Significativo na Educação Física: How meaningful physical education is represented in curriculum and interpreted by teacher educators in Portuguese-speaking countries

Abstract

There has been a recent increase in attention to meaningful experiences in physical education (PE) in English-speaking countries. This has led to calls for greater attention to be paid to the role of meaningful experiences in other contexts, given the different interpretations of the term ‘meaningful’ alongside other contextual priorities in PE. Thus, we examined meaningful experiences in PE in the Portuguese-speaking countries of Brazil (BR), Mozambique (MZ), and Portugal (PT) through the lenses of (a) curriculum and (b) teacher educators. Data were gathered through interviews with 12 teacher educators (BR = 4, MZ = 4, PT = 4) and analysis of curriculum documents. The PE curriculum documents did not explicitly reference meaningful experiences, though they do contain principles that teachers could use to foster them. In order to facilitate meaningful experiences, teacher educators indicated that PE teachers should apply democratic and reflective principles to make PE relevant to students’ lives, foster positive social interactions, offer appropriate challenges, enhance motor competence, and provide enjoyable and fun classes. Additional features were noted including novelty, competition, outdoor physical activity, and teacher professionalism. Teacher educators emphasised that meaningful experiences in PE arise from quality pedagogical practices but precarious teaching conditions can hinder this potential. In such circumstances, it is essential to seek creative solutions and advocate for improvements in working conditions and PE teaching in schools, while also integrating pedagogies of meaningfulness and social justice.

Introduction

Globally, many stakeholder groups agree that one of the main aims of physical education (PE) is to instil in young people a lifelong engagement with the culture of movement (Koski, 2008; Ní Chróinín et al., 2020). However, many students find the dominant form of PE inadequate, due to its emphasis on a limited range of sports techniques, fitness outcomes, and reducing obesity (Hastie, 2017). As a result, many students drop out of PE once it is no longer mandatory, perceiving it as lacking meaning and relevance (Ladwig et al., 2018). UNESCO's (2015) Quality PE Guidelines for Policymakers highlights that prioritising meaningful experiences can transform teaching, enabling students to perceive the value of what and how they are learning and experience an enriched quality of life.

Although almost all experiences carry meaning, not all are meaningful, as individuals do not always perceive them as significant (Kretchmar, 2007). We adopt the view that an experience becomes meaningful when individuals engage with it personally and recognise it as significant within their own lives (Kretchmar, 2007; Larossa Bondía, 2002; Metheny, 1968). Movement meanings exist along a continuum between the personal and the cultural, forming a rich web of connotations. While some meanings are idiosyncratic, others are shared within a particular time and culture (Kretchmar, 2000). The degree to which these meanings become meaningful can vary. As Jarvis (1987) notes, experiences that begin as ‘meaningless’ can acquire meaning through reflection and engagement. In PE, teachers can support students in transforming their experiences into knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

In this article, the term ‘meaning’ refers to the connotative dimensions of movement – that is, the meanings people attach to bodily practices. Skateboarding, for instance, may evoke ideas of adventure, freedom, resilience, lifestyle and belonging to an urban tribe. As Metheny (cited by Kretchmar, 2000) emphasised in her lectures, the cultural connotations of movement remind individuals of who they are, to whom they belong (their relationships and cultures), and the traditions and histories from where they come.

While there has been a recent surge in interest in meaningful experiences in PE, most research has been published in English and conducted in predominantly English-speaking countries. Studies on this phenomenon have been limited in Portuguese-speaking countries, home to over 250 million people globally (UNESCO, 2024). This study aims to address this gap. Given the diversity of PE contexts and experiences, and the influence of linguistic, cultural, and contextual factors on the notion of ‘meaningfulness’, understandings of this concept and its enactment can vary across educational traditions and sociocultural settings. In the various Portuguese-speaking countries – which may share a common language but are shaped by distinct yet interrelated historical, political, and pedagogical trajectories – interpretations of Meaningful PE are influenced by culturally shaped values, expectations, and curricular orientations.

The presence or absence of the concept of meaningfulness in PE can be found in different spaces. For example, it may be located in curriculum documents, teacher education programmes, or teachers’ practices. Curricula may include pedagogical principles and ideas that are aligned with or complementary to meaningful experiences. Teacher educators, as key mediators of curricular concepts, prepare future teachers to translate educational ideas into practice. Goodwin and Kosnik (2013) suggest that teacher educators are the linchpins or conduits within any type of educational reform, and that quality teaching is directly linked to the quality of teacher education. Thus, the perspective of teacher educators provides valuable insights into how Meaningful PE is understood in teacher education and can inform how teachers learn to prioritise meaningfulness with the students with whom they work. Accordingly, the research question is: What are the conceptions and perceptions of meaningful experiences in PE as viewed by teacher educators and as represented in curricula from Brazil, Mozambique, and Portugal?

Meaningful experiences in PE

There are a number of ways that meaningful experiences have been conceptualised in the literature over time. For example, based on definitions of meaningfulness in life and inspired by flow theory – involving purpose, intentionality and inner harmony – Chen (1998) argues meaningfulness in PE should consider the ‘students’ perceptions of purposes that the content requires them to achieve, their intention to act when they encounter the content, and the knowledge and skills in the content as perceived by the students’ (286). Chen's (1998) study in the United States identified nine dimensions of meaning attributed to PE: fitness development; socialisation; social recognition; variation of activities (novelty); self-expression (e.g. in dance or gymnastics activities); competitiveness; demonstration of competence; cultural appreciation; and release of tension. The regrouping of these meanings led to the creation of a six-dimensional construct of meaningfulness, comprised of: social bonding, cultural appreciation, challenge, tension release, fitness development, and self-expression.

