A vision of literacy for adolescent learners in Ontario schools might be described as follows:

All students are equipped with the literacy skills necessary to be critical and creative thinkers, effective meaning makers and communicators, collaborative co-learners, and innovative problem solvers. These are the skills that will enable them to achieve personal, career, and societal goals.

Students, individually and in collaboration with others, develop skills in three areas, as follows:

• Thinking: Students access, manage, create, and evaluate information as they think imaginatively and critically in order to solve problems and make decisions, including those related to issues of fairness, equity, and social justice.

• Expression: Students use language and images in rich and varied forms as they read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, discuss, and think critically about ideas.

• Reflection: Students apply metacognitive knowledge and skills to monitor their own thinking and learning, and in the process, develop self-advocacy skills, a sense of self-efficacy, and an interest in lifelong learning.

As this vision for adolescent literacy suggests, literacy involves a range of critical thinking skills and is essential for learning across the curriculum. Students need to learn to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. Teachers support them in this learning by not only addressing the curriculum expectations but also considering, and purposefully teaching students about, the literacy demands of the particular subject area.

Literacy, inquiry skills, and numeracy are critical to students’ success in all subjects of the curriculum, and in all areas of their lives.

Many of the activities and tasks that students undertake in the health and physical education curriculum support them in their ability to think, express, and reflect in discipline-specific ways. These include researching, discussing, listening, viewing media, communicating with words and with the body, connecting illustrations and text, role playing to create meaning through stories, and – especially important for kinesthetic learners – communicating through physical activity. Students use language to record their observations, to describe their critical analyses in both informal and formal contexts, and to present their findings in presentations and reports in oral, written, graphic, and multimedia forms. Understanding in health and physical education requires the understanding and use of specialized terminology. In all health and physical education programs, students are required to use appropriate and correct terminology, and are encouraged to use language with care and precision in order to communicate effectively.

Fostering students’ literacy skills is an important part of the teacher’s role in health and physical education. In addition to developing reading, writing, and media literacy skills, students in health and physical education need to be able to communicate orally by listening and speaking and to communicate physically through body language. (Oral communication skills are traditionally thought to include using and interpreting body language. In the health and physical education curriculum, this skill is broadened into its own category of “physical communication skills”.) Developing these skills will help students to acquire other learning in health and physical education and to communicate their understanding of what they have learned.

The Ministry of Education has facilitated the development of materials to support literacy instruction across the curriculum. Helpful advice for integrating literacy instruction in Health and Physical Education courses may be found in the following resource documents: