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Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2026 Apr 14. Published in final edited form as: Taiwan Yun Dong Jiao Yu Xue Bao. 2022 May;17(1):1–26. doi: 10.6580/JTSP.202205_17(1).01 Search in PMC Search in PubMed View in NLM Catalog Add to search Operationalizing Concept-Based Curriculum for Physical Literacy Ang Chen Ang Chen 1 Department of Kinesiology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA Find articles by Ang Chen 1 Author information Copyright and License information 1 Department of Kinesiology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA ✉ Contact Ang Chen, 254 Coleman Building, Department of Kinesiology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412, U.S.A, [email protected] PMC Copyright notice PMCID: PMC13075403 NIHMSID: NIHMS2115457 PMID: 41982229 The publisher's version of this article is available at Taiwan Yun Dong Jiao Yu Xue Bao Abstract Physical education has been experiencing marginalization for some time regardless of repeated efforts of revitalization. One important reason is that the content has been de-valued and regarded as inconsistent with the mission of schooling. This article attempts to advocate the adoption of a concept-based approach to curriculum and content development in physical education. Based on research findings and literature, the article first provides an overview of curriculum issues from the historical and contemporary perspectives. It then discusses the possibility of reconceptualizing the curriculum from a concept-based approach which is based on the tenets of physical literacy. Lastly, the article argues for focusing on the knowledge and relevant skill learning to help the learner acquire necessary competence for physically active lifestyle from the monism and lifecourse perspectives. It is expected that the article can inspire constructive discussions about physical education curriculum reform among practitioners as well as scholars. Keywords: physical education, reconceptualization, basic education, lifecourse Summary The theoretical tenets expressed in the essay are well-established as they are guided by the concept of physical literacy. The proposed curriculum reconceptualization may be one of many ideas. However, it is based on the research evidence and scholarship accumulated for over 25 years in my Pedagogical Kinesiology Laboratory. Although the two-dimensional framework is abstract and needs further development, the concept about this type of curricula is worth trying. In fact, the work has started and is continuing ( Chen, in press ). Physical education has endured over 150 years of development in institutionalized schooling. The marginalization we have been experiencing is quite unprecedented. The concept of physical literacy can be a valuable platform based on which new, innovative curricula may be developed. This essay is but one attempt to do so with a hope to draw curriculum scholars and specialists to engage in productive discussions and explore new curriculum ideas (Rink, 1992) to revitalize K-12 physical education. It is commonly accepted that the goal of physical education is to help students develop and sustain a physically active lifestyle ( World Health Organization [WHO], 2018 ). As a field, physical education, at least in the U.S., has not been successful in achieving the goal as well as others specified in the national standards ( Hastie, 2017 ). As a result, physical education has been facing unprecedented risk of being marginalized or faded out of the school as a legitimate subject matter. The challenge for physical education curriculum designers is to identify and operationalize a relevant conceptual framework on which a curriculum can be developed to accomplish this grand goal. Although attempts have been made to change the marginalization of physical education in schools, the fundamental issue of “what knowledge is most worth learning?” has not been addressed. It seems, however, that the concept of physical literacy ( Whitehead, 2010 ) has been acknowledged as the relevant framework for curriculum development to address the issue. The purpose of this article is to propose the need to advocate a concept-based approach to curriculum from the perspectives of physical literacy. It first gives a brief overview of the physical education curriculum from both historic and contemporary perspectives, then focuses on the rationale for reconceptualizing future physical education curricula with a concept-based approach that is consistent with the concept of physical literacy. Lastly the article proposes and for a concept-based curriculum reconceptualization with emphases on knowledge and skills acquisition from a lifecourse perspective to stimulate further discussions among physical education scholars and practitioners. Because I have been working in the United States, the ideas in the article are by and large based on the context of the U.S. The readers are advised to take precautions when reading and interpreting these ideas. They are strongly encouraged to place the ideas in their own context to generate a contextualized understanding. Overview of the Physical Education Curriculum Since its inception, physical education curricula have undergone quite a few changes in terms of the goals and core content. The initial goal of physical education when it was first included in schools as a subject matter in late 19th century was about improving students’ health. At that time, health was defined in different ways. In physical education, it was first defined as personal hygiene ( Lee, 1983 ). Combined with the idea to train physically healthy and strong labors for the new economy during and after the industrial revolution, physical education was prioritized as the most important content that schools