Vision

The PhysEd-Academy project is built on a vision for more equitable physical education experiences for students in schools, pre-service teachers in teacher education programs, and in-service physical education teachers.

In line with MacPhail and Lawson (2020), we acknowledge the need for a collaborative redesign for physical education in schools and teacher education programs for the twenty-first century. To this end, PhysEd-Academy brings together teacher educators and teachers from across Europe to engage in a collective action project (MacPhail & Lawson, 2020), advocating for a move away from national policy silos to reinvigorate the field of PE and lead to improved, equitable outcomes for children and youth, and both novice and veteran teachers. Undertaking such a collective action project necessitate three key elements:

international-comparative analyses to facilitate cross-border knowledge generation, innovation, professional learning, and continuous improvement,

solid, dynamic partnerships between teacher education programmes and exemplary school physical education programmes,
and knowledge-generating teams.

PhysEd-Academy represents this type of collective action project – one that addresses the need for an innovative conceptualization and more democratic structure and epistemology of PE teaching and teacher education (Casey & Larsson, 2018) which disrupts the dominant and traditional conceptualizations of the processes of teaching and teacher education, offering a vision for a more inclusive and relevant physical education for twenty-first century learners.