The recently launched Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education has five propositions, one of which is for students to adopt a critical inquiry approach within this subject area. In particular, students are encouraged to explore issues that relate to social power and taken-for-granted assumptions. This paper problematizes the concept of…

According to students, fun, good grades and time with friends are the three key outcomes of physical education. A further review of fun in physical education, from the perspective of students, is included in this article. Selected responses from interviews with high school students reference fun as an important part of their experience in physical…

Background: One of the essential elements within Sport Education is the inclusion of student roles and responsibilities. While previous research has examined students' performance in officiating tasks, the examination of student-coaches' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) within peer-assisted tasks of Sport Education has been scarce. Indeed, the…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to explore what it means to be able to move in different ways. What does it mean, from the perspective of the learners, to know how to carry out a specific movement? What is there to know and how could this insight contribute to the planning of developing learners' capability to move in different ways? As an…

Background: Education policies and curriculum documents in many European countries promote the social and moral development of young people as a cross-curriculum goal and place that goal at the center of the education process. All subjects, including physical education (PE) are required to contribute to the social and moral development of the…

Gender approach in education is a specific impact on the development of boys and girls by the set of factors of education and training process. The objective of this research is the reasoning of applying gender approach at physical culture lessons and creating comfortable environment taking into account the psychophysiological differences of the…

This study was carried out within the context of a requirement for every Australian Capital Territory Education and Training Directorate (ACT ETD) high school to include Indigenous perspectives across all areas of the curriculum. For the first time ever in the case study school reported in this article, two Torres Strait Island dances were taught…

Community development research suggests that positive partnerships and connections between groups can result in stronger, more resilient and productive communities. Despite community connections featuring increasingly at a curriculum level in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, research is only beginning to explore the nuanced processes…

Background: This study was grounded in the differentiated instructional model where teachers tailor content, process/support, and product in response to their students' levels of readiness and interest. The value of differentiated teaching is well established; however, the implementation of such a technique is difficult due to differences in…

Physical education (PE) is steeped in history, tradition and ritual. The accepted tradition of excuse notes allowing pupils to self-exempt from lessons is one such ritual associated with the subject in schools. This paper explores the impact of this phenomenon, focusing on participation and engagement levels within PE lessons. Data was collected…

The purpose of this study was to examine the pedagogy of facilitation within physical education professional development (PD). Specific research questions were: 1) What were the self-identified pedagogical strategies employed by facilitators in PD?, and 2) From the perspective of the participants, what strategies contributed to their growth as…

Background: School Health and Physical Education (HPE) and sport has increasingly become a complex cultural contact zone. With global population shifts, schools need policies and strategies to attend to the interests and needs of diverse student populations. School HPE and sport is a particularly significant site as it is a touchpoint for a range…

Girls' identity constructions are influenced by the dominant sport, health and beauty discourses in their society. Recent research indicates that sport and health discourses embedded in physical education (PE) compete for influence. Some of these studies have illustrated how these discourses inform girls' social construction of body ideals and…

This research project focuses on teacher education in a field-based methods course. We were interested in understanding what "could be" when we worked with pre-service teachers in a high school physical education class to assist them in the process of learning to listen and respond to their students in ways that might better facilitate…

Background: For many physical educators, the Spectrum of Teaching Styles serves as a "tool box" for meeting the different needs of students and goals in physical education. Despite the proliferation in Spectrum research in which researchers have examined teacher experience and student skill, knowledge, and social learning within the…