ON-SNOW WORKSHOP

What can we do as a nation for the future of snowsport. One important topic for this theme is how to get more people to enjoy snowsport. A more specific question we can ask ourselves: How can we as ski educators create a lifelong skiing passion for our ski instructors?

For this we have a 3-way solution:

• Create passionate and knowledgeable ski instructors. Stimulate the ability to become self-reflective and self- aware about their skiing and their understanding of skiing technique.

• Simplify how we describe ski technic. We use concepts and terms that are accepted and known not only to skiers. The components that synchronizes and together creates a wanted result are:

• External forces o Characteristics of the snow o Characteristics of the equipment o Interaction between equipment and snow o Joint movements

• Accessible training and educational material that are web based and free for everyone. Material that stimulates an active processing of the content.

Our view on learning is that we as educators can ́t directly learn our instructors anything. We can only create an environment and provide the right tools for them to teach themselves. With this point of view, we choose to use a teaching method called experiential learning.

For this workshop we have chosen to focus on learning and technical progress. We will mainly focus on interaction between ski and snow and we have chosen to present to you how we work with our level 1 instructors.

What do we want to achieve? Create ski instructors that are self-reflective and self-aware of their own teaching and skiing.

How? Experiential learning is a teaching method that enable participants to reflect on their own performance and verbalize their experience.

What do we communicate? We choose to introduce our instructors to ski technique by starting with the interaction between ski and snow and how that affect the result. The skis are our tools to create a turn. By understanding the turning characteristics of the skis and how that effects the outcome of the turn, we believe it will give us a good base to further progress from.

The participants in our workshops will be able to try and experience how we use experiential learning as a way to create a greater understanding and awareness for ski technique.

Presenters of this workshop are ski educators with many years of experience of teaching in Sweden, New Zeeland, Canada and Austria. We will offer 3 English speaking groups per session with a maximal number of 10 participants per group. We will also offer 1 German speaking group per session with a maximal number of 8 participants. We have no minimum limit of participants for our workshops.

www.snowsportsweden.com