Physical education and health education classes should be designed to benefit all children regardless of their abilities. Writers share information within the Adapted category about different types of disabilities and how teachers can create learning experiences appropriate for all learning levels.
Adapted physical education is not intended solely for students with disabilities. Adapted physical education is physical education that has been adapted specifically for an individual. To teach adapted physical education is to differentiate your instruction. In other content area classes, teachers are expected to differentiate their teaching. All students are expected to learn the same content, but how they are expected to learn that content is up to the teacher.
When teaching a general physical education class, you will have students who excel, students who struggle, and students, often the majority, who fall somewhere in the middle. This is the same for all content areas, that is why there is a need for differentiation; differentiation helps all students learn while being challenged. You are meeting your students where they are at, rather than teaching the same information to everyone and hoping they learn.
Research is clear, students with physical disabilities are excluded from physical education (Jespersen & McNamee, 2009; Martin, 2018). Thus, the purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to share a story of the best possibilities of attitudes and resources for students with physical disabilities, 2) to highlight the reality of what is happening in the schools, and 3) to provide a possible solution of perspective-taking for physical educators.
The Best Possible World
Let us start with a story. My name is Dr. Aubrey Shaw and when I was six months old my family and I were in a horrible car accident in Wyoming. From the collision with a double semi-truck, our car was smashed from both sides. Thankfully, no one lost their life that day, but I was surely close to losing mine. I was rushed to the hospital where they found a two-inch tear in my left temporal lobe. I was then airlifted to Denver Children’s Hospital where I underwent brain surgery and two months of a very long recovery. The doctors told my parents I would never walk or talk and was later diagnosed with semi-hemi paralysis due to a traumatic brain injury. After two months in the hospital, my family brought me home to be in a loving environment and daily intense therapy. I beat the doctors’ diagnoses. Moreover, when I turned five years old I was walking and talking and ready to go to preschool. I then began a nineteen-year journey with special services, therapy, and special education. My parents had the attitude and resources to help me be successful.
It is well documented that now more than ever, getting outside for exercise and fresh air has become critical for the health and well-being of all our students (Louv, 2007; SHAPE AMERICA, 2014; Steffen & Stiehl, 2010; Taylor & Kuo, 2009). This is especially the case for students who may experience varying emotional difficulties like anxiety and depression; or those who have been identified as having other challenges like attention disorders or other barriers to learning. The purpose of our paper is to offer an option for physical education and classroom teachers to provide an outside activity opportunity for students who have been identified as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The activity itself involves using an application called PuzzleWalk that can be accessed on a smartphone or other device (Lee, Frey, Min, Cothran, Bellini, Han, & Shih, 2020). Being teachers ourselves, we do not simply look at providing Developmental Adapted Physical Education (DAPE) (Kelly, 2019) opportunities for our students as merely a necessary formality. We also view fully inclusive access to opportunities for a fulfilling, active lifestyle as a social justice issue for all our students. Equal opportunities being provided to all our students is key. We are well aware of the negative effects that technology overload is having on all our students and teachers (Mustafaoglu, Zirek, Yasaci, & Ozdincler, 2018), especially during the past year. So, we are also not coming from the standpoint of simply promoting technology use. Rather, we are embracing the notion that students who have been identified as having ASD tend to respond well to interactive technologies including human/computer interaction.
Screenshot from App Advice (https://appadvice.com/app/puzzlewalk/1450986746)
Additional aspects of our rationale are that using mobile technology as a physical activity intervention for students with ASD is their attraction to technology use due to its predictability and relatively low social requirements compared to traditional face-to-face social interactions (Kuo, Orsmond, Coster, & Cohn, 2014). Also, it is known that students with ASD possess particular strengths in visuospatial learning such as block design and image-based problem solving; this is why they are visual learners. A mobile application like PuzzleWalk allows students with ASD to be self-directed learners in their communities.
