Pages: 14

The responsibility of schools to promote health has heightened in recent decades due to escalating concerns about young people’s health and health behaviours, including physical activity levels. This has increased the expectation on Physical Education (PE) to play a leading role in promoting active lifestyles, which has become a prominent theme in PE curricula globally. Challenges that schools face in effectively contributing to public health include them having little or no influence on key factors affecting young people’s health and limited capacity to pursue additional health outcomes. There is also uncertainty about the level of responsibility PE should accept for health outcomes and concerns about the expression of health in PE, which is not helped by the limited attention afforded to health promotion in teachers’ professional development. A whole-school approach to health can help schools meet health-related expectations and PE teachers are well placed to support school-wide initiatives. Within this, active cross-curricular links can improve the coherence and effectiveness of health-related learning, and activity breaks can improve students’ concentration and behaviour. Schools can also make connections with national health-promoting initiatives, incorporate active pedagogies and pursue research-informed pedagogical approaches to promoting health within PE to enhance students’ health-related learning and physical activity behaviours.

Pages: 18

This chapter explores some of the fundamental considerations and pedagogical principles underpinning the teaching of health in Physical Education (PE), including its philosophy, content, outcomes and organisation. Throughout, teachers are encouraged to reflect on the teaching, health-related learning and organisation of health within their own PE curricula. For the teaching of health in PE to be effective, a pedagogical emphasis and knowledge base which puts the ‘child’ at the core, rather than the activity or curriculum, is advocated. These should be underpinned by positive messages and practices focussed on physical activity for life, experiential learning, the acquisition of a practical knowledge base, and an explicit commitment to inclusion, equity, democracy and empowerment. The chapter also highlights the need for a broad, balanced, holistic and critical approach to health-related learning in order to equip and empower young people to make informed decisions regarding their physical activity participation and behaviour. Two main approaches to the organisation of health within PE are identified and critiqued, an integrated and focussed approach, but it is suggested that the critical issue should be the effectiveness of the learning rather than the approach(es) adopted.

Pages: 15

Fitness testing is arguably the most contested Physical Education- (PE)-for-health practice, especially in countries such as England, Australia and the United States of America. The testing of children within PE can be traced back to at least the early twentieth century, but approaches to teaching in, through and about fitness testing continue to be debated. Such debates, for example, relate to educative purpose (i.e. the tendency to focus on fitness testing in isolation as opposed to being embedded within a broader fitness education unit), the placing of students ‘on display’ (i.e. so that it is very clear who the higher and lower performers are) and the presentation and use of test results. One way to respond to the debates related to fitness testing is to expand how we think about fitness testing. That is to say, instead of focussing on ‘what the body is’ (e.g. underweight, flexible, strong) we can focus on ‘what the body can do’ (i.e. culturally, psychologically, socially and physically). Doing so, aligns more closely with contemporary and multi-dimensional understandings of health, and opens up opportunities for more inclusive and educative fitness testing, and PE-for-health practices more broadly.

Pages: 14

Promoting lifelong participation in physical activity is perceived as a key goal of Physical Education (PE). However, due to historical issues such as poor teacher preparation and some questionable practice, PE has largely failed in the achievement of this goal. Given that whole-school approaches to health and physical activity promotion are increasingly viewed as a global priority to help address the multiple influences on young people’s physical activity behaviour, there is a clear need to challenge the traditional approaches and to champion alternatives. This need endures, despite numerous interventions to stimulate sustained change in teachers’ practice. Importantly, multi-component approaches have shown real promise in their potential impact on health and physical activity outcomes for young people. In this chapter several multi-component approaches are explored, before Models-based Practice (MbP) and pedagogical models are focussed on as the ‘organising centre’ for curriculum design. To conclude Health-based PE is presented as a model which centrally positions valuing a physically active life as its main idea and provides an evidence-informed, flexible framework for teaching health-related PE.

Pages: 15

This chapter provides a rationale and framework for the Health-based Physical Education (HbPE) pedagogical model. The main idea of HbPE is ‘valuing a physically active life’ which contrasts with the emphasis on fitness, exercise and sport-dominated outcomes in common forms of health-related PE. This model has the potential to reconceptualise the way in which health-related PE is taught and enhance its impact on young people’s physical activity behaviours. The chapter highlights the rationale for new PE-for-health pedagogies with specific reference to pedagogical models, before exploring the background and development of HbPE. The chapter aims to justify HbPE’s main idea, learning aspirations, critical elements and pedagogy. Throughout the chapter, teachers are encouraged to reflect on strategies for supporting students to value a physically active life through PE.

Pages: 15

This chapter focusses on the Promoting Active Lifestyles (PAL) Project, a key aim of which was to help Physical Education (PE) trainees and teachers align their aspirations for young people to lead physically active lives with their practices in PE, within the broader context of a whole-school approach to health promotion. The Project involved the co-construction and implementation of PAL principles and paradoxes, considered to be associated with the promotion of active lifestyles among young people. All the PE trainees and teachers involved in the Project viewed the PAL principles positively and were able to implement some of them. They also found the PAL paradoxes interesting and perplexing and expressed a keen desire to address them. Many of the PE trainees and teachers described how their involvement in the Project led to transformative and enduring changes to their health-related philosophies and pedagogies and some reported being able to influence colleagues/peers’ health-related philosophies and pedagogies. The PAL Project resulted in closer alignment between PE teachers’ health-related philosophies and pedagogies which they believe led to them becoming more effective promoters of physical activity.

Pages: 17

Compared to previous generations, young people today are more likely to have digitised habits, actions and behaviours and differ in how they process information, express themselves, interact and manage and organise their daily activities. In this context, there is a need to consider how best Physical Education (PE) might be re-structured and re-organised and how PE teachers might be prepared differently to meet the new needs of young people in a digital age. One way to structure thinking about a different approach to PE in a digital age is to focus on learning attributes. Such a focus reminds us that learning is situated in the prevailing context of circumstances, activities and culture, and is a process of creating connections, networks and relationships. Taking into account how young people learn through digital technologies, proposed learning attributes for PE in a digital age emphasise: personalisation, asynchronous and synchronous learning, peer- and family-based learning contexts, and mass engagement in learning. To adopt such an approach and better prepare teachers to operate effectively in a digital age, initial and continuing professional development in PE could shift the primary emphasis from preparing to teach the curriculum to preparing to work creatively and collaboratively with young people.

Pages: 14

In this final chapter of the book, Physical Education (PE) and its relationship with health are presented as having a bright future. As educational thinking moves beyond the restrictions of the traditional thinking that long marginalised the subject area, five related factors are currently creating a context that will see PE gradually move towards the centre of the curriculum and develop a more positive relationship with health. These factors are the turn to more contemporary ways of thinking, the emergence of many new holistic approaches across education, PE, health and physical activity research, and the active engagement of a wider range of PE stakeholders. While recognising that potential barriers will need to be negotiated, the chapter finishes by proposing that personal vision, boundary crossing and professional development that recognises the contexts in which teachers’ work offers a framework to plan and enact this brighter future for PE and its relationship with health.