must teach ( Spencer, 1911 1 ). Naturally, the way to train a strong labor force required programs that would focus on the development of a heathy skeleto-muscular system. The health-centered approach was therefore infused with the idea of physical training with the methods of gymnastics which gradually became the dominant curriculum model in physical education. The educational value of the gymnastics systems was questioned during the same period when they were in dominant position. In 1885, William Anderson, a prominent physician and physical educator, organized a national meeting to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the gymnastics curriculum systems. The meeting reached a consensus to develop a discipline-based (extended from medical science) knowledge base for physical education so that the educational value of physical education could be determined and promoted with the support of science. One by-product of the meeting was the establishment of a national organization for physical education scientists and teachers which later became American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD), now it is the Society of Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE-America). In the 1920s, Thomas Wood broke out of the gymnastics curriculum conception after having experimented innovative “natural gymnastics” approach ( Wood & Cassidy, 1927 ). As Anderson, Wood was a physician and physical educator. He placed much emphasis on the educational values of the physical education content. At the Columbia University, he experimented blending sports, games, tumbling, outdoor adventures, and popular recreation activities in the formal physical education curriculum. He criticized the gymnastics systems as limiting in scope and, consequently, provided a narrow content choice for students to understand the value of physical activities. Since Wood’s “new physical education” idea, physical education curricula became much diversified with a wide choice of content and different approach to curriculum and instruction. There is no doubt that the changes elevated the status of physical education at the time for it to become one of the most appealing subject matters in institutionalized schooling. It was during that curriculum reform that the sole value of health enhancement was gradually replaced by many other value perspectives acknowledged in the professional educator communities. In addition, the curriculum became sport-centered with the dominance of popular team sports. Throughout the history of physical education, the dualism philosophy is the dominant perspective which views the human beings consist of the body and the mind and physical education is concerned with the body as the entity. Although many prominent physical educators, such as Charles McCloy, endorsed the belief of body-mind unity, they advocated the dualism idea anyway, insisting that physical education was different from other school subject matter in that it was the only content that educated the body via extensive physical training ( McCloy, 1940 ). Another consequence of the Wood’s new physical education was the loss of the disciplinary focus ( Park, 2017 ). The effort of incorporating scientific disciplinary knowledge in physical education was diminished in the wave of pursuing sports as the curriculum focus and the primary content. Many curriculum conceptions were developed, and all seemed to focus on the ways to improve students’ performance proficiency in playing competitive sports. Even the movement education curriculum ties the development of fundamental movement skills to future participation in sports. The physical focus and sport-centered approach to curriculum have led to quite a few curriculum models during mid- to late-20th century. These models help students explore different functions of sports in relation to the values of education. Although the functions and goals are quite different among the models, one common theme is that all are still based on the assumption that sports can help accomplish the goal of physical education. These models include, for example, sport education, teaching games for understanding, steps to success, teaching personal and social responsibility, and others. Although these curriculum models have been central to much scholarly work and curriculum development, the diverse goals and emphases did not seem to converge to a central goal. When the goal for physical education has changed to health enhancement and life-long physical activity participation, the content focus of skill proficiency for sport performance is no longer relevant. The sport-approach to curriculum has generated a perception about physical education as aim-less or “all things for all people” ( Ziegler, 2015 , cited in Hastie, 2017 ). Consequently, the critical question of “what knowledge is of most worth” has become increasingly relevant and curriculum scholars begin to question the relevance of sport-based approach to curriculum ( Ennis, 2014 ). Physical education, in most cases, has been viewed by others in education and the public as being equal to recreation. Its educational values have been questioned and even distorted (see an article in The Atlantic by Wong, 2019 ) to become a scapegoat for school failure. Over the years, physical education scholars have passed a few opportunities to reform the curriculum, which has led to the severe marginalization in schools in the U.S. Most noticeable is the 1992 Crossroads Conference about the crisis in secondary schools. The goal of the conference was to brainstorm about and make a decision to launch a curriculum reform to address the marginalization that had made physical education “an endangered species” (Siedentop, 1992, p. 72). The 200 or so physical education scholars and teachers who participated in the