Interdisciplinary approaches to physical education: A systematic review

Abstract

This study aims to provide an overview of research articles published in the Scopus, WoS and ERIC databases, from 2000 to 2022, related to the interdisciplinary approach of Physical Education (PE) subject to summarise the benefits that this approach can offer to students. The study was conceived as a systematic review based on the Flow diagram of PRISMA declaration. Taking into account selection criteria, a set of 773 papers was reduced to a final sample of 15 documents for the systematic review. Results provided evidence that PE in mandatory public schooling can contribute to promoting an alternative approach based on helping students to gain knowledge, skills, or competencies related to curricular areas outside PE. This study confirms that interdisciplinary approaches to PE are a growing area in PE and sport pedagogy research. Teachers naturally struggle to carry out objectives from their discipline in collaboration with teachers from other fields, and vice versa, they lack guidance. Though published literature could certainly help to show the way, PE teachers do not always have unlimited access to specialised research published online, and what they find is not always applicable to their particular classroom conditions.