Aquatic education for prevention

Abstract

Background: Drowning is a serious public health problem, annually involving more than 320,000 deaths worldwide. Years of research and awareness about  the need for a change in educational approaches in aquatic education, have nowadays brought out the relevance of targeting a competence acquisition which implies not only a true  aquatic environment mastery, but also  a reduction in injuries and drowning .

Goals: The purpose of this document is to state a position about aquatic education based on a crystal clear preventive approach.

Method: On an international level, the main references concerning drowning prevention and preventive aquatic education related topics were reviewed.

Results: Once the sub-competences which should be addressed were identified, they were  particularly analysed, comprising  pedagogical recommendations for each one of them. Based on this, general recommendations emerge to guide educational processes, highlighting the need for an entire population awareness to universally achieve a comprehensive drowning prevention.

Conclusions: On the whole, aquatic education enlightens the need for a qualitative leap which surpassess the idea of ​”​knowing how to swim” as the only resource for not drowning. This brings out new significant conceptions and methodologies which promote a variable environments and risk circumstances transference and consider individual and collective situations in the process in a culturally related approach.

Keywords: prevention, aquatic education, drowning, water competence, aquatic environment, transference.