Chen's (1998) conceptualisation emphasises meaning as an embodied, contextual and developmental phenomenon. Building on this foundation and guided by hypothesised criteria of meaningful experiences according to Kretchmar (2006), Beni et al. (2017) synthesised 50 empirical studies in English and found that children commonly referred to the following features of meaningful experiences in PE: positive social interaction; optimal challenge; motor competence; fun and enjoyment; and personally relevant learning. Their list does not replace Chen's (1998) definition but translates, consolidates, and provides updated evidence for and against its central ideas into practice-oriented guidance.

Research in other countries has both supported and extended the features developed by Beni et al. (2017). For example, the study by Walseth et al. (2018) in Norway revealed that students considered social interaction, the inclusion of all students in class, and the co-creation of the curriculum and the introduction of new activities at the students’ request to provide personally relevant and meaningful learning. More recently, research in culturally and economically diverse educational contexts has found support for the features of Meaningful PE similar to those of Beni et al. (2017), while also recommending that other features be included. For instance, Scanlon et al. (2025) in Australia highlighted enjoyment, challenge, inclusion, relationships, movement and a relevant learning environment. In Spain, Saiz-González et al. (2025) included novelty (variety of sports and activities), teachers’ interpersonal style (considering students’ interests and preferences, promoting autonomy, and making classes engaging and fun), and relief from the school routine (PE is a moment of active, dynamic and enjoyable learning within school life). In addition, based on students’ responses in Canada, the significance of PE was grouped into four categories: kindness, physical activity, fun, and quality education, with the most important ideas being: being treated with respect, working hard, having fun, being active, and equality (Harding-Kuriger et al., 2025). Studies by others have also shown that adventure provided by outdoor activities and adventure sports such as parkour, skateboarding, cycling, slackline, and rock climbing, can be a resource for meaningful experiences and learning in PE (França et al., 2023; Wintle, 2022). Although meaningfulness is a highly subjective concept that differs from individual to individual and experience to experience (Kretchmar, 2007), these features help to provide the basis for developing a shared language of meaningfulness which can be interrogated and built upon by teachers and students.

The features identified in these examples provide valuable clues about what might constitute a meaningful experience for students in PE and have helped shape provisional understandings of how teachers might intentionally try to prioritise these experiences for students. Although more recent findings exist, the framework by Beni et al. (2017) remains the most widely used and may offer a strong starting point and comparable basis for future studies to consider, especially when aiming to examine features of meaningful experiences in other contexts beyond those where English is the dominant language.

Beyond the development of a shared language of meaningfulness based on the features of meaningful experiences, the Meaningful PE approach (Fletcher et al., 2021; Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022) is informed by a social constructivist perspective of learning, which considers both individual and social processes in knowledge construction (Palincsar, 1998). This perspective suggests that knowledge is socially constructed based on a reflective analysis of previous experiences, and is mediated with others (Rovegno and Dolly, 2006). Meaningful PE involves teachers’ use of democratic pedagogies, which personalise learning, and reflective pedagogies, which promote evaluation of experiences. Democratic pedagogies engage students actively, giving them a voice in their learning and decision-making, fostering inclusion of all and opportunities to extend their learning to their communities. Reflective pedagogies encourage students to consider past and present experiences to enhance future learning, while also raising awareness of power, privilege, and inequalities, and supporting actions to promote social justice (Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022).

These pedagogical principles, although not new, gain relevance when they are explicitly connected to meaning. Inclusive practices that consider students’ interests and sociocultural contexts, together with reflection on social injustices, have long characterised critical and socially engaged pedagogies. The integration of Meaningful PE with social justice perspectives offers a way to strengthen students’ meaning-making of movement and their engagement in identifying and transforming social inequities (Iannucci et al., 2026).

Evidence from such studies can help researchers and teachers understand how ideas from Meaningful PE are interpreted or adapted across different contexts, depending on how students, teachers, and curricula position meaning and meaningfulness within the broader aims, purposes, and enactment of PE. Accordingly, this research examines how meaningful experiences in PE are described in curricula and interpreted by teacher educators in three Portuguese-speaking countries.

Methodological approach

This is a qualitative, exploratory, international comparative case study (Penn, 2019) conducted in Brazil, Mozambique, and Portugal. These are Portuguese-speaking countries representing diverse economies across three continents. According to Hantrais and Mangen (1996 cited by Penn, 2019), international comparative studies focus on particular phenomena in two or more countries, aiming to compare their manifestations in different sociocultural contexts using the same research protocols. International comparative studies in PE are scarce, and in their absence, Lawson (2018) suggests a need to provide rich descriptive studies that provide an understanding of the status quo in each respective context. From these descriptive studies, agendas for change can be created. Therefore, one way this research makes a significant contribution is by highlighting contextual and subjective similarities and differences in the conceptions and perceptions of meaningful experiences from the perspectives of teacher educators and curriculum.

