Dr.Hab., Associate Professor A.I. Zagrevskaya¹
Master's student V.S. Sosunovskiy^1
1National research Tomsk state university, Tomsk

Keywords: Olympic education, anthropic technologies, sport culture, students.

Background. The popular notion of Olympic spirit is commonly associated in the modern cultural tradition with the doctrine that gave rise to the modern Olympic movement after it was developed and implemented by Pierre de Coubertin in the late XIX to early XX century. The Olympic Charter spelled out the Olympic tenets including Olympism generally understood as the life philosophy that ennobles and integrates the human intelligence, willpower and bodily abilities into a harmonic whole. A formally declared objective of Olympism is to advance sports the world over and use them as a tool to facilitate harmonic development of human cultures and build up modern societies with a top priority being given to human dignity. The Olympic movement is intended to combine sports with culture and educational aspects and build up lifestyles driven by joys of physical culture so as to take full advantage of good role models and foster genuine respect to universal ethical values. Olympism implies the Olympic movement being imperatively designed to build up a better world by active involvement of young people in sporting cultures free on whatever forms of discriminations with a special emphasis on mutual understanding, friendship, solidarity and fair play values [1].

It is also a common knowledge, however, that sporting activity may sometimes be detrimental for personality development process as it may foster cruelty, aggression, negligent attitudes to fair play values etc. [5]. This is the reason for a high priority being given today to the efforts to find the most efficient Olympic education tools to help build up personal sporting cultures in university athletes based on a variety of traditional human values.  

Objective of the study was to provide theoretical and practical grounds for the anthropic education technologies to advance the Olympic education at national physical culture universities.

Study results and discussion. As provided by a prior study, Olympic education is defined as a process and result of the past generations’ experience being employed by people to acquire competences in the Olympic movement basics, tenets and values and the role of education-, culture- and self-learning-generated knowledge and skills in the modern society [3].

One of the key objectives of the Olympic education is to build up personal physical culture which design and content were subject to our previous study [3]. The personal physical culture is based on such positive values-driven attitudes to sports that help the athlete appreciate and organically accept the sport-specific standards, values and cultural norms so as to make them an integral part of the intrapersonal world.

It should be noted in this context that the personal physical culture building process implies – in addition to the acceptance of Olympism and movement ideals and values – certain behavioural models driven by due knowledge of the physical culture basics and healthy lifestyles; optimal mental and physical fitness rates; and the ability to take advantage of the physical culture and sporting experience in the life/ professional objectives being attained in context of the common social values being accepted [4]. 

We can only agree with S.V. Dmitriev (2011) who stated that values, semantics and “consumer importance” are considered specification of the subject and its activity rather than only its features. The notion of value refers largely to social consciousness; whereas the notion of values-driven priorities refers to individual consciousness. In this context, advantages of the anthropic education technologies for the social and individual consciousness development initiatives are quite obvious. The term anthropic emphasises the individual, personal nature of a human being and his/her activity. The athropic technologies are designed to “implement the relevant integrative education models with the student’s individuality being considered a reference point for the customised educational tools and methods” [2]. 

Given in Table 1 hereunder is the Olympic education model that we designed for the national physical culture universities based on the relevant anthropic education model geared to activate the individual values-and-senses-related and reflexive aspects. 

Table 1. Olympic education model for physical culture universities

The above data shows that our Olympic education model is composed of a few elements including the educational process objective, missions, tenets, methods, tools and outcome. Let us dwell on the tenets that mean the obligatory design requirements to the academic Olympic education model based on the anthropic technologies.

One of the necessary conditions for the model being duly customised to the individual personal qualities of the students in the Olympic values study process is that a due active communication environment is established to facilitate educational interpersonal communications in the teacher-student, teacher-academic group, student-student and student-academic group formats.

The active communication (which needs to be differentiated from common communication i.e. information sharing process) is designed to jointly create an interpersonal subject field for constructive discussion/ thinking process. The field is applied to identify the key subjects with the relevant self-identification and self-prioritisation tools. The active communication is designed to attain a variety of results including the system of individualised, personality and socio-cultural relationships being improved in every component including own self, society and community [2]. 

