Sport | Participatory Science | project-based learning | autonomy | responsibility | resilience | mental skills | civic engagement | embodied cognition | self-transcendence.

Introduction: why introduce sport into Participatory Science?

Participatory Science is often described as an approach enabling citizens, students, residents, associations, families or non-specialist audiences to contribute to the production of scientific knowledge. This definition is accurate, but it remains incomplete if it reduces participation to data collection, occasional observation or assistance provided to research already entirely designed by specialists.

From a more ambitious perspective, Participatory Science can become a space for capacity-building. It enables people who do not come from the academic world to understand the issues involved in research, discuss its objectives, learn protocols, contribute to the interpretation of results, propose improvements, and even gradually become co-authors of a project. The question is therefore not only how to enable participation. It is how to foster the emergence of capable participants.

Project-based learning provides a decisive framework here. It does not simply consist of having a group work on a concrete activity. It organizes a pathway in which learners gradually become responsible for a real objective, a process, a production and a restitution. It transforms learning into a situated, collective, progressive experience oriented toward a useful result.

In this perspective, sport appears as a lever that is still under-modelled. It is not merely a question of saying that sport is good for health, that it reduces stress or that it promotes cohesion. It is a matter of understanding how sporting experience can prepare, strengthen and structure the skills necessary for project-based learning and Participatory Science.

In sport, the body learns before discourse. The practitioner must act in a real environment, sometimes uncertain, sometimes changing, sometimes demanding. They must perceive, decide, adjust, start again, cooperate, manage their emotions, accept fatigue, recognize their limits, build confidence and develop a finer relationship with their environment. These dimensions are also at the heart of Participatory Science projects.

The central hypothesis of this article is therefore the following: when integrated intentionally, progressively, safely and in a culturally adapted way, sporting practice acts as a bodily laboratory for the skills necessary for Participatory Science. It prepares participants for autonomy, responsibility, initiative-taking, emotional robustness, attention to the environment, cooperation and the transformation of experience into shareable knowledge.

1. Three traditions to connect: sport, project-based learning and Participatory Science

1.1. Project-based learning: learning by producing

Project-based learning is based on a simple but demanding idea: people learn better when learning is oriented toward a real production, a concrete problem, an identifiable audience and a shared responsibility. The project is not a pretext. It is the medium of learning, but also its revealer.

In a project, participants must understand the context, clarify the objective, identify constraints, distribute roles, produce solutions, test, fail, adjust and present the results. They therefore learn knowledge, methods, attitudes, social skills and organizational skills at the same time.

Project-based learning does not aim only to transmit content. It aims to build a capacity to act.

1.2. Participatory Science: producing knowledge with society

Participatory Science can take several forms. Some approaches mobilize citizens as observers or data collectors. Others involve them in analysis, the formulation of questions, the design of protocols or the governance of the project.

The typology proposed by Haklay distinguishes several levels of participation, from simple contribution to more advanced forms of citizen science in which participants take part in defining problems, methods and uses of the results. This distinction is essential, because it makes it possible not to confuse contribution with autonomy.

In the most transformative projects, Participatory Science does not only seek to obtain more data. It seeks to produce knowledge that is more situated, more open, more democratic and more capable of acting on territories, behaviours, public policies or social practices.

1.3. Sport psychology: mental, psychosomatic and cognitive skills

Sport psychology has long identified mental skills that are decisive in performance and learning. The model by Durand-Bush, Salmela and Green-Demers distinguishes in particular basic skills such as confidence, commitment and goal setting; psychosomatic skills such as stress management, fear control and regulation of the activation level; and cognitive skills such as concentration, distraction control, mental imagery and planning.

These skills are not specific to sport. They are also necessary in research, project management, cooperation, education, impact entrepreneurship and Participatory Science. A participant in a scientific project must also maintain an objective, manage uncertainty, remain focused, learn from failure, regulate their emotions, cooperate with others and act within a constrained framework.

Sport can therefore be understood as a space for intensive training in transferable skills.

2. Sport as a gentle limit-situation

Sporting practice places the participant in a particular situation: they are confronted with a real but generally framed challenge; with a difficulty, but a progressive one; with a risk, but a regulated one; with uncertainty, but accompanied uncertainty. This is what can be called a gentle limit-situation.