brainstorm, however, failed to come up with enough “new ideas” to address the crisis (Rink, 1992, p. 67). At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, there are some developments that could lead to some curriculum reform ideas. One development is that fitness education has begun to emerge as a strong focus of physical education, which starts to defy the influence of the sport-centered curriculum conception that was strong in the 1990s. Scholars began to question the value of sport-centered curricula and advocate for a concept-based approach to physical education with a focus on lifelong health-related fitness and physical activity behavior ( Corbin, 2021 ). In this effort, kinesiology knowledge, especially concepts of exercise physiology, psychology, and sociology have been recognized to be critical content areas that should be infused into K-12 curriculum for children and adolescents to understand the benefits and principles of conducting health-enhancing physical activities by following science-informed methods. Another significant development is the prevalence of the physical literacy concept ( Whitehead, 2010 ) in the physical education communities worldwide. With a lifecourse focus, physical literacy, a philosophical idea, challenges physical educators to reflect on our content to ensure it can provide lifelong benefits to our students. The concept, subsequently, has been operationalized into different physical education curriculum ideas for implementation in schools ( Durden-Myers & Whitehead, 2018 ). A central approach to content across the attempted curricula for physical literacy is the consensus that kinesiology knowledge, through designed cognitive tasks, should be taught to fulfill the purpose of becoming physically literate ( Cale & Harris, 2018 ; Corbin, 2021 ; Ennis, 2015 ). These two developments share two common characteristics. The first is the knowledge focus in content development, namely a concept-based curriculum approach to curriculum development, and the second is the attempt to aim at the lifelong impact on students’ lives. The shared consensus seems to suggest that physical literacy can be a viable philosophical guide and an operational platform for future curriculum reform. These developments have created a momentum of curriculum reform and an opportunity to revisit the ways of curriculum reform. From an implementation perspective, however, there are two different approaches to curriculum reform, one is the incremental approach which “focus[es] on improving currently existing programs,” the other a paradigm change approach which “attempt[s] to reconceptualize the mission and focus” of physical education (Rink, 1992, p. 67). It seems that the incremental approach has not been successful since 1992 ( Carlson et al., 1992 ; Hastie, 2017 ). With the concept of physical literacy, it has become possible to develop a paradigm-changing conceptualization of the physical education curriculum that moves away from the sport-centered approach to content development and embraces a concept-based approach ( Corbin, 2021 ). The Need for a Reconceptualization One primary reason for the curriculum crisis is the issue of curriculum dis-alignment between K-12 physical education and the scientific discipline of kinesiology. Park (2017) provided a thorough review of the history to show the disconnect between K-12 physical education and the kinesiology discipline. Physical education, similar to other subject matter in education, began as a field in which knowledge generated through science was taught to learners for them to apply the knowledge to enhance their quality of life. Park (2017) observed that this knowledge-based application has been lost in modern physical education. She also observed that there are “too few” “good physical education teachers” (p. 190) who can “keep a focus upon applying important information as well as advancing scientific findings” (p.190). as a result, the marginalization of physical education seems to be inevitable when the curriculum in K-12 schools is dis-aligned with its scientific discipline ( Schwab, 1969 ). There are three types of curricula in K-12 physical education: recreational, public health, and educational physical education ( Ennis, 2017 ). The recreational curriculum emphasizes providing enjoyable experiences to students. It provides many sport- or game-based activities to please them. Once the activity is perceived boring, another activity will be offered to take its place to keep the enjoyable feeling. Curriculum wise, the recreational curriculum is characterized by multiple activities, short units, and frequent rotation of activities. The recreational physical education is the most prevalent, and it is the most welcome form of physical education but offers the least educational value ( Goodlad, 1984 ). The second type is the public health curriculum that focuses on health-related physical fitness development. The curriculum is organized around the fitness components to provide ample physical activity opportunities for students to develop or maintain health-related fitness in each area such as cardio-respiratory, muscular capacities, and flexibility. Its programming is often determined by the physiological intensity, duration, and types of exercises a task can provide to students. Instructional objectives are centered around strategies to keep students constantly physically active at a moderate or vigorous intensity. Health concepts such as blood pressure, body composition, and disease prevention (e.g., diabetes, obesity) are taught on an ad-hoc basis and at the vocabulary, rather than conceptual, level. The third type, educational curriculum, provides knowledge-centered learning experiences to students. The curriculum is usually structured in a way that physical activity tasks are vehicles that