The active communication environment may be described as the special educational activity domain designed to not only secure flow of information on the Olympism/ Olympic movement values and ideals, but also facilitate relationships and exchange of the personal and socio-cultural senses via the interpersonal educational contracts in the academic sport training process.

The active communication environment building process is governed by a concept of subjectivity. The educational communication subject means the content of the Olympic education model with the high priority being given to the education elements designed to secure due competences for the students to “extract personally sensitive knowledge from the information flow” as required by the sporting activity reflexive control concept.

When the personality development tenet is addressed in the active communication process under the Olympic education model, due efforts are to be taken to address the subject to cognition, evaluation and transformation (i.e. the system of Olympic ideals and values) and represent it as an evolutionary system. It should be mentioned that not only an individual transforms one or another subject, but the individual effect on the subject implies a feedback from the subject that may transform the intrapersonal environment of the individual in response.

Students in the active communication process face constantly variable educational situations that force them analyse their own and other people’s actions based on the knowledge of their own selves and/or respecting the other people’s interests. The communication process is to be geared to build an encouraging and friendly climate to facilitate the interpersonal exchange of the Olympic knowledge and thoughts, to help the students mobilize their own socio-cultural and creative resources and employ them for the Olympic ideals and values being successfully shared with their counterparts. Therefore, the academic Olympic education process to help students realize and accept the relevant Olympism/ Olympic movement ideals and values cultivates mutual respect, empathy, mutual spiritual enrichment and synergised creativity in the students and teachers to help them build up good sporting culture.

Conclusion. The academic Olympic education model is based on the common human values albeit these values are always very personal and cannot be communicated directly in a ready-made form; rather they should be digested and accepted by an individual (by making them personally relevant for the latter) via the relevant senses-driven communication process. Therefore, the Olympic education model designed to give competences in the Olympism/ Olympic movement values and ideals includes the relevant anthropic education technologies to activate the values-and-senses-related and reflexive aspects of the individual consciousness.

References

1. Bogdanova M.A. Kulturnoe soderzhanie olimpizma: ot antichnosti k sovremennosti [Cultural content of Olympism: from antiquity to the present]. Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2010, no. 336, pp. 55-59.
2. Dmitriev S.V. Antropnye vuzovskie tekhnologii – vazhen ne obuchenny spetsialist, a razvivayushchiysya professional [Anthropic university technologies - proprity of developing specialist rather than well-trained specialist]. Fizicheskoe vospitanie studentov, 2011, no. 3, pp. 37-41.
3. Lubysheva L.I., Zagrevskaya A.I. Struktura i soderzhanie sportivnoy kultury lichnosti [Structure and content of personal sports culture]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2013, no. 3, pp. 7-17.
4. Manzheley I.V. Sredovy podkhod v formirovanii sportivnogo stilya zhizni studencheskoy molodezhi [Environmental approach in formation of students' sporty lifestyle]. Teoriya i praktika fiz. kultury, 2013, no. 12, pp. 9-13.
5. Sosunovskiy V.S., Zagrevskaya A.I. Printsipy Feyr Pley v sovremennom yunosheskom sporte [Fair play principles in modern youth sports]. Sb. tez. dokl. Mezhdunar. federatsii studencheskogo sporta «Universitetskiy i Olimpiyskiy sport: dve modeli – odna tsel?» [Proc. Intern. University Sports Federation "University and Olympic sports: two models - one goal?"], Kazan, 2013, p. 289.

Corresponding author: vadim14sergeevich@gmail.com

Abstract       

The study gives a top priority to the academic sport culture building issues at national physical cultural universities in context of the principles of Olympism. Olympic education model content is driven by common human values forming a basis of the human life philosophy, and generally the Olympic education is designed through activation of the values-and-senses-related and reflexive aspects of the student’s personality i.e. based on the anthropic education technologies. The study explores benefits of the anthropic education technologies designed to develop the values-and-senses-related and reflexive aspects of personality, the technologies being also viewed as an interaction of the individual abilities with the tools and strategies to build up the personal competitive experiences and individual styles of the professional teaching process with due emphasis on the progress rethinking aspect.