In a hard limit-situation, the individual is exposed to a constraint that is too strong and may disorganize, injure or exclude. In a gentle limit-situation, by contrast, the constraint is strong enough to produce learning, but safe enough to allow progression.

This logic is central to sport. Effort, fatigue, balance, speed, coordination, the relationship to the environment, competition or cooperation force the practitioner to move out of a passive position. But supervision, rules, equipment, progressivity and the collective make this movement possible.

Project-based learning functions in a similar way. A good project must be demanding enough to set participants in motion, but not to the point of overwhelming them. It must create a fruitful tension between what one already knows how to do and what one must learn to do.

Participatory Science needs this tension. If the project is too simple, it does not transform. If it is too complex, it discourages. Sport helps participants bodily experience this point of balance.

3. Typology of sporting forms that can be mobilized in participatory projects

3.1. Individual sports

Individual sports, such as running, swimming, climbing, kayaking, cycling, hiking or martial arts, strongly develop the relationship to oneself. They confront the practitioner with their real level, pace, limits, progress and emotions.

They are particularly useful for working on:

• self-confidence;
• effort management;
• autonomy;
• perseverance;
• personal responsibility;
• the ability to set goals;
• acceptance of failure and starting again.

In a Participatory Science project, these skills are decisive for participants who must learn to observe, measure, document or contribute regularly, sometimes without immediate gratification.

3.2. Team sports

Team sports, such as football, rugby, basketball, volleyball or relay races, develop cooperation, communication, mutual trust and understanding of roles.

They are particularly useful for working on:

• mutual support;
• distributed leadership;
• rapid decision-making;
• coordination;
• responsibility toward the group;
• listening;
• conflict management;
• the ability to accept a collective strategy.

In Participatory Science, participants often have to act in networks, share protocols, produce comparable data and accept that their individual contribution only makes sense within a collective dynamic.

3.3. Outdoor sports

Outdoor sports occupy a special place. Kayaking, sailing, hiking, canyoning, diving, orienteering, surfing, skiing, mountain walking or navigation put the participant in direct contact with an environment.

They develop:

• attention to environmental conditions;
• reading the terrain;
• risk awareness;
• observation;
• humility in relation to the environment;
• adaptation;
• the ability to act with nature rather than against it.

These dimensions are central in environmental Participatory Science. The participant is not merely in a learning space. They are in a living, moving, complex environment that responds to their gestures.

3.4. Endurance sports

Endurance sports make it possible to work on the long term. They teach that action is not limited to initial intensity. One must endure, manage resources, know oneself, anticipate fatigue and accept fluctuations in motivation.

They are particularly relevant for participatory research projects, which are often long, repetitive, demanding and sometimes invisible in their immediate results.

3.5. Technical sports

Technical sports, such as kayaking, climbing, archery, sailing, diving or certain martial arts, develop a precise relationship between gesture, safety, protocol and repetition.

They make it possible to work on:

• rigour;
• progressive learning;
• precision;
• attention to instructions;
• safety;
• acceptance of correction;
• understanding the consequences of a poorly executed gesture.

These forms of learning are directly transferable to participatory scientific protocols.

4. Socio-anthropological modelling: sport as a producer of collective life

Sport is a social fact. It does not only produce individual effects. It organizes relationships, belongings, rites, rules, roles and forms of recognition.

In many cultures, bodily practices play a role in social integration, education, transmission, entry into adulthood, the symbolic resolution of tensions or the construction of a collective identity. Even when practised in a modern framework, sport retains this capacity to create bonds.

In Participatory Science projects, this dimension is valuable. Many audiences may feel distant from science because they do not recognize themselves in its codes, places, languages or institutions. Sport can act as a mediator. It creates a shared space of action in which social statuses are temporarily redistributed.

A researcher, an adolescent, an educator, a parent, a resident, a migrant, an athlete, a technician or an elected representative may find themselves in the same bodily activity. They do not bring the same knowledge to it, but they share an experience there. This experience can become the starting point for a more balanced relationship.

Sport can thus help transform a beneficiary audience into a learning collective.

