Physical literacy in CALD middle school children: What do our preservice teachers know?

The shifting demographics of school-aged children in the middle years, as well as predictions, suggest the enrolment of children who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) will continue to increase. The diversity of middle school students in today's classrooms underscores the significance of developing effective teaching strategies and policies to help ensure student success. This linguistic diversification presents a clear call for Health and Physical Education (HPE) educators to reach non-English speaking students with appropriate strategies. Scholarly literature clearly establishes the need, opportunity, and methods for effectively teaching physical literacy (PL) in CALD classrooms. Few articles, however, have been written about multicultural HPE methodologies for exposing and building preservice teachers' (PSTs) knowledge appropriate for CALD middle school children. This paper is about the perspectives of HPE PSTs enrolled in two 12-week elective HPE undergraduate units. We report those PSTs' learning experiences and knowledge of theoretical and practical physical literacy methods for teaching middle school CALD children. Data were collected using an online questionnaire. A key finding was that the PSTs believed they felt inadequately equipped to teach physical literacy to CALD children. The PSTs' perception was on account of a lack of knowledge and paucity of CALD information provided in their subjects. From here, we identified the need to focus on the CALD-specific pedagogical interventions to support the PSTs in using applicable language and terminology when conversing about physical literacy curriculum topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]