All stages of the research process – from study design through data collection and analysis to manuscript writing – were shaped by our epistemological positions and professional trajectories. Collectively, we identify as educators and researchers in the fields of teaching and teacher education, which informed the theoretical and methodological choices adopted in the research. The focus on meaningful experiences reflects our pedagogical and scholarly interests, as well as our understanding of the heuristic value of this approach for the field. The research team consists of five men and one woman: two Brazilians, one Mozambican, two Portuguese (all of whom speak Portuguese as their first language), and a critical friend of Canadian nationality whose first language is English. This diversity, together with our experiences as educators and researchers (especially in terms of gender identities, race, geographic origin, social class, and professional trajectories), influenced our methodological processes and decisions. We acknowledge that our positions and identities shaped the development of the research, especially in relation to the interpretation of the results and the ways in which we constructed the relevance of the study, both for ourselves and for the academic and teaching community.

Contexts and participants

Brazil and Mozambique were colonised by Portugal, gaining independence in 1822 and 1975 respectively; Mozambique later experienced civil war that lasted until 1992. Although Portuguese is the official language in Mozambique, more than 40 local languages are spoken. Portugal currently receives immigrants mainly from former colonies and from India, China, and Ukraine (European Commission, 2025), while Brazil receives immigrants primarily from Venezuela, Bolivia and Haiti (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 2022). Most of the population of these countries live in urban areas in Brazil (88%) and Portugal (61%), whereas in Mozambique 64% of the population lives in rural areas (World Bank, 2024).

In Brazil and Portugal, compulsory schooling includes all of upper high school or secondary school (up to approximately ages 17–18). In Mozambique, compulsory schooling ends at ninth grade (around ages 14–15), although secondary schooling continues until 12th grade (around ages 17–18). PE is a compulsory subject in all three countries. Regarding material conditions, schools in Brazil and Mozambique frequently face shortages or inadequate facilities and equipment, and Mozambique also deals with overcrowded classes, often with 70–90 students in primary education and 40–50 in secondary education (Pessula and Bive, 2019). All three countries have national curricula (Brazil, 2018; Mozambique, 2022, 2024; Portugal, 2017a, 2017b) that define essential learning throughout basic education, with flexibility for regional and local adaptation.

The participants were 12 teacher educators, four from each country, comprising five women and seven men, with average ages of 51.7 years (BR), 44 years (MZ), and 57 years (PT). Their teaching experience averaged 28 years (BR), 18 years (MZ), and 33 years (PT), including time spent in schools and universities. The participants were affiliated with public and private universities from medium and large cities in each country. They were not familiar with the Meaningful PE approach; only one educator from Portugal mentioned this approach during the interview. Each participant was assigned a code to ensure anonymity.

Data collection

Two types of qualitative data were collected. Firstly, the first author conducted one individual semi-structured interview, either in person or online, with each teacher educator. The questions addressed participants’ perceptions of the state of PE teaching in the country, the PE curriculum, student participation in PE, and their conceptions and examples of meaningful experiences in PE. The average length of the interviews was 50 minutes. The audio recordings were made, transcribed, and reviewed, resulting in 103 pages of transcript.

The selected curriculum documents are the main national PE policy frameworks in each country, providing a solid basis for examining if and how meaningfulness is embedded in formal expectations. In Brazil (2018), the curriculum defines essential learning and prescribes competencies (general, by area of knowledge, and by discipline) and skills to be developed, as well as cross-cutting contemporary themes. PE is part of the language area; its contents encompass a variety of games and play, sports, dance, gymnastics, combat sports, and adventure sports. Each content area is subdivided according to its characteristics.

In Mozambique (2022), the curriculum prescribes teaching and learning principles, defines cross-curricular themes, objectives, skills and values, extracurricular activities or interest clubs, and the graduate profile. PE is located in the area of practical and technological activities, and its contents include: gymnastics (rope-skipping, aerobics, and artistic); dance (Mozambican and contemporary); traditional games of Mozambique; pre-sports games; athletics, handball, basketball, soccer, volleyball; and optionally chess, badminton, swimming, cricket, tennis, orienteering race, and netball (Mozambique, 2024).

In Portugal (2017a), the curriculum prescribes the principles, vision, and values of teaching and learning, as well as the competencies to be developed. It is organised into areas and sub-areas, highlighting essential learning or competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes), teaching actions and strategies, and descriptors of the graduate's profile. The PE content includes: traditional and popular games, collective sports games, athletics, gymnastics; rhythmic and expressive activities; skating; and optionally, nature trails, combat sports, racquet games, and swimming (Portugal, 2017b).

Data analysis

We conducted reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's guidance (2006, 2019), situated within an interpretivist and constructionist perspective. Interviews were analysed first, followed by the curriculum documents. Rather than assuming coherence between policy and practice, we treated these sources as complementary, each offering a distinct space where meaning is produced and negotiated. Analysing both enabled a richer understanding of how PE meanings are constructed across contexts.

We began with the framework proposed by Beni et al. (2017) and Fletcher and Ní Chróinín's (2022) work, as its conceptualisation of Meaningful PE has demonstrated strong utility for interpreting how teachers and curricula articulate movement experiences across diverse contexts. These served as sensitising concepts that guided our initial readings. Ongoing reflections and team discussions helped critically examine how our experiences and assumptions as researchers in PE and teacher professional development shaped our interpretations, guiding both coding and theme development. This approach was applied to both interviews and curriculum documents, providing a flexible and rigorous framework while explicitly acknowledging the interpretive role of the researchers.