It also makes it possible to open scientific projects to audiences that would not spontaneously come to a conference, a laboratory or an abstract protocol. Children, families, people with disabilities, disadvantaged groups or audiences distant from science can enter into a research process through an accessible, joyful, useful and situated sporting experience.

Sport does not replace scientific mediation. It can become one of its pathways.

5. Psychological modelling: confidence, commitment, resilience

5.1. Self-confidence

Sport develops confidence because it gives the participant concrete evidence of progress. What was impossible becomes difficult, then possible, then manageable. This progression is visible in the body.

In a participatory scientific project, this confidence is essential. Many participants initially think that science is not for them. They doubt their ability to observe properly, understand a protocol, handle tools, produce reliable data or speak up.

Sporting practice makes this progression tangible: learning means beginning awkwardly, starting again, receiving feedback, adjusting and realizing that one is becoming capable.

5.2. Commitment

Sporting commitment is supported by several dimensions: pleasure, challenge, the group, the objective, progress, identification with the role and recognition. These same levers are necessary in Participatory Science.

A participant does not commit sustainably only because they are told that the project is important. They commit because they understand their place, feel their usefulness, see their progress and experience a bond with others.

Sport offers a concrete model of embodied commitment.

5.3. Resilience

Resilience is not only the ability to endure a difficulty. It is the ability to reorganize after a difficulty, learn from an error, transform a failure into information and continue without being reduced to the difficulty encountered.

In sport, error is permanent: poor gesture, wrong trajectory, fatigue, fall, defeat, fear, hesitation, imbalance. But if the framework is good, error becomes material for learning.

In Participatory Science, this culture of error is indispensable. Participants must be able to understand that imperfect data, a poorly applied protocol or an invalidated hypothesis are not humiliating failures, but stages of clarification.

5.4. Robustness

Robustness here refers to the ability to hold up in an imperfect environment. A participatory project never takes place under ideal conditions. There are delays, absences, unforeseen events, misunderstandings, material constraints, group tensions and missing data.

Sport trains precisely for this reality. It teaches people to act with wind, fatigue, weather, terrain, the opponent, equipment, fear and uncertainty. It makes the idea that real action always takes place in an incomplete world more acceptable.

6. Neurocognitive and behavioural modelling

Sporting practice mobilizes complex cognitive processes. It engages attention, inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, anticipation, planning and decision-making.

In many sports, the practitioner must process several pieces of information simultaneously: their body, others, space, rules, time, the objective, danger, rhythm and weak signals. This cognitive activity is not abstract. It is embodied in action.

This embodied cognition is particularly interesting for Participatory Science. Field projects require perceiving, selecting, comparing, interpreting and documenting situated information. The participant must learn to see what matters.

Sport also develops regulation of the activation level. Too little activation produces inattention or passivity. Too much activation produces panic or haste. The athlete gradually learns to find an effective zone of engagement.

In a participatory scientific project, this regulation is also necessary: staying focused during an observation, not becoming discouraged by a repetitive task, not panicking when faced with a technical difficulty, not becoming scattered in a collective project.

Sport can therefore be seen as neurocognitive training for situated action.

7. Sport and project-based learning: from sporting challenge to scientific challenge

Sport and project-based learning share the same deep structure.

In both cases, there are:

• an objective;
• constraints;
• rules;
• a collective or a framework for action;
• progression;
• feedback;
• errors;
• adjustments;
• an observable production;
• a transformation of the participant.

Sport can thus serve as a warm-up to the project posture. It brings participants into a dynamic of action even before the project is intellectually formulated. It sets them in motion, both literally and figuratively.

In a hackathon, a training course, a scientific stay, a discovery class or a field operation, a well-chosen sporting practice can prepare participants for cooperation, listening, controlled risk, role-taking, confidence and commitment.

But this integration must be intentional. It is not enough to add a sporting activity to the programme. The pedagogical link between the bodily activity and the project must be organized.

After the activity, it must be possible to ask:

• What did we learn about ourselves?
• What did we learn about the group?
• What roles emerged?
• How did we manage fear or uncertainty?
• How did we make decisions?
• What errors helped us progress?
• What skills are transferable to the scientific project?
• How can this experience be transformed into a method?

It is this reflective passage that transforms sport into a tool for project-based learning.