carry cognitive knowledge for students to apply in a physical activity setting. This type of physical education is what Park (2017) referred to as relevant physical education for scientific knowledge application. As Ennis (2017) described, educational physical education provides opportunities to enhance cognitive understanding about the benefits and principles of physical activity. It takes a knowledge-activity integrated approach to emphasize movement proficiency, health enhancement, and life-long physical activity. The structure of the curriculum is characterized by a balance between knowledge and physical activity. The question we are facing now is, which content, of the three types of physical education, is of the most worth? The recreational physical education has been around for a long time. Its prevalence in history has not helped physical education avoid the current crisis. Its ability to help students learn knowledge and skills has been in question ( Placek, 1983 ; Hastie, 2017 ). The public health approach to physical education seems to meet the public health expectation for health enhancement. Its effectiveness, however, can be questionable because of the various complexity in determining its effectiveness in fitness development such as heredity, nutrition, social-economic environment, and life-style change, to name a few. Findings from community-based fitness intervention programs seem to show difficulties in attributing desired outcomes measured using fitness and health indicators to the intervention programs ( Bai et al., 2015 ). The educational physical education, with its focus on knowledge acquisition, provides a coherent learning experience for students to embody physical activity with scientific knowledge associated with the activity. It expects the students to master the knowledge and apply it to current and future physical activity settings. Research evidence has begun to show its long-term positive impact. Kulinna et al. (2018) , for example, found that 20 years after learning the knowledge in high schools, former high school students can still remember the information and use them to guide their current physical activity participation. Wang and Chen (2020) reported that middle school students still can recall, in a standardized knowledge test, the knowledge learned in a concept-based physical education and continued to engage in physical activities outside of schools 14 months after the instruction. Most importantly, the educational physical education is aligned with the science of kinesiology and the focus on knowledge learning is consistent with the mission of schooling ( Ennis, 2017 ). Michael Young (2013), a curriculum theorist, criticized that for too long, curriculum work has deviated from its core mission which is to provide the knowledge of most worth to children. He argued that curriculum work must start from the knowledge that children are entitled to. Curriculum designers must start their work with the question of what knowledge is worth learning. When deviating from the knowledge base, the curriculum would be in a crisis. Perhaps, physical education in the U.S. is experiencing a curriculum crisis as a result of a long-time dis-alignment between K-12 curriculum and kinesiology science. For knowledge in the curriculum to be worthwhile, it must meet two assumptions. One is that the knowledge is accurate and “near to truth about the world we live in and to what it is to be human” (Young, 2013, p. 107). The second is the knowledge is not fixed and is always open for further exploration and challenge. Knowledge that meets the two assumptions can be referred to as “powerful knowledge” (Young, 2013, p. 108). For the knowledge in physical education to be powerful, it must reflect those concepts of kinesiology science and, yet it must also leave open space for the learner to explore further. The exploration experience can be critical in determining the worth of the knowledge and the learning experiences. These experiences must be personally meaningful so that the learner can determine how to apply the knowledge to their lives meaningfully. To facilitate learning, the knowledge in the curriculum must be specialized, as Young argued (2013), to reflect the authenticity of the discipline and must be delivered in the most relevant way as defined in the discipline. In addition, the knowledge must be differentiated from the prior knowledge or experiences students bring to the classroom. In short, “it is not general knowledge” but “has generalizing capacities” (Young, 2013, p. 108). To develop a curriculum with the knowledge of most worth, a different theoretical platform is needed to allow “new ideas” (Rink, 1992, p. 67) to take hold for the curriculum. The platform must be drastically different so that a paradigm-change can take place in the process of developing a new curriculum. The concept of physical literacy is such a platform, its prevalence around the world allows a fundamentally different reconceptualization of physical education. Unlike the three-domain approach (i.e., cognitive, psychomotor, and affective) where knowledge, skills, values are conceptualized as separate entities, physical literacy takes a monism perspective to emphasize whole-person embodiment experience. Motivation/ confidence, knowledge, competence, and values, the four pillars of physical literacy, are one entity in a moving person who is embodying these modes to various degrees at the same moment ( Whitehead, 2010 ). The concept of physical literacy takes a life-long perspective to physical activity participation. This lifecourse perspective ( Whitehead, 2010 ) demands a physical education curriculum to help students develop a life-long need and competence for physical activity participation. It is, however, a common observation that physical education