Identification and validation of good practices promoting physical activity, well-being and health through a collaborative didactic engineering approach

Since 2016, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB - French speaking part of Belgium) prepares the implementation of a substantial reform of its educational system. One of the axes of that project called ‘Pact for Excellence in Education’ (PEE) deals with a deeply modification of the core curriculum that will emphasize 8 domains. Among these domains, one directly involves physical education (PE): “Physical Activities, Wellbeing and Health”. It means that there is a need to redefine PE teachers’ missions and priorities as well as preparing them to implement actions in health education.

The Ministry of Education mandated a group of experts from the 12 French-speaking institutions involved in physical education teacher education (PETE) in order to identify, design and share teaching resources respecting the principles advocated by the PEE and aiming to promote physical activity, wellbeing and health. The specificity of the approach is based on the collaboration between teacher educators and practitioners at each step of the project, in line with the collaborative didactic engineering model (Goigoux, 2012; Sénéchal, 2016).

The selection of a sample of good practices implemented in FWB and/or other countries (Bonni et al., 2018) was based on evidence or field practice. In addition, the group of experts had also to test several projects in the specific context of the FWB’ schools.

Six projects were analyzed : “Development of the playground”, “Nutriathlon”, “Oblomov: move, play, create!”, “PAPS” (Physical Activity Pauses at School), “Dare to save at school”, “Playground layout”. The aim of this presentation is to propose an overview of the data collected at that point.. The latter are expected to be shared on a digital platform managed by the educational authorities.