Physical education and leisure: What’s the link?

All around the world, practitioners and researchers point out that people are becoming less and less physically active and adopt more and more sedentary behaviours. Such changes in the Human lifestyle could have dramatic consequences as pointed out by the ‘Designed to move’ movement (Morris, 2013). To fight against that irresistible evolution, the need of a multisectorial approach is illustrated by the complexity of the socio-ecological model (Sallis et al., 2006). It underlines the large array of variables that play in the physical activity that someone is able to integrate into his/her life.
Nevertheless, school has been identified as one major pillar of the promotion of an active lifestyle (van Sluijs et al., 2007). According to the knowledge and specific competences that they acquire during their studies, physical education (PE) teachers are considered as the potential cornerstones of such action (Tappe & Burgeson, 2004). While it was traditionally focused on the development of the youth’s physical, motor, and social competences of the students, since two decades, PE is increasingly more associated to the preparation of physically educated citizens. It means that what the students learn during their PE lessons should be useful outside the school and for a lifelong term. This concept is become a determining pedagogical principle: the physical literacy (Whitehead, 2013).
In parallel, PE teachers are now requested to play a role on the health of their students despite if few evidence confirm that they can be successful in influencing the future behaviours of the children/adolescents to who they teach (Green, 2014). New pedagogical approaches are proposed nowadays in order to increase the effectiveness of the PE teachers’ intervention. This is linked to another pedagogical principle: accountability.
Leisure activities enter progressively in the PE curriculum. Students benefit of more experiences that they could operate in their community. This requires more partnerships between school and leisure actors in order to implement original projects. Students must learn to become autonomous and smart decision makers able to identify the way to integrate PA in their leisure.