8. Sport and Participatory Science: from practitioner to co-investigator

Sport can become a direct support for Participatory Science when it makes it possible to observe, measure, document or access environments.

A kayaking outing can become an operation for observing the coastline. A hike can become biodiversity monitoring. An orienteering race can become participatory mapping. A dive can become a species survey. A bicycle outing can become an air-quality measurement. A collective walk can become an investigation into urban accessibility. A nautical activity can become a citizen observatory of floating waste, birds, water temperature or coastal uses.

In this perspective, the athlete is not only a practitioner. They become a co-investigator.

This transformation requires several conditions:

• simple protocols;
• progressive training;
• clear safety;
• useful data;
• visible restitution;
• recognition of contributions;
• articulation with researchers or institutions;
• an understanding of the meaning of observation.

Sport then makes it possible to connect sensory experience and knowledge production. It links gesture, environment and data.

9. Kayaking as an integrative model

Kayaking is a particularly rich case for thinking about this articulation.

It is both an individual sport and a collective activity. Each practitioner is alone in their craft, but depends on the group for safety, orientation, rhythm and decision-making. It engages autonomy and interdependence.

It is practised in a moving natural environment: sea, river, lake, current, wind, wave, depth, weather, temperature. The kayaker must learn to read the environment. They cannot impose their will on the water. They must compose with it.

It develops technical skills: getting into the kayak, paddling, steering, balancing, recovering, securing oneself, getting back into the kayak, helping another practitioner. These skills build self-confidence because they transform an initial fear into a real capacity.

It also develops mental skills: staying calm in waves, accepting being tossed around, relaxing, anticipating, deciding, not tensing up, assessing risk, giving up if necessary.

Finally, it provides access to observation areas that are sometimes difficult to reach from land. Kayaking can therefore become a research tool: wildlife observation, photographic surveys, waste monitoring, access to coves, non-motorized approach, coastal awareness, collection of environmental information.

As a metaphor, kayaking says something profound about Participatory Science: moving forward in a living environment, reading signals, correcting one’s trajectory, cooperating, holding one’s course, accepting uncertainty and learning from the field.

10. Application to researchers, doctoral students and scientific teams

The value of sport does not only concern non-scientific audiences. It also concerns researchers, doctoral students and scientific teams.

Research life is often marked by sedentary behaviour, isolation, pressure, uncertainty, cognitive fatigue, symbolic competition, difficulty completing work and sometimes abandonment. In some doctoral pathways, a lack of well-being, loss of meaning or difficulty organizing time can become dropout factors.

Integrating sporting practice into research environments can therefore have several effects:

• improve stress regulation;
• strengthen well-being;
• create team cohesion;
• give bodily rhythms to long intellectual activities;
• reduce isolation;
• support concentration;
• restore a sense of daily accomplishment;
• develop resilience in the face of scientific setbacks.

This proposal may seem counter-intuitive. Adding sport to an already busy schedule may appear to be a waste of time. Yet if sporting practice improves quality of presence, mental clarity, psychological health and productivity, it does not necessarily reduce work. On the contrary, it can make work more sustainable.

This nevertheless requires a change of paradigm. Sport should not be considered a personal luxury to be practised once the “real work” is finished. It can be recognized as a component of the ecology of scientific work.

11. Intercultural dimension: not exporting a single sporting model

The integration of sport into Participatory Science must remain culturally situated.

Not all cultures value the same bodily practices, the same relationships to effort, the same forms of competition, the same uses of the body, the same gender rules, the same conceptions of the collective or the same ways of surpassing oneself.

It would therefore be problematic to export a Western, competitive, individualistic or standardized sporting model into all contexts. In some territories, walking, dance, rowing, wrestling, navigation, collective games, martial arts, agricultural practices, fishing, traditional hunting, subsistence activities or daily travel may play a more relevant role than institutionalized sports.

The issue is not to make all audiences fit into a narrow definition of sport. It is to recognize the bodily practices that, in each culture, develop attention, autonomy, responsibility, cooperation, courage, self-control and the relationship to the environment.

Inequalities of access must also be taken into account: gender, age, disability, social class, health, safety, equipment, availability, cultural norms and possible trauma. Sport must not become a new tool of exclusion.

It must be designed as a gateway to the capacity to act.

