PHASE Asia Pacific is a conference for all educators focussed on physical education, health, athletics, sports, and experiential learning. The conference allows participants to learn from leading authorities in their respective fields as well as from practitioner presenters, to network with fellow educators, and to access good practice and resources in multiple formats.
PHASE has evolved from the Asia Pacific Physical Education Conference (APPEC) which was a dedicated Physical Education & Wellness event for the Asia Pacific region starting in 2015.
A strengths-based approach to health and physical education (HPE) has been positioned as a foundational philosophy of the new Australian HPE curriculum. This “positive” approach to HPE seeks to focus less on human deficits, societal and individual risk behaviours, and more on the strengths and resources that can be nurtured within young people and their communities. Building on my keynote presentation, this workshop will first review the range of theoretical perspectives informing strengths-based approaches and the reasons why this knowledge is critical for curriculum design.
Drawing on a recent curriculum design project for Netball Queensland, participants will explore a range of contemporary youth “health issues” and the ways in which such health issues can be re-imagined and re-oriented to reflect a strengths-based approach to health education in school settings. Importantly, participants will be provided with a series of meta-curriculum design steps that will facilitate their future endeavours in constructing units of work that focus on or contribute to learning outcomes that can inform lifelong healthy living.
