Teachers today are charged with teaching for diversity awareness. Physical educators are challenged to cross the boundaries of traditional European origin games and sports, to offer innovative, culturally relevant curricula. The purpose of this study was to examine students' perceptions of such an innovative physical education program. Adopting a postcolonial (Gandhi, 1998) interpretation of physical education, we chose "stepping" as an appropriate vehicle through which to present culturally relevant content to African-American children. In stepping there is an absence of musical instruments; rather, the body itself becomes an instrument. Clapping, foot stamping, and slapping of the hands against body parts are used to produce rhythms. Stepping grew out of song and dance rituals in historically black colleges and universities in the United States. Traditionally, a step routine includes all of the five traits of western African dance which include: "dominance of a percussive concept of performance, multiple meter, call and response, songs of allusion/dances of derision, and part playing . . . " (Malone, 1996, p. 189). We utilized ethnographic methodology to answer the research question of how did the children perceive and respond to the innovation. The teacher-researchers were university faculty, two of whom taught the step lessons, while the third served as ethnographer. Participants were 46 African-American boys and girls who were the entire sixth grade of a rural elementary school in the South. The teachers had the support and assistance of the resident teacher, an African-American male who had "stepping" experience. The primary data source was student interviews. Interviews were triangulated with participant observation and daily debriefs with the teachers, which also served to confirm the fidelity of the instruction being implemented. The interviews were analyzed using the bracketing technique (Denzin, 1989) to identify emergent themes. Participant observation and daily debriefs were used to further classify the themes into focused categories. The major themes emerging from this study were: (1) students as invested learners, (2) students as decision-makers, and (3) students as problem-solvers. While further research is needed to determine the extent to which the children perceived the cultural relevance of the step lessons, they clearly invested in the curriculum. Keyword(s): curriculum development, diversity, multiculturalism/cultural diversity