We followed the six recursive phases of reflective thematic analysis – familiarisation, coding, theme construction, iterative review, defining/naming themes, and narrative reporting (Braun and Clarke, 2006, 2019). Initial coding was conducted by the first author, followed by collaborative theme refinement and analytic discussion with two researchers. A critical friend then reviewed the categories and the overall process to ensure rigour and coherence. Discussions throughout the analysis, particularly during the inductive stage, refined our understanding and informed the final themes.

For curriculum analysis, repeated readings of both the general and PE-specific sections allowed identification of explicit and implicit characteristics of meaningful experiences. Fun and positive social interactions were key categories: playfulness in the Brazilian and Portuguese curricula was interpreted as fun, whereas references to social norms, attitudes, and values were understood as expressions of positive social interactions across all three curricula. Relevant excerpts were colour-coded according to dimensions of Meaningful PE and organised into a comparative table to enable cross-country analysis.

Patterns within and across interviews and curriculum documents were compared to identify relationships among codes and to group them into broader analytic categories. Through iterative team discussions, these categories were refined and eventually consolidated into two overarching themes, which shape the results.

Results

The results are presented in two thematic sections: (1) (mis)alignment of the PE curriculum and meaningful experiences, and (2) teacher educators’ perceptions of meaningful experiences in PE.

(Mis)alignment of the PE curriculum with meaningful experiences

The thematic analysis of the curriculum documents from the three countries led to the identification of two sub-themes. The first concerns curricular orientations for promoting meaningful experiences in PE. A second sub-theme is derived from the information gathered in the interviews and addresses teacher educators’ views on curriculum and meaningful experiences.

Curricular orientations and their relationship with meaningful experiences

Across the three curriculum documents, no explicit references to meaningful experiences in PE were identified. However, latent elements associated with this concept were evident through underlying ideas, competencies, and pedagogical orientations.

The Brazilian curriculum (2018: 223) explicitly values the senses and meanings attributed to bodily practices, reflecting a cultural and identity-oriented understanding of PE. The PE-specific competencies indicate that students should plan and implement strategies to face challenges, expand cultural repertoires, reinterpret values and meanings of body practices, and autonomously enjoy these practices in leisure and health contexts. Although the notion of ‘meanings attributed to body practices’ appears explicitly, the treatment of ‘challenge’ remains broad and lacks guidance on adjusting task difficulty. Still, several features of meaningful experiences (Beni et al., 2017) – challenge, development of motor competence, personally relevant learning, and positive social interactions – are implicitly embedded. The emphasis on interpreting and recreating meanings suggests alignment with democratic and reflective pedagogical principles, particularly regarding student agency and co-construction of understanding.

The Mozambican curriculum (2022) emphasises student-centred teaching and the development of self-esteem, identity, and quality of life. The second guiding principle of the Mozambican curriculum (2022: 5) states that education should prepare students to apply knowledge to problem-solving and lifelong learning, linking curricular content to ‘concrete life situations’ and community needs. This orientation strongly reflects personally relevant learning and connects school PE to broader social and cultural contexts. The community focus also aligns with democratic pedagogies, particularly those that value participation, situated learning, and responsiveness to local realities (Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022).

In turn, the Portuguese curriculum (2017a) situates PE within a broader framework of general competencies for holistic education and grounds pedagogical decisions in meaningful guiding principles. The competencies under ‘interpersonal relationships’ and ‘personal development and autonomy’ indicate that students should adapt behaviours in cooperative and competitive contexts, relate knowledge, emotions, and actions, identify interests, and consolidate competencies through lifelong learning (pp. 25–26). These competencies resonate with several features of meaningful experiences – especially positive social interaction, motor competence development, and learning that is personally relevant to students’ lives.

Personally relevant learning appears prominently in all three curricula, although with different emphases. In Brazil, personally relevant learning is associated with autonomy and sustained engagement in bodily practices; in Mozambique, with problem-solving and life skills; and in Portugal, with lifelong learning. Positive social interaction also features in the three documents, expressed through intentional socialisation and ethical coexistence in Brazil, an extensive framework of civic and moral values in Mozambique, and responsibility, cooperation, and empathy in Portugal. Motor competence is likewise central: Brazil links autonomy and bodily appropriation to health and leisure; Mozambique emphasises motor development connected to identity and well-being; and Portugal highlights body awareness and movement integration.

The notion of challenge appears explicitly only in Brazil and Portugal – framed in Brazil as solving challenges within bodily practices and in Portugal as identifying needs for developing or deepening competencies – while Mozambique does not include this feature. Fun/playfulness is clearly referenced in Brazil through playfulness, mentioned more indirectly in Portugal, and absent in the Mozambican curriculum.

Three additional categories were evident across all three curricula: cultural appreciation (such as cultural identity, cultural patrimony, and aesthetic sensitivity), health and well-being (treated critically in Brazil, as habits and hygiene in Mozambique, and as everyday healthy behaviours in Portugal), and environmental sustainability. In addition, sports competition was present in Mozambique's curriculum, with PE playing an important role in popularising national sports through school sports competitions.

In terms of the pedagogical approaches that are expressed in the curriculum documents, democratic pedagogies appear consistently across all three but with different emphases. For instance, in the curriculum of Brazil (2018), the democratisation of bodily practices is associated with community protagonism; this is understood as the capacity of students to reflect, make decisions, and act in order to secure their right to access bodily practices. The document also highlights respect for differences and the confrontation of prejudice as essential components of democratic coexistence. In Mozambique (2022), democratic pedagogies are grounded in the principle of inclusive education and in the transversal themes that address human rights, a culture of peace, democracy, gender, and equity, reinforcing equal opportunities and ethical coexistence in a diverse and post-civil war context. The curriculum of Portugal (2017a) positions inclusion and equity as structuring principles and incorporates democratic values into its vision of the student – such as respect for human dignity, citizenship, solidarity, and cultural diversity – explicitly rejecting all forms of discrimination.