curricula are most likely to teach knowledge and/or skills that are either popular among the respective age groups or are determined by adults as suitable for children and adolescents in schools. Knowledge and skills that would help students understand human physical activity from birth to the preschool age and from adult to aging years are often left out. When students graduate from high school, for example, few would have mastered knowledge and skills they would need to maintain a physically active life in adult and aging years. In other words, a physical literacy curriculum must help students understand physical activity needs and purposes from birth to aging and prepare them for healthy aging with relevant physical activity choices. With the focus on knowledge-physical activity integration and life course perspective, the concept of physical literacy extends the possibilities of physical education to a new level. It also demands a different conceptualization of physical education for curriculum development. The new conceptualization should embrace the idea of monism, should take a lifecourse approach to content development, and should be centered on knowledge to provide a cognitive-physical integrated embodiment learning experience. This conceptualization would help us design a curriculum that allow students to learn knowledge, build motivation/confidence, develop values, and master competence simultaneously. It would focus on capacity development for the entire life course, rather than only for the present, to allow students to be able to adapt to and address anticipated and un-anticipated challenges that will come to them later in life. It would help students construct a knowledge repertoire with both declarative and procedure knowledge to enable them to not only do physical activities but also communicate with physically literate vocabulary with self and others in physical activity and healthful living contexts. The Concept-Based Physical Education To revitalize physical education in K-12 schools, the “new ideas” expressed in the concept of physical literacy must be operationalized to provide a relevant and actionable platform for curriculum development. The knowledge and lifecourse perspectives should anchor this effort to allow the curriculum to be transformative in that the curriculum changes students from a passive learner to an active knowledge seeker with personally meaningful purpose for physical activity participation ( Ennis, 2017 ). A transformative curriculum conceptualization based on the two anchors must be drastically different from the traditional conceptualizations that are based on sports ( Ennis, 2014 ). In addition, the new conceptualization should be consistent with major tenets of physical literacy that physical activity participation is a personal journey that is initiated and controlled by the individual. Recently emerged research evidence can be indicative of a possible positive association between the knowledge and physical activity participation as a function of student growth. The association seems to become increasingly positive as children moving from elementary to high schools. At the elementary school level, most research evidence shows little association between knowledge and after-school physical activity ( S. Chen et al, 2014 ). Similar findings were reported in other studies. For example, Erwin and Castelli (2008) reported a low correlation ( r =.20) of knowledge about skill execution sport and after-school physical activity. When children grow, the positive association appears to become apparent. DiLorenzo et al. (1998) found that although the association was not observed at the fifth and sixth grades, the knowledge learned at the fifth/sixth grades was a positive predictor of their after-school physical activity participation when they were in eighth and ninth grade. At the middle school level, S. Chen et al. (2017) reported that students with high and medium exercise science knowledge had lower level of sedentary behavior than low knowledge group. Wang and Chen (2020) found that knowledge learned from a concept-based curriculum at the sixth grade was retained at the eighth grade and was a positively predictor for their after-school physical activity participation. For students in high schools, research evidence seems to support a positive association as well. Mitchell et al. (2003) found a moderate correlation ( r = .49) between high school students’ knowledge about designing a personal fitness program and their after-school physical activity level. Thompson and Hannon (2012) reported a moderate correlation ( r =.44) between knowledge and physical activity participation, and that the students who scored at a high or moderate level in a knowledge test reported higher physical activity participation than did the students who scored low on the knowledge test. Kulinna et al. (2018) tracked a group of individuals who took a concept-based physical education, Fitness for Life ( Corbing & Lindsey, 2007 ), in high schools about 20 years ago to determine the impact of the curriculum. They reported an encouraging finding that most of them remembered the knowledge about the benefits and principles of exercise and they were using the knowledge to guide their physical activity participation 20 years after their high school graduation. This finding is particularly meaningful because it demonstrates the direct impact of a concept-based curriculum. However, there are studies that found the knowledge-activity association non-observable or weak ( Haslem et al., 2016 ; Kelly et al. 2012 ). Although it may be premature to have a definitive conclusion about the positive association between knowledge and physical activity participation, the evidence, taken together, does suggest that the curriculum matters in that knowledge