Abstract
The aim of this study was (a) to investigate how the concepts of Physical Activity (PA) and Physical Fitness (PF) are used within school interventions designed to promote student health, and (b) to propose the adoption of a biopedagogical perspective within school Physical Education (PE), as a viable framework for teaching and interpreting the above concepts. The review of literature focused on studies published from 2000 to date. From the total of the 73 initially selected articles, only 33 were used since they met the inclusion criteria. The “didactic triangle” was used as a theoretical framework for analyzing the selected literature. The results indicated that most studies adopted healthism as their underlying perspective, one which connects the benefits of participation in PA and exercise with physiological and cognitive changes in students’ development. The analysis that was conducted according to the didactic triangle showed that healthism limits the improvement of health to a primarily individual effort and thus fails to capture the dynamics of the “student-teacher-content” relationship in the adoption of PA habits. In contrast to the above, the proposed biopedagogical perspective, as presented in the present study, focuses on health as an existential property that is acquired experientially through students’ participation in PA content and activities that stimulate them primarily in terms of social and emotional learning. In future educational interventions, the biopedagogical approach is proposed to be used within PE curriculum models in order to test its long-term impact on learning outcomes related to students’ health.
Full text: 
The meaning of health within school Physical Education. A biopedagogical approach 616 KB