Reflective pedagogies also run across the three curricula, though like democratic pedagogies, they take different forms. In Brazil (2018), reflection is treated as a specific dimension of practice, oriented towards observing, analysing, and making decisions based on one's own bodily experiences, especially when addressing challenges or learning new modalities. In Mozambique (2022), reflection is embedded in transversal themes designed to develop citizenship and social intervention competencies, encouraging students to critically analyse issues related to human rights, equity, health, sustainability, and ethical coexistence. In the Portuguese curriculum, reflection is linked to values of curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, encouraging students to seek new solutions and applications, thereby expanding the scope of reflective practice beyond bodily activity.

Overall, while none of the curricula explicitly adopt the terminology of Meaningful PE, all three incorporate elements that relate to its features and pedagogical principles. Brazil foregrounds cultural interpretation and student agency within body practices; Mozambique emphasises problem-solving and community relevance; and Portugal highlights social interactions, emotional–behavioural connections, and personal development. These embedded orientations reveal a shared – though variably articulated – commitment to forms of learning that can support meaningful experiences in PE.

Teacher educators’ views on curriculum and meaningful experiences

When asked whether their national curriculum supports the promotion of meaningful experiences in PE, teacher educators offered nuanced and often critical interpretations. Across contexts, they recognised curricular intentions aligned with meaningfulness but highlighted persistent gaps between policy and pedagogical enactment.

Brazilian teacher educators generally perceived the curriculum as conceptually aligned with meaningful experiences – particularly through its emphasis on student protagonism, problem-posing, reflection, and the re-signification of body practices. However, they emphasised that the curriculum offers little pedagogical guidance, placing the responsibility for meaningfulness largely on teachers’ professional judgement.

One teacher educator in Brazil noted that the curriculum encourages students to draw on cultural references and question or modify practices, arguing that: ‘the idea of PE today is to provoke this relationship of constructing knowledge … the curriculum provides this opportunity’ (BR_TE2). Yet others stressed the limits of the document: ‘It depends heavily on the teacher. The curriculum alone does not guarantee anything; we need teachers who can enable this’ (BR_TE3). Another teacher educator pointed to minimal operational clarity: ‘The [Brazilian Curriculum (2017)] shows this concern, but only in minimal terms. It does not explain how to do it, especially when it comes to assessment’ (BR_TE4). Together, these views portray a curriculum that is conceptually open to meaningful experiences but under-specified in practical, pedagogical terms.

In Mozambique, teacher educators generally agreed that meaningful experiences are not an explicit curricular priority. However, the curriculum emphasises life skills, problem-solving, community relevance, positive social interactions, equity, and the development of autonomy and self-esteem – experiential qualities that can contribute to Meaningful PE. One educator emphasised that meaningful experiences are also shaped by gendered inequities. She explained that many teachers plan lessons ‘thinking about the boys and not the girls’ (MZ_TE2), especially in rural areas where girls shoulder domestic responsibilities, have little free time, and face discrimination during PE classes. Consequently, girls’ opportunities to engage in relevant and enjoyable learning experiences are constrained, limiting the potential impact of the Mozambican curriculum's equity goals.

Portuguese teacher educators recognised strong curricular intentions related to meaningful learning – such as essential learning outcomes, situated and interdisciplinary learning, and the emphasis on active and healthy citizenship. However, they consistently noted a misalignment between curricular ideals and traditional teaching practices. As one teacher educator stated, ‘In what is written, yes – there is repeated emphasis on situated, meaningful learning. In practice, I would say no. Teaching remains very traditional, and students often fail to see its applicability’ (PT_TE3). Another highlighted a disconnect between teacher intentions and student experience: ‘Conceptually, there is concern. But I’m not sure it translates into practice … teachers may have intentions, but these are not always perceived by students’ (PT_TE4). These accounts indicate that Portugal's curriculum offers clearer conceptual support for meaningful experiences, yet implementation remains a challenge.

Analysis of the three curricula, combined with teacher educators’ perspectives, suggests that although the three curricula reference principles aligned with meaningful experiences, their enactment depends heavily on actual teaching conditions and teacher agency. This indicates that the ideals of meaningful experiences may be quite removed from the realities of classroom practice. Teacher educators highlight how structural and contextual challenges shape the implementation of these guidelines, suggesting that meaningfulness emerges less from the written documents and more from teachers’ capacity to adapt curricular intentions to feasible practices in each context.

Teacher educators’ perceptions of meaningful experiences in PE

The second part of the results presents Portuguese-speaking teacher educators’ perspectives on meaningful experiences in PE, including their conceptual understandings and practical examples.

Conceptions and features of meaningful experiences in PE

Several of the teacher educators articulated their perspectives about what beliefs and practices informed or reflected meaningful experiences. In all three countries, teacher educators felt that the strongest feature was personally relevant learning: that is, the potential for the knowledge acquired in PE to become an integral part of the students’ current and future daily lives.