taught through concept-based curricula ( Kulinna et al., 2018 ; S. Chen et al., 2017 ; Wang & Chen, 2020 ) are positively impactful on after-school physical activity participation. It is worth pointing out that being knowledgeable about physical activity and participation in in-school and after-school physical activity may not suggest that students are physically literate. In concept, physical literacy requires life-long evidence to determine. In other words, the 12 years of time in school is a short period in the entire life span of an individual. Therefore, what all the research evidence is showing is that K-12 physical education can help students start their own physical literacy journey. Adopting the journey concept is important in the curriculum design. Currently, little evidence can show a life-long impact of the knowledge although Kulinna et al.’s (2018) findings are encouraging. Knowledge and activities offered in concept-based physical education rarely take a lifecourse approach to content development. The knowledge and activity content is only relevant for a short period of time when students are still learning in schools or shortly after graduating from high school as young adults. The content that is likely missing is the knowledge and activity choices about active aging that are needed for life beyond the young adulthood. The concept of journey indicates that in physical education students are not expected to reach the destiny of physical literacy. Rather, they are learning how to prepare themselves for a life-long journey of becoming a physically literate mover. The journey concept communicates the central idea of the curriculum to students, teachers, and communities that the life-long process of physical activity participation for healthful living is the goal of life. The purpose of physical education is to prepare them for this life-long pursuit. However, adopting the concept of journey does not mean that the destination is not important. It means that the goal of being physically literate is different from the goals in most traditional curricula in that mastering a sport skill or enjoying a game are often portrayed to be the destinations for students in physical education. In a physical education for physical literacy, it should be made clear that students are constantly on the physical literacy journey, whether or not they have arrived at their destination of physical literacy can only be determined by the individual long after they have completed their K-12 physical education. Based on the personal journey idea, the physical education curriculum should be based on the views of life quality pursuit. There are two dimensions of life quality. One dimension is a global and longitudinal view of life quality, expressed in the term “quality of life.” The other is “quality of living.” Quality of life in this curriculum context can be understood with a summative sense that a person, at the near end of life, has determine his/her entire life to be satisfying. In other words, it is a life-long perspective in that it refers to a status encompassing the entire life experience. Quality of living, on the other hand, means the extent to which one enjoys his/her life at a given moment or during a relatively short period of time. It is a formative sense of life specified by a particular point of time. The curriculum for physical literacy should acknowledge both dimensions in content organization. While providing learners with satisfying daily experiences in lessons (quality of living), the experiences must contribute to their preparation for life-long pursuit of physical activity participation (quality of life). In a curriculum, the quality-of-life dimension refers to the knowledge, skills, motivation, or fitness components that can benefit the learner for a long time. The quality-of-living dimension includes those knowledge, skills, motivation, or fitness components that they can use at a given moment or a relatively short time (e.g., a few months or years as opposed to life-long utility value). Those content in the quality-of-living dimension is context and time specific, while those in the quality-of-life dimension would be transferable across contexts and have life-long utility values for the learner to adapt them in new or different context and throughout their lives. We can use the two-dimensional framework in curriculum development where content selection and organization may follow the principles defined with each of the dimensions. The tasks to be experienced may have strong quality-of-living orientation in that they can enhance the enjoyment of physical activity in the lesson and, perhaps, enrich their life on the days they are having physical education in schools. The tasks, however, must also carry quality-of-life components that focus on providing benefits for future life. In other words, while the tasks provide instant enjoyment, they also transmit or help construct knowledge, skills, and values that the learner can rely on to benefit their future life. Using soccer as an example, the quality-of-living dimension of tasks may be manifested when students learn the skills and play small-sided games in a lesson to receive instant enjoyment of skill acquisition and game play, and, perhaps, receive cardio-respiratory benefits along the way, too. But only when the teacher builds the quality-of-life components, such as how to identify fields outside of school where they can play soccer on their own and social skills/etiquette for them to be able to engage with diverse groups of soccer enthusiasts, can the learner learn life-long benefits of playing soccer to enhance the quality of life. This two-dimension integrated learning experience can have life-long impact as well as providing immediate benefits for daily living. A curriculum for physical