Life skills have been defined by the World Health Organization as “the ability for adaptative and positive behaviour that enables individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”, while for UNICEF, they represent “a large group of psychosocial and interpersonal skills, which can help people make informed decisions, communicate effectively and develop coping and self-management skills that may help them lead a healthy and productive life” (Goudas, 2010, pp. 242-243). Thus, educational and governmental organisations have highlighted that transferable life skills are important for adolescents’ health, well-being, and their educational and occupational success (Cronin et al., 2020), encouraging policy makers to integrate life skills education into the school curriculum. Physical education (PE) is seen as a setting that can enhance students’ life skills (Cronin et al., 2020; Goudas, 2010). Different teaching approaches (e.g., Sport Education Model, Cooperative Learning) have been shown to help PE students develop their teamwork, communication, problem solving and decision making, leadership, and social skills (Cronin et al., 2020).

Goudas (2010) distinguished three types of life skills programmes developed for sport and PE: (a) programmes that teach life skills in classroom settings using sport metaphors (which we refer to as isolated); (b) programmes teaching life skills in youth sport settings in addition to sport skills (which we refer to as juxtaposed); and (c) programmes teaching life skills within the practice of PE and sport at the same time with physical skills (which we refer to as integrated). Considering political and economic demands in learning and teaching PE through these types of programmes is likely to lead to tensions between the transmission of a core of subject knowledge and the requirement to address these societal issues. Depending on the ways in which these new social demands are met, we assume that PE will be rooted in different teaching traditions, with this concept initially highlighting what counts as content, goals and values for science education (Östman, 1996; Roberts, 1988). Relying on an overview of the sport pedagogy literature to identify the traditions underlying the official discourses in PE, Forest et al. (2018) distinguished four broad educational directions for PE. In the PE teaching tradition (PETT) “Teaching PE as sport-techniques”, PE content typically includes sport-specific movements or more generic and fundamental skills such as throwing, catching or kicking a ball. The PETT “Teaching PE as health education” is based on the idea that PE should teach students to manage their physical activity and develop healthy lifestyles. According to the PETT “Teaching PE for values and citizenship”, the main objectives of PE are to teach students values such as self-responsibility, respect for differences, conflict resolution and participation in the democratic life of the class. Finally, the PETT “Teaching PE as physical culture education”, which is still in construction and may be seen as an attempt to integrate the three previous perspectives, is not only about learning facts, methods or how to think as a sportperson, but it is also about being socialised into a specific view of embodied culture. Therefore, what is considered as subject knowledge may considerably vary according to these different PETT, and the boundary between subject knowledge and life skills can appear to be shifting. Consequently, what does it really mean to teach and learn life skills in PE?

The aim of this literature review is to (a) characterize the ways in which life skills are taught in PE according to Goudas (2010)’s categorisation, (b) identify which life skills are most commonly taught in PE, and (c) infer the teaching traditions and possibilities for learning offered to students that emerge from these analyses.

Literature search was carried out in English and French from the database Google Scholar. The English keywords used for this research were Life skills, Physical Education, Didactics, Teaching, and Learning. The French keywords were Compétences transversales, Education physique, and Didactique. Further filters were applied to narrow the results and make them as specific and up-to-date as possible: year of publication of the scientific contribution from 2021; peer review; full text available. A first quick reading of the 291 articles resulting from this literature research (236 in English and 55 in French) led us to retain only those that were specifically concerned with the general topic of teaching and learning life skills in PE. A more in-depth reading of the 32 articles resulting from this first selection (26 in English and 6 in French) allowed us to eliminate those that did not provide information on the ways in which life skills are taught in PE (n=15). Thus, out of the initial 291 papers, only 17 were found to meet all the inclusion criteria, for a total amount of 19 life skills programmes developed for sport and PE. Results of the research were divided by teaching life skills in classroom settings (which we refer to as isolated), in addition to sport skills (which we refer to as juxtaposed) and at the same time with physical skills (which we refer to as integrated). It should be noted that some articles described different ways in which life skills are taught in PE. To carry out this analysis, we considered subject knowledge from the perspective of the PETT “Teaching PE as physical culture education”. Hence, while Goudas (2010) considered as integrated programmes based on Donald Hellison’s TPSR model, we categorised as juxtaposed a didactic proposal based on the same model (Muñoz-Llerena et al., 2022). Indeed, the continuity of teaching and learning in classroom actions (Ligozat et al., 2018) lay much more in the values of respect, equity and inclusion worked throughout the sequence than in the motor skills and cultural dimensions of the numerous sports taught. Besides, we have grouped together the different names for life skills where we felt they referred to the same skills. In this way, critical thinking and metacognitive skills have been considered synonymous with reflexivity. Cooperation has been grouped with collaboration and working together. Management of emotions has been clustered with emotional well-being and self-control and emotion regulation.

Few of the most recent papers really deal with how to teach life skills in PE, in line with Bezeau et al. (2021)’s observation that in many PE curricula, educational goals are over-prescribed while the methods of teaching are little or not documented. The life skills programmes developed for sport and PE we reviewed mainly taught reflexivity (n=4), cooperation (n=4), management of emotions (n=3), problem solving (n=2), and conflict resolution (n=2). A majority of them propose to teach these life skills in an integrated way (n=9, 47%), with a more or less visible anchorage in the tradition of teaching PE as physical culture education. This is the case of an integrative methodology of introduction to circus training, with emphasis on creativity and risk inherent in circus culture (Barth Pinto Tucunduva, 2021). The other programmes are shared between an isolated (n=5, 26%) and a juxtaposed (n=5, 26%) way of teaching life skills in PE, with more or less significant roots in traditions of teaching PE for values and citizenship (e.g., Muñoz-Llerena et al., 2022) and of teaching PE as health education (e.g., Savchuk et al., 2021) providing little opportunity to learn sports skills. These contrasted ways of teaching life skills in PE raise questions about potential tensions between the transmission of subject knowledge and the requirement to address socially acute questions. They lead us to rethink contents that were previously considered as disciplinary, in order to integrate social sensitive questions that are dependant of historical, cultural and political contexts. A promising avenue for this rethinking seems to us to lie in conducting an epistemological reflexion about the core principles of the social practices taken as reference (Martinand, 1989) in PE, with the aim of highlighting the social/life skills inherent to their culture and culturally meaningful ways of putting them into practice.

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