─ 73 ─ スポーツ教育学研究 2015. Vol.35, No.2, pp. 73-89 Approaches to Improve Physical Education in Canadian Schools: Teacher Education, Diversity & Curriculum Supports Rebecca Lloyd University of Ottawa Note of acknowledgement: I would like to thank my research assistant, Michael Fairbrother, for his assistance with gathering the information that is complied and displayed in the three Tables featured in this article. 日本スポーツ教育学会第 35 回記念国際大会シンポジウム Many researchers, including the thirty-three featured in this review (31 of whom are featured in Table 2 as well as two additional researchers in Table 3), provincial governments and national and provincial organizations such as Physical & Health Education Canada, PartcipACTION, the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, as well as Canada Sport for Life have invested interest in improving the health and physical activity of school- aged children in Canada. At first glance, the concept of improvement might be linked to the simplistic notion of getting more children active. Considering the declining rates of physical activity where only 14% of Canadian children aged 5-11 and only 5% of children aged 12-17 meet the guidelines of experiencing 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day as measured by the 2015 ParticipACTION Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth (ParticipACTION, 2015), efforts to increase physical activity rates are certainly needed and of utmost importance. What this review of research and physical education programs will indicate, however, is that improving the experience of children’s physical activity within and beyond the context of physical education is a complex phenomenon. Considerations for inclusion, diversity in programming, gender, culture, race, social constructions of the body, and child-attuned pedagogies, as this review will address, indicate that the health of the whole child extends far beyond exercise physiological parameters. Physical Education Curriculum in Canada To understand what physical education is like in Canada, it is important to have some knowledge of Canada’s geography and political history as no national curriculum exists. Since the 1867 Canadian Constitution Act, each of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories are responsible for their own education that is publically funded through taxation. Approximately 7% of Canadian children are not bound by provincial curriculum standards as they attend either private or First Nations schools (Hickson, Robinson, Berg, & Hall, 2012). Worthy of note is that the population of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is rapidly rising, for example in the province of Saskatchewan the proportion is moving from 3.8% to a predicted 20.8% by 2017, and many attend public schools. Hence, the need to create culturally relevant curriculum is ever pressing (Halas, 2011; Robinson, Borden & Robinson, 2013). Considering the Euro- centric focus inherent in our physical education programming as well as the overwhelmingly 94% proportion of Caucasian physical education faculty members who influence the direction of physical education in Canada (Douglas & Halas, 2013) much reformation needs to occur to align with the recently assembled Truth and Reconciliation Commission of