The physical education reform in Wallonia-Brussels Federation (Belgium)

The educational reform, which the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB – French speaking part of Belgium) is currently implementing, will directly affect teacher training. In the domain of “Physical Activities, Wellbeing and... [ view full abstract ]

The educational reform, which the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB – French speaking part of Belgium) is currently implementing, will directly affect teacher training. In the domain of “Physical Activities, Wellbeing and Health” of the new core curriculum required in the “Pact for Excellence in Education” (PEE), the implementation of actions in health education will be instituted and strengthened in school curricula.

A group of experts from the 12 French-speaking institutions involved in PETE has been mandated by the Ministry of Education in early 2017 to identify, design and share teaching devices and tools respecting the principles of the PEE in the specific domain. The project is based on the collaborative didactic engineering model (Goigoux,2012 ; Sénéchal,2016). The approach’s specificity lays on the collaboration between teacher educators and practitioners at each step of the project.

The first steps were to screen the literature focusing on the inclusion of health education in physical education programs, the identification and analysis of didactic devices and tools, based on the 6 dimensions of physical activity in schools (Snyers et al.,2014) and 20 objects of teaching and learning in health education (Turcotte et al.,2011). Projects developed in FWB and other countries based on evidence or field practice, corresponding to the priorities of the PEE, were selected in order to prepare fact sheets describing the educational devices and tools for the promotion of physical activity, wellbeing and health in a school context.

Since early 2018, the works of this group are focused on the validation and the evaluation of additional tools and devices, to be implemented in the specific context of the FWB. All of these devices and tools were designed to be shared with the educational actors.

The paper provides a description of the state of progress of the project and illustrates the methodology that is applied.