ASRP: Integrating STEM Practices into Physical Education as a Personalised Learning Approach for Foundation Students

The extant literature reports primary classroom teachers have restricted capacity to teach quality Physical Education (PE). One of the main reasons cited internationally, is limited exposure in pre-service teacher education. This inadequate introduction leads to poor in-service teacher confidence, especially amongst classroom generalist teachers. Further, the in-school situation tends to be exacerbated by restricted opportunities to PE specific professional learning, and the marginalised status of PE compounded by classroom primary teachers having to teach across all key learning areas. Our proposed project offers a solution to the issue we have raised, by enabling high-quality cost-effective PE teaching across all Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public schools. We intend building on provisional findings from a large-scale Affiliated Schools project being implemented at five schools across all four school terms in 2022. The following media article encapsulated the nuances, multi-faceted nature and impact of the current study UC Uncover Story Our planned project for 2023 extends this work, by integrating Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) through the STEM Practices Model (Lowrie et al., 2018) targeting Foundation students at six schools. The project would be implemented collaboratively with the teachers at our study schools, the Project Implementation Team and our Research Team, to ensure alignment to the ACT context. From a review of the available literature, it would seem our approach has never been done before. Therefore, in common with our existing Affiliated Schools project we seek to find insights where none have existed previously. Specifically in how STEM can be taught through PE in ways that will benefit ACT Foundation children. To enable this approach, we will develop a New Model for Schools as one of four Affiliated Schools research priorities we address. The others being: Early Childhood Education; Cultural Integrity and Personalised Learning.