspects of adaptive sports, as opposed to the medical systems which technologies may easily be replicated and applied in different countries, should be addressed on a country-specific basis with due adaptation to the present social, economic, historic, legal, religious, mental and other factors of the specific social environment. The efforts may be successful enough only when the replicated educational technologies of other countries are duly customized by the research teams of the local adaptive physical education and sport specialists of the subject country.

Conclusion. Adaptive physical education being prudently applied in the health improvement practices of people with physical and health impairments will help integrate them in society and improve their life quality.

The study was performed under the State Order by the Federal State Higher Education Establishment Supported by P.F. Lesgaft National State University, St. Petersburg, for the research report “Adaptive physical education and sport theory and practice to improve motor activity, education, culture and socialization of people with physical and health impairments”, pursuant to the Ministry of Sports of Russia Order #318 of April 07, 2015.

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Corresponding author: spevseev@gmail.com

Abstract

Objective of the study was to make a historical progress analysis of adaptive physical education and sports and explore their missions and further development prospects. The historical progress analysis of adaptive sports as an ideology gives the reasons to break down its national history at at least the following stages:

– Stage of adaptive sports being applied on a mandatory basis to cure the military service personnel diagnosed with spinal cord injuries;

– Rehabilitative stage when the adaptive sports were applied both as therapeutic/ rehabilitative and social sports; and

– Disabled sport stage when the adaptive sports have become a driving force for the Olympic movement of people with impairments and an important element of the social practices to improve their life quality.

Therefore, the article considers the mission of adaptive physical education and sports, their development history in the role of social institutions designed both to improve the physical (body) abilities of people with impairments and encourage their integration in society, i.e. their (re-) socialization and personality development, help them overcome a variety of mental conditions including inferiority complexes and improve their life quality on the whole.