This series attempts to translate some of the terms and clear up some of the misconceptions in the Ecological Approach discourse from a mostly Judo context. I assume you are already familiar with what the ecological approach is and the discussion surrounding it. I believe the current discourse is largely driven by poor communication that fails to help people understand what the ecological approach actually encompasses. Most good explanations come from an academic view and would make sense to people who have already read and understood the literature. The goal of this series is to bridge the gap between a “dumbed down” explanation that oversimplifies and causes further misunderstanding, and an accurate but academic explanation. I do not recommend using this series as a guide to run your practice. If you’re looking for guides to run your practice, or accurate explanations there is plenty of other content out there. Through this series, I hope to help people understand terms used within the Ecological Approach. This will help those of you who wish to read further into the existing content out there"

Other than the toxic discourse emerging from the BJJ sphere, I think the problem is that Eco advocates are trying to explain their stance utilizing terms that have similar but different meaning outside of the Eco discourse.

For Example:

Those are all common ways people have been “simplifying” explanations for those terms. While they aren’t exactly wrong, it’s also not quite correct. When told this, people tend to get defensive that you are implying that they don’t know what organizing yourself or what a performance environment is, or that what seems to look like situational sparring to them isn’t exactly that.There is further confusion due to people using the terms Eco, Ecological Dynamics, Ecological Approach and Constraints Led Approach (CLA) interchangeably. In addition, it’s difficult to explain the differences between the approaches - all the experts have different takes. Then you also have people saying the right answer is a hybrid approach.

For example, “Interest vs Hobby”. In casual conversation, these words are often used interchangeably. However “interest” refers to something you are curious about, while a “hobby” is an activity in which you actively participate, a distinction that matters in the field of psychology and career planning.

I will go over what CLA, Ecological Approach and Ecological Dynamics is. I’m not an academic expert, so it is based on my limited understanding of the books and research papers I’ve read. I’ll explain it in a way that I feel is the best middle ground between being correct and having people understand it, and will also put it in a judo context with examples whenever possible.

Most of what this series will cover is just scratching the surface of the approach.