literacy must follow the monism assumption that all physical movement involves all human capacities rather than the physical alone. Throughout the history, physical activity has been the core content of physical education. Therefore, building physical competence has been front and central to curriculum development. Whitehead (2010) made a strong case that a physical literate person must have embodied all dimensions of physical movement including cognitive, psycho-social, and emotional aspects to understand their functions in a physically active life. Corbin repeatedly (2002 , 2016 , 2021 ) advocates for including important healthful living concepts in physical education to assist students to become physically literate. Recent studies also demonstrate that lack of procedural knowledge may be a contributor to adolescents’ physical inactivity (Zhang et al., 2020). Currently, it seems, incorporating and integrating scientific knowledge about physical activity’s benefits for health, sound nutrition, and sound physical activity principles can be a curricular priority to provide a holistic approach to content develop that allows a monism embodiment learning experience. Reconceptualizing Concept-Based Curriculum for Physical Literacy The reconceptualization of future physical education should be based on the tenets of concept-based curriculum ( Corbin, 2021 ) and move beyond the physical- and/or sport-only approach. The curriculum needs to be characterized by three fundamental changes in perspectives. First, the goal of the curriculum is to help students start and sustain a physical literacy journey. Second, the curriculum is based on a framework that integrates the quality-of-life and quality-of-living dimensions to provide immediate and life-long benefits to students. Third, the curriculum should emphasize a knowledge-physical activity integrated structure following the monism assumption of physical literacy in content development for students to embody physical activity as “lived” processes involving all human capacities. Reframing the curriculum requires an understanding of the contextual challenges to be addressed. First, the curriculum needs to serve the mission of schooling ( Ennis, 2014 ). Using a kinesiology-science centered approach could help address the challenge. Second, the curriculum must be learner- and learning-centered rather than performance and recreation-centered. Emphasizing a personally meaningful journey for physical literacy can be the solution to the challenge. Third, the content should be based on a life-long perspective where the tasks, both knowledge and physical activity, must address the needs of human development, from birth to aging years. Moving away from and incorporating individual physical activities with a differentiated learning approach can help address the needs of preparing the learner for a life-long engagement in physical activity. Lastly, the content should include the knowledge and physical activity tasks that prepare the learner to participate in physical activities outside of physical education and beyond the school yard. Taking a social-ecologic approach to learning experience design can help address the need of making sound personally meaningful decisions for physical activity choices. Using the two-dimensional perspective to frame the curriculum, based on the concept of physical literacy, allows us to develop a curriculum to satisfy the four challenges. The two-dimensional perspective specifies a life-long pursuit by including the knowledge and skills the learner needs for the future. It allows the curriculum to be based on and aligned with both natural and social sciences in kinesiology. A vertical curriculum articulation should be used to sequence the content to mimic physical activity needs along the lifecourse trajectory rather than a sequence by content only for the present. The focus on the individual learner should be central and consistent with the monism idea in that the learner engages in the embodiment learning experiences with knowledge-activity integrated tasks as a whole person. I reconceptualize a hypothetic curriculum framework by framing it in four stages, the early childhood stage (Kindergarten-2nd grade), the middle childhood stage (3rd grade-5th grade), the pre-adolescence stage (6th-9th grade), and the adolescence/young adult stage (10th grade-12th grade). Each stage represents a physical literacy milestone with specific content designed following the two-dimensional perspective. The curriculum for each of the four stages should be concept-based in that learning and experiencing important physical activity concepts are the goal of learning. Learning experiences are designed following the monism idea in that all human capacities of the learner must be involved to provide the “lived” embodiment. Learning tasks must be cognitive-physical integrated and problem-solving oriented. Physical activities should be the vehicle for experiencing the concepts to be learned. Some of these characteristics can be found in articles by Sun et al. (2012) and Zhang et al. (2014) . However, the curricula used in their intervention studies were not designed for the proposed conceptualization. The reader should not interpret them as it was. The early childhood stage curriculum (K-2 nd grade). The major goal of the early childhood curriculum is to assist the learner to understand that physical movement follows a purpose since the birth of a person. The content should evolve around this central idea. The learning experiences should be organized to allow the young learner to work with parents, guardians, and/or siblings as well as the teacher to trace their movement origins by documenting their physical movement development, including reflex movements, since birth to five years of age. The tasks may include, for