Furthermore, one Brazilian teacher educator highlighted the social dimension of meaningful experiences in PE: ‘When the teacher manages to use sport as a vehicle for students to achieve social inclusion, cooperation, and understanding of society, using sport for this purpose, PE becomes highly meaningful’ (BR_TE1). Another teacher educator (BR_TE4) highlighted the importance of considering students’ diverse interests and skill levels, diversifying content with elements of youth culture (e.g. skateboarding, parkour) to engage them.

One Mozambican teacher educator provided a different point of view, suggesting that meaningfulness is perhaps more closely tied to personal relevance, stating that meaningfulness emerges ‘when the teacher shows the student why that content is important, when they relate what is being taught to aspects of the student's life’, noting that without this connection the content ‘cease[s] to have significance’ and undermines engagement (MZ_TE4).

Portuguese teacher educators likewise highlighted the broader social and political value of PE, positioning meaningfulness within a civic and ethical frame. One argued that PE should cultivate awareness of ‘social well-being, democracy, gender equality, respect, tolerance’, emphasising that its purpose is not technical mastery but enabling students ‘to have a more significant role in the community’ (PT_TE2).

Another stressed that meaningful learning is ‘useful for life’ and best achieved through ‘problem-solving’ in situations that approximate real-life contexts and can be tried out ‘with friends and family’ beyond school (PT_TE3). Collectively, these perspectives point to the role of coherence – where learning in PE is perceived as connected, transferable, and purposeful (Martela and Steger, 2016).

Teacher educators also identified specific features of meaningful experiences aligned with the Meaningful PE framework (Beni et al., 2017). For example, challenge was frequently cited and interpreted as differentiated opportunities that push all students appropriately: ‘The student who is good has the right to be challenged to be even better’, while others need space to ‘set goals’ and work towards them (PT_TE1). Enjoyment was also described as essential – ‘it has to be fun’ – and social interaction emerged as a recurring concern, particularly the need to intentionally cultivate cooperation and counteract tendencies towards individualism during small-sided games (PT_TE1).

When synthesised, teacher educators across the three Portuguese-speaking contexts shared a convergent understanding of Meaningful PE as learning that extends beyond the gym and becomes relevant in students’ everyday lives, emphasising personal relevance, social purpose, and transferability.

Conditions necessary for promoting meaningful experiences

The teacher educators across Brazil, Mozambique, and Portugal highlighted that Meaningful PE experiences for students depend on both structural and pedagogical conditions. In Brazil and Portugal, teacher educators emphasised the importance of recognising students’ diverse interests and abilities, fostering participation and student voice, diversifying content, and building strong teacher–student relationships – principles aligned with democratic pedagogies (Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022). As one Brazilian teacher educator stated:

When I’m with my students, I like to hear them, to understand how they are doing, to know their opinions about the class, and to ask how we could develop activities or what changes we could make. Giving voice to those who are there is about enhancing what we can achieve with body practices. (BR_TE2)

In Mozambique, teacher educators highlighted that Meaningful PE experiences rely on both adequate facilities and teaching materials, as well as teacher commitment, professionalism, and relational care:

The [adequate] teaching material and infrastructure, the professionalism, the motivational classes, the humanity, the affection of the professional themselves. (MZ_TE3)

A meaningful PE experience is one in which the teacher is committed, who does everything to have a full, happy class every day. […] one in which the transmission of values is in the true sense […] because through games and sports activities, students can take these values into their lives. (MZ_TE2)

Across contexts, teacher educators stressed the importance of participatory, contextualised, and reflective teaching and assessment practices that allow students to take an active role in their learning, as exemplified in the narratives of teacher educators from Brazil and Portugal:

The student has to know what, why, when, what I am doing or learning that knowledge for, what it is for. […]. We start a class not with the activity, but with the goal. ‘The reason for our class … Do you remember the last class? We worked on that. Do you remember that we planned that for this two-month period? In this class, our focus is that’. When the class is over, there is a discussion circle: ‘For the next class …’. (BR_TE3)

It is very important that teachers implement […] authentic assessment that meets the needs of the children and propose things that are meaningful for their daily lives. […]. They have to learn because what they learn makes them better people and citizens. (PT_TE2).

Comparatively, Brazil and Portugal place greater emphasis on pedagogical agency, student voice, and democratic classroom practices, whereas Mozambique foregrounds structural and material conditions alongside teacher commitment. Across all three contexts, however, teacher agency emerges as the central factor enabling meaningful experiences, mediating both curricular intentions and contextual constraints. These findings underscore that meaningfulness in PE is co-constructed through the interaction of structural, relational, and pedagogical conditions.

Examples of facilitating meaningful experiences in PE

Across contexts, teacher educators described initiatives intended to promote meaningful experiences in PE, yet their accounts indicated contrasts in how each country conceptualises meaningfulness. These examples show how cultural traditions, institutional conditions, and pedagogical orientations shape what is foregrounded as ‘meaningful’ in PE.

In Brazil, teacher educators highlighted a variety of activities, as well as curricular, extracurricular and interdisciplinary projects. These included vocational sports schools, badminton and chess activities using student-made chessboards, school Olympics, nature trails in the local mountains, and introducing novelty through elements of youth culture (e.g. slacklining, street dance). Such initiatives diversified movement experiences and connected learning to local realities. They also mentioned strategies such as gamification, the construction of handmade PE materials, and tournaments involving students and the community. During the pandemic, teachers developed online sessions with guest speakers and encouraged students to produce dance videos. Together, these actions promoted autonomy and personal expression and reflected adaptive, student-centred teaching aligned with Meaningful PE principles.

