Rejuvenating, Reconstituting, and Transforming Physical Education to Meet the Needs of Vulnerable Children, Youth, and Families

The U.S. has a children’s crisis. A crisis also looms for physical education. Physical education is becoming a plowed out, decimated, and disappearing field because of its design flaws, selectivity, and silences. The children’s crisis provides opportunities for physical education to rejuvenate, reconstitute, and transform itself. New visions, missions, and conceptions of competent practice can be developed in response to the multiple, interdependent needs of poor and vulnerable children, youth, families, and their local neighborhood communities. Opportunities are emerging to develop new change theories and design models in conjunction with emergent complex change initiatives in school communities. Different kinds of change theories are identified. Possibilities for new design models are sketched. Together, these change theories and design models provide new directions for research and practice. They signal a change in paradigms.