Pedagogical tools for aquatic literacy development

The Aquatic Literacy for all Children project (ALFAC) was born from the recognition that the Aquatic Literacy (AL) development is probably the major challenge for the aquatic professionals. AL involves aquatic skills, knowledge and psychosocial domains to ensure drowning prevention, motor development and a long live involvement.
A European consortium in the field of learn-to-swim agreed to map the AL of 6 to 12 years-old children and build pedagogical tools to support the instructors teaching. While some care exists when implementing aquatic programs on the learn-to-swim context, most still fail not having a holistic approach to the individual (Mekkaoui et al., 2022). It is now necessary to build an aquatic pedagogical toolkit, ensuring a multi-cultural approach, to fully develop children and raise the level of AL across Europe.
After AL mapping, a large number of friendly-user pedagogical exercise situations, videos and interactive materials were built to conduct instructors intervention, especially in the weaker domains. Evaluation tools were also included to allow appreciation of children’s improvement while ensuring the aquatic safety and motor development.
Those tools were initially disseminated through a small aquatic instructors sample in each country followed by a questionnaire to evaluate its feasibility and relevance. Then smooth changes were made to make each tool more relevant to different settings.
ALFAC sees instructors as active persons in tools redefinition. The final ALFAC issue is to create an on-line tool that supports instructors practice on drowning prevention and children’s motor development, in the three domains of the AL. The strength of these tools is that they allow sharing of best practices from several countries hoping that can raise the level of AL in children across Europe and enabling them to enjoy the aquatic environment safely throughout their lives.