In Mozambique, teacher educators emphasised interschool competitions as central to PE, reinforcing a school sport culture where meaningfulness is associated with social interaction, affiliation, and performance. While these events can build belonging and confidence, they also narrow the scope of meaningfulness to competitive contexts. Other examples – handcrafted materials for PE, a sex education project, and occasional guided discovery or reflective discussions – suggest efforts to connect PE to students’ lived experiences and promote agency. Still, these practices were constrained by structural and resource limitations, suggesting more limited pedagogical diversification compared to Brazil and Portugal.

Portuguese teacher educators described initiatives tied to broader policy and community partnerships, such as the nutritional project ‘Sintra Grows Healthy’ (Ferreira et al., 2020), active transport projects, and environmental education involving canoeing and riverbank clean-ups. These forms of engagement linked movement to citizenship, health, and environmental awareness, supporting relevance and purpose. References to established pedagogical models – Sport Education, Teaching Games for Understanding, Cooperative Learning, and Peace Education – indicated more systematic integration of autonomy, social interaction, and inclusive participation, reflecting support for meaningfulness as an explicit pedagogical aim.

Across contexts, the examples demonstrate that meaningful experiences in PE are not uniform, but situated constructions shaped by local educational cultures, the resources available, and the institutional logics that guide school practices. Rather than indicating a continuum of pedagogical development, the differences among Brazil, Mozambique, and Portugal highlight distinct contextual pathways through which teachers interpret what counts as valuable, relevant, and engaging for students in PE.

Discussion

The findings indicate that although the PE curricula in Brazil (2018), Mozambique (2022, 2024), and Portugal (2017a, 2017b) tend not to explicitly address meaningful experiences, they contain references closely aligned to features and pedagogical principles that could support them. Teacher educators echoed this perspective, noting that even in the instances where there was close alignment, the realisation of meaningful experiences depends largely on teachers’ interpretation and practices, as curricular documents offer limited guidance on how to enact these ideas.

Across the three countries, teacher educators stressed that personal relevance plays a large role in supporting Meaningful PE experiences, requiring teachers to connect learning to students’ everyday lives. In addition, participants from Portugal highlighted appropriate challenges and motor skill development, while those from Brazil and Portugal emphasised the role of joy and fun. Overall, their interpretations aligned with several of the features of meaningful experiences identified in prior English-language research (e.g. Beni et al., 2017). They also underscored PE's potential to foster social connections and coherence across movement experiences and contexts (e.g. from school to local community organisations) – conditions that support meaningfulness (Martela and Steger, 2016). When such connections are absent, students often perceive PE as meaningless (Beni et al., 2017; Walseth et al., 2018).

With the conceptualisations of meaningful experiences in mind, teacher educators highlighted that in order to facilitate these types of experiences, several conditions are necessary: addressing students’ diverse interests and skill levels, diversifying content, building trusting relationships, listening to students’ voices, and engaging with their communities. Many of the descriptions of conditions also align with the language of the features and pedagogical principles (e.g. student choice, social interaction, personal relevance). The participants also stressed the need for adequate resources – or creative alternatives – and for teachers to demonstrate professionalism, motivation, creativity, care, and commitment to positive values, aligning themselves with quality education (Harding-Kuriger et al., 2025). Across the three countries, participants emphasised participatory, contextualised, and reflective pedagogies that position students as active agents of learning. These ideas closely align with the democratic and reflective principles central to the Meaningful PE approach (Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022). Our findings suggest the potential of an additional pedagogical principle linked to teacher professionalism, encompassing motivation, creativity, care, and ethical commitment – factors that shaped how teacher educators across contexts interpreted and enacted meaningful pedagogies.

Beyond the descriptions of common features identified by Beni et al. (2017), there were also several other features that arose from the teacher educators’ data. For example, the diversification of content relates directly to ideas of activity variation and novelty (Chen, 1998; Saiz-Gonzalez et al., 2025). These elements were most evident in the examples from Brazil and Portugal. Considering students’ interests and abilities, listening to their voices, and engaging with their communities connect both to democratic pedagogies and to teachers’ personal style (Saiz-Gonzalez et al., 2025). In Brazil, teacher educators associated meaningfulness with extracurricular sports projects, while Mozambican teacher educators emphasised participation in interschool competitions, which complement the curriculum and create coherence in students’ learning trajectories. Competition or competitiveness can be a source of meaningful experiences, but it tends to be valued more for the social interactions and personal challenge it affords than for competition itself (Light, 2010). In addition, female students often regard activities not classified as traditional sports, such as aerobics, dance, climbing, and Pilates, as more significant to their PE experience (Beni et al., 2017; Chen, 1998; Enright and O'Sullivan, 2010), highlighting the importance of diversifying content to respond to students’ varied interests and strengths. Finally, by encouraging engagement in communities of practice, teachers create pathways for students to explore passions and develop identities within movement cultures (Kretchmar, 2000).

Teacher educators in Brazil and Mozambique highlighted the adaptation of spaces and the creation of alternative materials as strategies that support meaningful experiences in PE – skills they believe transfer to adult, family and community contexts. Research in both countries documents these practices (Pessula and Bive, 2019; Rufino, 2017). For instance, national survey data from Brazil (Instituto Península, 2023) show that 50.9% of teachers create alternative materials and 94.7% report inadequate spaces for PE.

