The Grapple Hut Huddle, June 2023
Eric goes a bit further with his discussion on pedagogical practices in jiu jitsu.
This month’s newsletter is going to be a bit shorter than I like but there will be a few extra articles released in June/July to make up for the lack of depth in this piece so keep an eye out for those.
THIS MONTH'S BIG GRAPPLING EVENTS
June 2 - IBJJF Worlds (FloGrappling)
The time has come once again for the IBJJF Worlds competition to take place in California. I am very much not familiar with most of this and likely won’t be able to watch any of the matches due to a) a personal boycott of FloGrappling content and b) timezone differences in addition to personal commitments but it was probably worth mentioning here for you to know about in case you really wanted to watch some gi grappling.
June 9 - ONE Fight Night 11 (Amazon Prime in USA)
Another month and ONE are putting on another card filled with combat sports action, this time taking place live out of the world famous Lumpinee Boxing Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand. Typically you’d hear about Lumpinee with regards to muay thai fights (which I personally went to go see when I got to visit Bangkok a few years ago), however with a partnership with ONE Championship the stadium has seen more than just muay thai taking place with ONE’s weekly Friday Fights hosting kickboxing and MMA matches. This event will feature what I can tell is the first grappling competition in the stadium between ADCC 2022 champion Kade Ruotolo and Tommy Langaker in a Welterweight (185 lbs) grappling match for the ONE Grappling Welterweight Championship.
THE NEWS
As part of the build up of the super fight between UFC Featherweight Champion Alexander Volkanovski and UFC Lightweight Champion Islam Makhachev, Craig Jones (who helps Volkanovski train in submission grappling ahead of his fights) made several quips about SAMBO (which Islam and his team trained in) being inferior to jiu jitsu.
As that time went on Craig also hosted several seminars with the cheekily named “SAMBO IS FAKE TOUR” as a nod to the remarks he made and how it seemed to provoke the likes of former UFC Lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov (who once wore a “If SAMBO was easy, it’d be jiu jitsu” shirt to a UFC weigh-in).
Now it seems that there will be an organized competition of Craig Jones’ team, B-Team Jiu Jitsu, and a team picked by Khabib to represent their respective sports in a team grappling event. The news was revealed in a discussion on The Simple Man podcast hosted by B-Team notables Ethan Crelinsten, Nick Rodriguez and Damien Anderson. No further details have been released but a prospective team match seems intriguing.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY & JIU JITSU
Last month I spoke briefly about pedagogical approaches to teaching and tried to contextualize them in ways that relate to jiu jitsu. Some discussion arose specifically about Critical Pedagogy, and a question one person asked stood out:
“Knowing what you know about jits culture would you say that its actually a good thing that critical pedagogy is rarely done in jits. Do you really want most coaches to wax poetic with shitty opinions?”
This mostly is referring to the, for lack of a better word, “chud” or “right-wing adjacent” and “alpha male obsessed” culture that exists within jiu jitsu’s community as a whole. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad question but it doesn’t really relate to what critical pedagogy is meant to do.
Critical pedagogy is an approach to education in which the outcomes for the student are to empower and expand their critical thinking, social justice and political consciousness. This doesn’t mean you spread your political, social, or personal ideology onto your students. That already happens no matter what you do be it intentionally or not. Instead, critical pedagogy works to help your students develop the necessary skills and knowledge needed to be able to think critically. In essence, its the opposite of dictating what one should or should not think.
So let’s take a look at ways we can see critical pedagogy take place in jiu jitsu settings.
One way is by recognizing the existing power dynamics. A coach can use critical pedagogy by acknowledging and addressing the power dynamics that exist in a jiu jitsu gym. This is somewhat important for the student as it can help them understand the influences their coach may or may not have over their personal choices, behavior etc. We see this a lot in regards to the power dynamics that exist between a male head coach and a female learner, and by better enabling students to be aware of that dynamic they can start to question the role it plays in certain interpersonal relationships.
A similar example can be through the reflection of social hierarchies. There are tons of hierarchal structures that exist in jiu jitsu from the belt rankings to competition status to even gym affiliations. An instructor can encourage their students to look at these hiearchal structures and think about how privilege, gender, and other factors play a role in the establishment of them and how they continue to exist to this day.
Finally, a pretty useful form of critical pedagogy is developing a student’s ability to critically analyze jiu jitsu techniques and strategies. We saw a good example of this in the “Leglock Explosion” this past decade or so where leg attacks became far more common in the sport. Someone, somewhere sat down and saw that this was a massive void in strategy and technique training and sought to exploit it for various reasons (likely personal interest in training those techniques or even competition success). They had to ask the question as to why certain techniques were being used more than others, and then had to challenge themselves to address that gap in knowledge.
There are more ways that critical pedagogy can be utilized in jiu jitsu or other sports such as judo or wrestling.
The goal of critical pedagogy isn’t to allow uncritical absorbtion of personal beliefs or philosophy on a topic or theme, but to actually allow your student to develop what they need to ask “why does that exist?” and then pursue that question themselves.