Publish at January 13 2020 Updated January 15 2025
I have the privilege of living next to an outdoor municipal ice ring. Skates can be borrowed for free and just about every newcomer to the neighborhood ends up coming to put on skates at some point.
Everyone has the opportunity to serve as a support or encouragement as it takes some to overcome clumsiness, fear of ridicule or sprawling all over. The place is ideal to observe perseverance in action.
Dany is Romanian, he immigrated 3 years ago. We can see that it is his first time. In fact this is his second time on ice skates but I can hardly believe how well he is doing. He has already done inline skating and the adaptation does not seem too difficult. The winter is long in Quebec, 5 months, and he is convinced that knowing how to skate is an important cultural factor here. Of course!!
He continued for almost an hour. The pleasure of sliding was already enough and with such a strong motivation, nothing stops him.
Manuel, Miguel and Maria are three Mexican students in immersion at Laval University. First outing on skates for two of them. Skates badly tied, frozen before even starting and barely expressing themselves in French, it's on that they didn't revise the vocabulary of skating in their course.
Return to the shelter and demonstration of skate lacing. Well yes it's tight. Without that, not only there will be no fun, but also discomfort will occupy all the space and, worse, they won't have any chance to improve. So it's tight!"
The exchanges were fairly limited, so we offered them a few basic drills and let them practice, answering their questions as needed. They continued to slowly circulate on the ice for at least 30 minutes, encouraging each other. We'd be wrong to interfere, it's all good.
Support from friends, humor and acceptance make it easy. Proud enough of their first outing, the ice is broken; they'll be back, and with their skates firmly attached. That, they remembered well.
Sébastien was born in Quebec and is getting back into skating. His main goal seems to be to not fall. After a few laps, you can feel his interest waning. It's cold.
I suggest that he try skating backwards. He is interested in it but he doesn't dare to do it. After a few tries and advices, he tells me that before coming he had watched a video on YouTube about how to skate backwards. I encourage him to try something else because what he learned from it doesn't seem to work very well.
Some theoretical knowledge never hurts and it may improve the repertoire. In the meantime, without too much embarrassment, he alternates different exercises with his forward skating and visibly takes pleasure in it. We often laugh, we warm up and the atmosphere is good.
A young woman arrives on foot and calls out to us. She has found "guy skates" in her size and wants to know if she can use them.... We ask to see. The skates are of good quality, the blade is superficially rusted, but it should be fine.
Sylvie, that's her name, shows a particular sensitivity in relation to help: she wants attention but no support that she doesn't expressly ask for. Well... we listen to her, we watch her struggle and when it's not going well at all, she accepts that we help her. We quickly understand that we must not give her the slightest impression that we want something for her. We back off as soon as she decides on a direction.
Sebastien and I remain perplexed. We know nothing of her history but we suspect that she did not have it easy. She runs cheerfully on the ice, aligning falls, swearwords and new starts. The jerky gait of the beginning becomes a bit more fluid, maybe the rust on her skates is slowly going away and her old reflexes are gradually coming back. One has the impression to see almost a rage to succeed. That too has something to do with perseverance.
When I left the rink, I gave one last look as I stood on the street. Sylvie was still skating with determination, alone in battle with her demons, but at least now she had blades to fight.
Perseverance in the face of difficulties seems to have a lot to do with the impression of making progress thanks to one's own value, hence the importance for facilitators of knowing how to withdraw and let this value express itself, at least give the impression of it. On what else can one build one's self-confidence?
____________________
Sébastien has piqued my curiosity. I've been skating since I was six years old, so I went to see what videos are available to learn how to skate. Surprise, I discovered techniques I didn't know about, even breakdancing on skates! I can't wait to go back to try some of these new exercises and share them.
These technical skills provide new motivations, We come to play and create with what we learn. At this point, it's no longer about perseverance but about fun and creation.
References
Learning to skate backwards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pth7XgwqBLE
Free Style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCEZ3xo95wI
5 Easy Iceskating Tricks to impress your Friends
https://youtu.be/wO4GLV41VkY?feature=shared
If you think you know how to skate...
You might also like:
The contribution of narrative practices to pedagogy
The narrative approach is an extraordinary lever for development. This approach enables us to dissociate the person who is supposedly the bearer of a problem from the situation he or she is experiencing. By shifting the focus on interactions, we don't limit the individual to being just a problem.
New and innovative teaching methods
Is pedagogical innovation possible? Many so-called "new" pedagogies are no longer theories, but living, consolidated subjects. Today, the question is no longer why and how. The question is rather when.
For a philosophy in action - part I - Praxisophy
What is philosophy in action, and can we be actors in our own philosophy? How do you carve out your own representation of the world?
Dan'A's dream is conceived as an educational lab that explores new ways of learning. Like an itinerant master class with donkeys, the idea is to revisit facilitative practices and give shape to a "societal intelligence". This lab is part of the Inex movement, which projects experiential learning as a means of developing human potential.
The art of the teacher in the face of algorithms
Adaptive platforms promise to automatically adjust the difficulty "to measure" each learner, thanks to data. But calibrating a challenge is more than just optimizing indicators. The algorithm individualizes based on traces; the pedagogue contextualizes based on a human, relational and symbolic situation. The challenge is not to pit human against machine, but to preserve pedagogical discernment in the face of algorithmic optimization.
