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

Abstract

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.