Preparing physically educated citizens in PE Expectations and practices

Since the end of the 80’s, physical education (PE) is a right for any citizen. Nevertheless, this school subject experienced a crisis expressed by a certain marginalization, a reduction of the curriculum time allocation, some questioning about the subject status, repeated decreases of material, human and financial resources as well as presence of inadequacies in facility and equipment supply, or a low remuneration of teachers. However, since two decades, the growing recognition of the benefits that society could get out one physically active lifestyle for health leads to a shift in the PE priorities. All around the world, PE teachers have to adapt their programs and teaching strategies in order to prepare physically educated citizens. It seems now essential to propose contents that will be more transferable in the out of school life. PE teachers are now expected to be the corner stones of the promotion of a healthy lifestyle that their students should acquire for their whole life. This attractive vision is not well supported by the literature, mainly when considering the long term effects. Reasons of that lack of achievement have been underlined and solutions are now proposed and implemented. Teachers are recommended to be models, update their knowledge, do networking, become project managers, and behave like real professionals. Moreover, they should foster students’ play and pleasure, achievement and learning, movement, interactions, and autonomy. Physical literacy and accountability became two major guiding principles of PE teaching. PE teachers’ education should rely now on pedagogical cases, communities of practice and action researches. A growing number of examples of good practices is available. In parallel, researchers implement studies aiming to analyse the effects of these initiatives. Using technology like computers, video, tablets, Web-based applications … is considered as a promising approach