Special issue – editorial introduction – physical education teacher education and its complexities: mapping contexts for research and sharing experiences from Brazil

ABSTRACT

This special edition is about the complexities of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) and focusses on the unique and often underrepresented setting of Brazil. All researchers in PETE deal with complexity; we acknowledge that is the nature of doing research. But since the 1990s there has been a growing awareness of the need to think about complexity in different ways (Ovens [2017]. Putting complexity to work to think differently about transformative pedagogies in teacher education. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), 38–51. Retrieved March 14, 2021, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1157529.pdf; Ovens et al. [2013]. Complexity thinking in physical education: Reframing curriculum, pedagogy and research. Routledge). In particular, there has been increased resistance to overly reductionist forms of research that seek certainty and generalisability. What has emerged is the need for increased attention to the social–cultural–material environments in which teacher education takes place, particularly in the way such environments are agentic in constituting phenomena such as PETE. There has also been an appreciation that the essence of such phenomena cannot be distilled from the messiness of its context and generalised unproblematically. Such an awareness has provoked researchers to engage in more generative ways with the multidimensional, relational, dynamic and unpredictable nature of educational practice. Alongside this is the need to represent and document the diversity of PETE practices in order to understand how those practices emerge from, respond to, and consist of multiple connections, configurations, agents, interpretations and meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• complexity thinking
• Brazil
• physical education teacher education
• criticality
• social justice education
• collaboration

Acknowledgements

We thank Dawn Garbett for thoughtfully proofreading a draft of this editorial and introductory paper as well as for her enduring support of the CIPPEFE events.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The 1st CIPPEFE (2018) has been organised in collaboration with the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará (IFCE) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). Proceedings retrieved from: https://intranet.limoeiro.ifce.edu.br/revistas/refise/issue/view/5. The 2nd CIPPEFE (2020) has been organised in collaboration with the São Judas Tadeu University (USJT). Sessions retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughx2xh9UTA&t=1036s. Accessed 14 February 2021.

2 As listed in the Lattes academic curriculum database, the official main source for all Brazilian research. The open call had two phases with two rounds of ad hoc peer reviews in each phase. The first phase (2018–2019) was into Portuguese and the second phase (2019–2020) was into English. It was important for us to have organised the first phase into Portuguese to value the details from the original writing process of each paper draft. Although longer, such a collaborative procedure for this special edition enabled a more diverse and contextualised range of papers.

3 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1839744.

4 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1902298.

5 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1884061.

6 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1878128.

7 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1802712.

8 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1818557.

9 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2020.1851182.

10 Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1907567.