12. Proposed model: the Sport-Project-Science cycle

Based on the preceding elements, it is possible to propose an eight-phase model.

Phase 1 — Bodily activation

Sport sets participants in motion. It moves the group out of a seated, passive or strictly discursive posture. It creates a different form of availability.

Phase 2 — Situated experience

Participants experience a real situation, in an environment, with constraints, emotions, interactions and unforeseen events.

Phase 3 — Observation

The experience is transformed into an object of observation: what happened? What did we see, feel, measure, understand? What signals did we perceive?

Phase 4 — Formalization

The group links the observations to concepts, hypotheses, data, maps, narratives, protocols or research questions.

Phase 5 — Cooperation

Participants organize roles, responsibilities, complementarities and decision-making modes.

Phase 6 — Empowerment

Each person understands their contribution. The project becomes partly their own. Participation ceases to be merely presence.

Phase 7 — Restitution

The group produces a shareable result: data, poster, map, narrative, prototype, protocol, presentation, educational tool or project proposal.

Phase 8 — Transfer

The skills acquired are transferred to other contexts: school, laboratory, association, territory, impact enterprise, research programme, public policy or personal project.

13. Limits, risks and points of vigilance

Integrating sport into Participatory Science entails several risks.

The first is instrumentalization. Sport may be used as simple entertainment, with no real link to learning, research or the project. In this case, it entertains, but does not structure.

The second is the excessive valorization of high-performing profiles. If the system admires only the fastest, strongest or bravest, it reproduces hierarchies and may exclude less athletic people.

The third is confusion between self-transcendence and exceeding safety limits. Self-transcendence has pedagogical value only if it remains chosen, progressive, accompanied and respectful of people’s integrity.

The fourth is cultural risk. A sporting activity may be experienced as unsuitable, embarrassing, socially inappropriate or inaccessible depending on the context.

The fifth is a lack of evaluation. It is not enough to assert that sport produces autonomy or resilience. Effects must be documented, experiences collected, systems compared, limits analysed and knowledge produced.

An ethical framework is therefore necessary. It must include:

• consent;
• safety;
• inclusion;
• accessibility;
• progressivity;
• diversity of bodies;
• diversity of cultures;
• the possibility of not taking part in a physical activity;
• recognition of non-competitive learning.

14. Discussion: toward a bodily ecology of Participatory Science

Science is often thought of as an activity of the mind. Participatory Science reminds us that it is also a social activity. The integration of sport makes it possible to add a third dimension: science is also a bodily, situated, emotional and relational activity.

Observing an environment, following a protocol, walking for a long time, paddling, waiting, measuring, concentrating, cooperating, carrying equipment, facing discomfort, revisiting one’s errors, recounting what one has seen: all of this engages the body.

It is therefore possible to speak of a bodily ecology of Participatory Science. This ecology does not separate knowledge, action, emotion, the collective and the environment. It thinks them together.

In this perspective, sport becomes a bridge. It connects:

• field and knowledge;
• effort and attention;
• emotion and method;
• autonomy and safety;
• pleasure and rigour;
• self-transcendence and respect for limits;
• individual experience and collective production.

This is not a matter of sportivizing all scientific projects. It is a matter of recognizing that certain sporting practices, when well chosen and well integrated, can train participants who are more capable, more committed, more robust and more responsible.

Conclusion

Sporting practice can play a structuring role in project-based learning and Participatory Science. It must not be reduced to an activity of relaxation, health or cohesion. It can become a method for training autonomy, commitment, responsibility, resilience, robustness and self-transcendence.

Sport engages participants in a real experience. It teaches them to act under uncertainty, manage their emotions, cooperate, read an environment, respect rules, take initiatives, start again after failure and gradually transform their capacities.

Participatory Science needs these skills. It cannot be limited to asking citizens to collect data. It must train people capable of understanding, contributing, questioning, documenting, transmitting and sometimes becoming co-authors of projects.

Project-based learning provides the framework for this transformation. Sport can be one of its bodily and social accelerators.

The challenge is therefore not to juxtapose sport and science, but to build hybrid systems in which the sporting gesture becomes a learning gesture, the observation gesture becomes a scientific gesture, and the participant gradually becomes an actor capable of acting on themselves, with others and in the world.