example, “show and tell” in which children share artifacts, such as photos, video clips, stories, and physical demonstrations, about their movement development since infancy to five years to demonstrate that every movement has a purpose. The knowledge base for the curriculum to guide the learning experience could be motor development/control theories. The movement content can focus on basic fundamental movements such as rolling, crawling, balancing, etc. The learning tasks are age-appropriate in a sense that they either mimic the movements of new-born children or match the movements that the children in this development stage can and should do. The middle childhood stage curriculum (3 rd -5 th grade). The curriculum goal at the stage is to reinforce the idea that every movement has a purpose. But at this stage the purpose should go beyond the “survival” of the infancy and young childhood. The movement purposes for healthful living are introduced and should be a central theme. The learning experiences should introduce developmentally appropriate physical fitness activities to allow the learner to observed important physiological responses to physical activity and understand the responses as benefits to health. Accordingly, learning tasks can be grouped by health-related fitness concepts rather than the movement characteristics. For example, small-sided soccer activities should be performed as aerobic exercises rather than soccer skills to allow the learner to know the scientific vocabularies of physical activity. The knowledge base should be a combination of motor development/learning theories and exercise physiology. At this stage, basic concepts of nutrition can be introduced too (at the upper end of age/grade). The physical activities should be mated to the concepts to assist reinforcing the knowledge learned as well as developing physical competence. The pre-adolescence stage curriculum (6 th -9 th grade). The curriculum at this stage encompasses the 6th to 8th grades in middle school and the 9th grade that is the first year of high school. The four-year span is based on the unique context of the United States where the 9th grade is the last year of compulsory physical education for most adolescents. In most high schools, physical education is only required for one or less credit hour, which translates into one year or one semester of study. Physical education for the 10th to 12th grades is elective, most students who take the elective physical education are high school athletes. The purpose to extend this curriculum to 9th grade is to keep the continuity of the content to help students continue their physical literacy journey into the first year of high school and, hopefully beyond. The goal of physical education at this stage is to help students navigate through the rapid development phase of puberty with relevant knowledge and physical activities that help them sustain the momentum of traveling on their physical literacy journey. In-depth concepts of exercise physiology are mated with appropriate physical activities to highlight the knowledge-centered embodiment experiences that reinforce the idea of having specific purpose for physical activities. The learning experiences should strengthen the problem-solving opportunities to personalize the scientific principles, based on both social and natural sciences, in planning personal physical activity strategies. The knowledge base should develop students’ ability to critically analyze physical activities from physiological, psychological, and sociological lenses and to understand their personal meaning in pursuing physical literacy. Although the physical activity content can continue to offer age-appropriate activities popular among adolescents, the activities must be carefully chosen to (a) allow relevant knowledge to be learned and (b) have life-long utility values. Activities with little contextual restrictions, individual-friendly rather than team-oriented, and with carry-over value into adulthood and aging years can be the most appropriate activities. The adolescence/young adult stage curriculum (10th-12th grade). The goal of the curriculum is to prepare students for post-high school physical literacy journey by helping them make critical decisions for physically active life from age 19 to over 65. The curriculum should carry over the idea of preparing students for adulthood and aging from the last stage and expand the content to deliberately provide a content for students to vividly experience the changes in physical activity experiences in later years of life. The learning experiences consist of well-mated cognitive-physical learning tasks that offer ample opportunities for students to learn the aging process and how physical activity can help optimize the aging life. The learning may focus on correcting misconceptions about aging such as aging is not an imminent life event, and on the understanding that the aging process starts as early as 30 years of age. The knowledge base should be based on an ecological perspective supported by research-informed exercise recommendations and/or guidelines for aging population with well-mated cognitive-physical tasks for students to experience their “aging” reality, and physical activity choices they will have in relation to their personal characteristics, social and physical environment, and socioeconomic constraints. The physical activities for the curriculum should be based on non-team sport, highly individualized activities, with a blend of low- moderate-, and rigorous intensity. For example, walking, hiking, swimming, dance, and tai-chi can all be relevant choices. In summary, this curriculum ought to provide an avenue for students to envision and plan for their future physical literacy journey. 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