Can Physical Education Improve Attitudes towards Disability?

Abstract

Nowadays, there is still some discrimination against people with disabilities, which tends to manifest itself subtly within “politically correct” parameters. These manifestations have a negative charge that can provoke feelings of rejection and fear, thus blocking the process of social inclusion of this group, which began several decades ago. Among several constraints, the literature indicates the negative attitudes of people without disabilities towards their peers with disabilities as one of the main barriers, and therefore, they consider positive attitudes as a criterion for success in the inclusion process. In the school context, the physical education discipline has been presented as an excellent tool for the development of positive attitudes towards disability due to its experiential and playful nature, potentially cooperative, which leads to deep personal interactions. In this context, structured contact between groups is seen as the basis that sustains these changes. It is in this way that in this opinion text, we focus on the results of research based on the theory of contact applied through the discipline of physical education and the development of positive attitudes. We conclude that, despite the large number of variables involved in the research presented, the results are indeed encouraging.