PhysEd-Academy Project

The PhysEd-Academy project was an Erasmus+ funded project that brought together teacher educators and school teachers from seven European countries to support change in physical education and teacher education.

At its heart was a simple idea: teacher education and school practice should not develop in isolation. The project created spaces for teacher educators and practising teachers to learn with and from one another, explore pedagogical ideas, and build knowledge across national and institutional boundaries.

What the project set out to do

PhysEd-Academy aimed to strengthen collaboration between physical education teacher education and school practice through a sustained international network.

The project focused on:

1. Establishing a network for sustained, international collaboration between PE teachers and PE teacher educators across Europe, 
2. Establishing a PE teacher education framework for strategic planning, policy development, proactive leadership, and adaptive design, 
3. Identifying and articulating a set of signature pedagogies for learning across different national initial teacher education and continuous professional development programs, 
4. Testing the set of signature pedagogies in initial PE teacher education programs, and 
5. Identifying connections between PE teacher education and equitable student outcomes. 

A collective action approach

The project was organised through an interconnected system of Communities of Practice (CoPs) involving teacher educators, pre-service teachers and in-service teachers across different national and professional contexts.

This collective action approach created opportunities for shared inquiry, collaborative learning and pedagogical development across teacher education and school practice.

Through these interconnected communities, participants were able to work across institutional and national boundaries while also exploring how pedagogical ideas could be adapted to local contexts.