Promoting Vitality in Health and Physical Education

Vitality draws together the interests of health and physical education. Already these fields of education have come together, with health, fitness, wellness, and active and healthy living as shared curricular concepts. Vitality furthers these conjunctions by having us rethink prevailing views of the body of knowledge in health and physical education. More than a concept, vitality is promoted phenomenologically in terms of the essential movements of the body. It is explicated as vitality affects, specifically identifiable motions and developmental patterns of movement that provide curricular structure for teaching health and physical education. The promotional implications of this analysis relate to enlivening the baseline criteria currently used in health and physical education assessments; revitalizing the curricular concepts of body awareness, space, time, and relationships on which provincial programs are based; and expanding the reach of these programs to mental, emotional, spiritual, and, particularly, environmental health.