Teacher educators from Brazil and Portugal also described interdisciplinary projects that expanded students’ involvement with physical practices and strengthened coherence across life contexts. Projects addressing social issues – such as environmental action, healthy growth or active transport – helped link PE to other domains of students’ lives, which may explain why participants frequently framed meaningfulness in terms of coherence. Recent research (França et al., 2023; Wintle, 2022) indicates that adventure or outdoor sports in PE provide multiple learning opportunities, including cooperation, inclusion, well-being, motor and socio-emotional skill development, contact with nature, and sustainable behaviours. These life skills contribute to meaningful learning experiences. This also aligns with other research showing that interdisciplinarity enhances meaningfulness in learning processes (Tonnetti and Lentillon-Kaestner, 2023). Similarly, project-based learning fosters responsibility and immediate personal relevance, as connecting classroom content to life outside school supports meaningful experiences (Simonton et al., 2021).

Participants also identified several strategies for promoting meaningful experiences in PE such as adopting new pedagogical approaches, incorporating reflective moments about the purpose of learning, integrating new technologies, and using authentic assessments. They also emphasised the value of creating alternative teaching materials and involving families and community in PE projects. Collectively, these practices reflect democratic and reflective pedagogical orientations that enhance student engagement and deepen learning, thereby increasing the potential for meaningful experiences (Fletcher and Ní Chróinín, 2022).

Finally, Meaningful PE has been increasingly associated with social justice-oriented pedagogies (Batista et al., 2024; Iannucci et al., 2026), particularly because it foregrounds students’ voices, interests, and cultural contexts. Approaches centred on relevance, autonomy, and positive social interaction create opportunities for learners who have been historically marginalised in PE – whether due to gender, body norms, disability, or socioeconomic constraints – to experience belonging and recognition. By legitimising diverse bodily practices and valuing students’ cultural backgrounds, Meaningful PE fosters more equitable participation, creating opportunities for greater inclusion of students who are less competitive (Enright and O'Sullivan, 2010; Walseth et al., 2018).

Conclusion

This study explored how Meaningful PE is represented in curricula and interpreted by teacher educators in Brazil, Mozambique, and Portugal. Although the curricula do not explicitly mention meaningful experiences in PE, they include principles that can foster them, while also offering ideas and terms that are closely linked to meaningfulness. Teacher educators linked meaningful experiences to learning relevant to students’ lives, positive social interactions, appropriate challenges, improvements in motor skills, enjoyment and fun in class, and the use of democratic and reflective teaching practices, aligning with findings from research in English-speaking contexts.

This study contributes to the literature by showing that, despite linguistic differences, there are some shared interpretations of meaningful experiences in PE that are relatively consistent across contexts, with key features supported by democratic and reflective pedagogies. Additionally, it highlights that meaningfulness remains under-represented in curriculum documents, revealing a persistent gap between policy and practice in PE. Teacher educators reported projects and strategies emphasising the importance of novelty, competition, outdoor physical activity (which may be related to environmental sustainability in curricula), and teacher professionalism in facilitating meaningful experiences in PE. These insights, however, require further investigation with teachers and students in schools.

Across the three contexts, sociopolitical conditions shape distinct pathways for implementing Meaningful PE. Brazil's critical and cultural pedagogical traditions support meaningfulness but may be hindered by structural precarity; Mozambique's post-colonial and post-civil war agenda aligns with cultural and social dimensions of Meaningful PE but faces acute material limitations; and Portugal's policy environment facilitates the operationalisation of meaningful pedagogies. Meaningful experiences emerge from quality, inclusive, democratic, reflexive and socially engaged pedagogies that support lifelong engagement in movement. Structural constraints – limited resources, large classes, or inadequate infrastructure – require teachers to adopt creative strategies, illustrating how inequalities shape culturally embedded interpretations of meaningfulness. This context-specific dimension expands existing literature by highlighting how structural inequalities influence how meaningful experiences are understood and enacted.

A limitation of this study is the absence of PE teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Including these voices in future research would deepen understanding of how pedagogical ideas are interpreted and enacted in Portuguese-speaking schools, and this will be addressed in the next stages of our research project. Future studies should therefore examine these viewpoints and potentially also extend the investigation to other linguistic and cultural contexts.

The cross-country comparison suggests several implications for teacher education and policy. First, because meaningfulness is interpreted through local structural conditions, teacher education programmes should explicitly address how to adapt the features and principles of Meaningful PE to contexts marked by limited resources, large classes, or uneven institutional support. This requires shifting from solely promoting pedagogical models to preparing teachers to make context-responsive decisions. Furthermore, we believe that combining Meaningful PE with social justice pedagogies is essential to transforming learning experiences in contexts marked by inequality, promoting inclusion, equity, and the pursuit of social transformation, both within and outside of PE.

Second, the examples from Brazil and Mozambique indicate the need for policies that reduce over-reliance on individual teacher initiative. Strengthening institutional support – through facilities, teaching materials, and curricular guidance – would help sustain meaningful practices beyond the current reliance on isolated, short-term projects. In Portugal, where institutional structures already support integrated pedagogies, policy can focus on maintaining coherence across school–community partnerships and ensuring equitable opportunities for diverse student groups.

Finally, across all three countries, embedding meaningfulness more explicitly into curriculum documents could create a shared language for teachers and provide clearer expectations for practice. Such alignment between curriculum, teacher education, and school conditions is essential for enabling Meaningful PE to become a systemic rather than individually driven achievement. This will help ensure that students appreciate, engage with, and enjoy the benefits of body movement culture throughout their lives.