Screenshot from App Advice (https://appadvice.com/app/puzzlewalk/1450986746)
Beyond working with students with ASD, recent research in various professional fields has shown that, depending on the game type and purpose, certain video games can lead to positive effects for participants (Franceschini, Trevisan, Ronconi, Bertoni, Colmar, Double, Facoetti &, Gori, 2017; Granic, Lobel., & Engels, 2014; Zayeni, Raynaud, & Revet, 2020; Uttal, Meadow, Tipton, Hand, Alden, Warren, & Newcombe, 2013). For example, the use of electronic and video games as a therapeutic intervention has shown success in the prevention and reduction of childhood anxiety and depression (Zayeni, Raynaud, & Revet, 2020). In cognitive psychology (Keilani & Delvenne, 2020), the use of electronic and video games has been shown to help patients manage social and emotional issues as well as improve focus, multitasking, and working memory (Keilani & Delvenne, 2020). Furthermore, children with other learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, have shown improved focused visuospatial attention, phonological short-term memory and ability to interpret and blend multiple sounds, all of which can positively enhance reading skills after training with action video games (Franceschini et al., 2017).
Assessing the skills and physical fitness of students with disabilities can be challenging. Most physical educators are used to assessing general non-disabled students, but many don’t have the know-how and experience of testing and planning activities for students with disabilities (especially students with severe/multiple disability).
Adapted physical education is not intended solely for students with disabilities. Adapted physical education is physical education that has been adapted specifically for an individual. To teach adapted physical education is to differentiate your instruction. In other content area classes, teachers are expected to differentiate their teaching. All students are expected to learn the same content, but how they are expected to learn that content is up to the teacher.
When teaching a general physical education class, you will have students who excel, students who struggle, and students, often the majority, who fall somewhere in the middle. This is the same for all content areas, that is why there is a need for differentiation; differentiation helps all students learn while being challenged. You are meeting your students where they are at, rather than teaching the same information to everyone and hoping they learn.
Physical educators and adapted physical educators have stepped up these past few months to make sure their students had opportunities to continue, as best they could, with the physical education curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a majority of teachers, lessons were designed with the premise that students would not have much, if any, of the traditional equipment often used in physical education or adapted physical education settings.
(U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. Brittany Martin)
The purpose of this article is three-fold:
To encourage and support physical educators and adapted physical educators to use our recipes to make some homemade equipment with the intent to get this equipment in the hands of their students for their fall classes. We do realize that to complete some of our equipment recipes; there will be costs involved. Perhaps some of the physical education or adapted physical education equipment budget for 2020-2021 could be used to purchase the materials to make the equipment; or possibly, funds for materials could be obtained through Donor’s Choose or other similar programs that fund school projects.
To encourage teachers to pass these recipes along to families or other community members who want to support the physical education and adapted physical education programs, by either making the equipment or donating the materials so the teachers could make the equipment in preparation for classes.
To provide several activities that the physical educators and adapted physical educators could have the students do with their distance learning equipment. We would also encourage the teachers to keep abreast of the numerous resources that have been posted on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that might also provide equipment ideas that would be simple, easy, and cost-effective to make this summer so that their students might be able to work toward mastery of additional physical education content in their fall classes.
In sum, the goal is to provide equipment recipes and corresponding activities to support physical educators and adapted physical educators to design distance learning activities for their students that will still meet the physical education national/state grade-level outcomes. Thus, providing our students with meaningful, yet fun opportunities to master grade-level outcomes – even in the chaos of a pandemic.
Limited opportunities exist for athletes with physical disabilities to participate in sport (Martin, 2018), specifically, no foundation presently exists for creating generations of athletes with physical disabilities (Shaw & Stoll, 2018). Many students and children with physical disabilities are excluded from institutional sport, recreation, and physical education where they can learn the fundamentals of a healthy active lifestyle.
A concomitant problem arises, as this population of youth is growing up without the fundamental knowledge of how to be active. However, what if there was a better way to provide individuals with physical disabilities the knowledge and skills for a healthy active lifestyle? The purpose of this paper examines an argument to include students and athletes with physical disabilities in sport, recreation, and physical education beyond the minimum requirements by law.
Historical Background The problem of inclusion is not historically modern since people with physical disabilities were excluded from every aspect of life. They were left to die on the streets, were killed at birth, or were hidden away (Rimmerman, 2013). Often the brutish societal behavior was collaborated through early laws. From the inception of the law, i.e., Mosaic Law, Roman law, Hammurabi’s code, and Hebraic rule, individual rights were seldom addressed. Instead, what was good for the masses ruled, and thus the minority, that is people with disabilities, were excluded or eliminated.
