Jiu Jitsu Coaches as Cultural Workers

Jiu Jitsu Coaches as Cultural Workers

The first time I read Teachers as Cultural Workers, I remember being hooked, literally pulled in, by the words on the pages. It felt as if I had already been acquainted with Freire’s ideas, even though I’d never heard of him at that point, and was now able to articulate my attitudes about experiences I had. New approaches to skill acquisition and motor learning were beginning to take hold, slowly reshaping how the jiu-jitsu world understood teaching and performance. However, a large majority of the jiu-jitsu community, to this day, are opposed to such changes and resist these new ways of designing practice. In fact, they insist that these approaches are nothing new and that they have been doing constraints-based training all along. Thankfully, through the efforts of people like Greg Souders and others, frustrated with outdated traditionalist and representationalist approaches to coaching, we have entered a new era of martial arts education. One that reflects a broader paradigm shift taking place across disciplines. Long-standing assumptions we continue to reproduce in the post-Enlightenment world, such as the view of humans as ahistorical rational agents or Cartesian dualism, are beginning to lose hold, and jiu-jitsu is just one of many fields adapting to these shifts. What makes this moment especially interesting, at least to me, is the way Freire’s critical pedagogy converges with relational and 4E approaches to cognition, together offering a coherent framework for identifying the often invisible constraints that shape learning in training environments. 

Before reading Freire, I was familiar with Žižek’s conceptualization of ideology, which García and Aguilar Sánchez (2012) define as the “generating matrix that regulates the relation between the visible and the invisible”¹. By shifting the coaches role to that of cultural worker, we can start to take accountability and ownership of our student's learning environment, including spaces that extend off the mats. In other words (without all the philosophical jargon), this suggests that a Freirean analysis can help us understand how gym cultures, and the ideologies present across academies, actually shape the behaviors and norms within a gym. In reality, the development of our students’ jiu-jitsu is shaped not only by the constraints designed to promote the emergence of movement solutions, but also by the rules of the environment, the academy’s social norms, and the instructor’s presence. Ultimately, my goal is to spread awareness of the idea that jiu jitsu coaches are, in fact, more than mere lecturers, so that we can remain faithful to what we now understand about pedagogy and cognition, while also giving students the space and skills they need to become active participants in this (grappling) world. In a recent BJJ Mental Models episode, I reflected on epistemic humility and the role it plays in shaping the culture of a training room. Throughout my own experiences, I have encountered plenty of coaches who position themselves as the sole arbiters of knowledge, effectively transforming their gym into a personal site of veridation. This authority shows up in both subtle and overt ways, through decisions about which techniques are considered correct, and through the discouragement of questioning or student-led exploration. This authoritarian model of education, I would argue, collapses under a more accurate account of how learning actually works. And I’m afraid that, by this point, we have long mistaken the map for the actual terrain.

So let us begin with a simple question. What does it mean to be an expert in jiu-jitsu? To make this clearer, consider a physicist. It would obviously not be enough to read a textbook and then claim expertise (at least not to my knowledge). What makes a physicist an expert is not simply the possession of information, but a way of being in the world grounded in a history of experience. It is the capacity to generate and test hypotheses about physical reality, to design meaningful experiments, and to skillfully leverage technology and the laboratory environment in pursuit of understanding. This is not something someone can just “pick up” from listening to a podcast, or a lecture, or by simply reading a book. It requires trial and error, self-maintenance, and the freedom to explore. Remember, the enterprise of science is not so much interested in recreating past work. Instead, physicists are busy formulating new models and ways of understanding our terrain. Why should jiu-jitsu be any different?

In reality, this is not the level of expertise most jiu-jitsu gyms aspire to develop. Instead, students are often incentivized to imitate and reproduce their professor’s solutions. In some cases, students are socialized to imitate without questioning how those solutions emerged in the first place, or why they should be applied in a given context. Freire refers to this approach as the banking model, in which “education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are depositories and the teacher is a depositor.”² The contradiction of this model is that the production of knowledge becomes monopolized by the coach, and can become rather alienating. As a result, students who are meant to be experts-in-making are instead reduced to choreographers, detached from the very processes that give knowledge its meaning. In this sense, Freire’s work is deeply relational and, in some ways, enactive by nature, and his perspective on education can help coaches identify constraints not only at the level of movement solutions but at the cultural level as well. As Freire points out, spaces of learning are always shaped by relations of authority, norms of participation, and implicit judgments about what counts as knowledge, and jiu jitsu academies are no exception. These norms influence how practitioners come to read their training environments and, in turn, how they understand both learning and themselves. Once these invisible constraints are made visible, the task is to then imagine a training environment that works with epistemic tools and methodologies, such as CLA, rather than against them.

Keep in mind, the goal of this essay is not to prescribe a specific way of implementing these ideas, but to begin a conversation about coaching as a form of cultural activity. To make this possible, coaches need to recognize the limits of their own knowledge and approach jiu-jitsu as an ongoing, collective project that depends on shared participation and self-discovery. This requires an openness toward students that invites inquiry rather than obedience, and an approach that allows members of the community to take part in shaping the culture of the room. The aim is to make the jiu-jitsu academy something more meaningful than a place where repetition and memorization take place. We should want our students to become more than passive observers and followers. By reimagining jiu-jitsu as a cultural activity, we can better assist students in developing the skills and confidence needed to actively shape their world.

As Paulo Freire says, “teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge.”³ With that in mind, this is an exciting time to be a coach. Take pride in the work, and do not shy away from the uncertainty that comes with it.

References:

¹ García, G. I., & Aguilar Sánchez, C. G. (2012). Psychoanalysis and politics: The theory of ideology in Slavoj Žižek. IJŽS (Vol. 2, No. 3). IJŽS.

² Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000), 72.

³ Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, trans. Donaldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandre Oliveira (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005), 40.