Conference Agenda

In recent years, China has continued to reform its Physical Education (PE) and Health curriculum, with growing attention being directed to the primary context. A key milestone in this process was the 2022 national PE and Health curriculum standard, which introduced a competency-oriented framework, outlining dimensions such as physical ability, health behavior, moral literacy (MoE, 2022). While clearly articulated in policy, how these dimensions are understood by teachers as part of their everyday practice remains unclear. This is significant in light of the Outline of the Plan for the Construction of China into an Education Powerhouse (2024–2035), which emphasises the role of primary PE (CPC Central Committee & State Council, 2025). Given these shifts in curricular priorities and the national emphasis on primary PE, it is both timely and important to explore how primary PE teachers understand the purpose of the PE and Health curriculum and what they prioritise in its implementation.

In the wider PE literature, continuing attention has been paid to the role of teachers in translating policy into practice. Curriculum enactment is understood as a process shaped by interpretation and adaptation, rather than as direct implementation (Ball et al., 2011a, 2011b; Lambert & Penney, 2019). Research also points to the ways in which teachers exercise professional agency, navigating between policy expectations and local conditions to make situated decisions about content and teaching (Priestley et al., 2015; Penney & Alfrey, 2022). Extending this line of inquiry to primary contexts, recent work highlights that teachers’ curriculum decisions are influenced by various structural conditions (e.g., Griggs & Randall, 2025). These studies offer important insights into how curriculum policy is interpreted and enacted in local school contexts. It is therefore relevant to explore how teachers in the Chinese context make sense of PE and Health curriculum purposes and priorities in their daily practice.

In the Chinese context, research has largely focused on policy level development or student outcomes (e.g., An et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2025; Zhang et al., 2021). While valuable, these approaches offer limited insight into teachers’ perspectives as a key actor in day-to-day curriculum delivery, particularly at primary level. To address this gap, the presentation draws on survey data from primary PE teachers in Hunan province, aiming to explore how teachers understand curriculum priorities, experience structural conditions, and approach their professional learning needs.

Three research questions guided this study: (1) How do teachers understand and interpret the purpose and value of the PE and Health curriculum, and what priorities do they report in enactment? (2) Which structural conditions (constraints and supports) do teachers perceive as shaping their space for curriculum enactment? (3) What are teachers’ professional learning needs, and which content areas and support formats do they prioritise?

Teacher professional learning has increasingly been conceptualised as a situated, ongoing, reflective, and practice-based process rather than a linear accumulation of knowledge or skills (Han et al., 2025). Within this thinking shift, practitioner inquiry has been widely recognised as a well-established, effective, and evidence-informed approach for supporting teachers’ professional learning (Goodyear et al., 2013). Research has indicated that practitioner inquiry can facilitate teachers’ professional learning by critically examining practice, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, prompting pedagogical change, and generating context-sensitive knowledge (Gilchrist, 2018; Luguetti et al., 2025).

In physical education (PE) field, practitioner inquiry has gained increasing attention as a means of supporting PE teachers’ professional learning and pedagogical development (Alfrey et al., 2017). For example, practitioner inquiry has been employed as a powerful tool to promote PE teachers’ understanding and enactment of social justice pedagogies (Philpot & Ovens, 2025), Teaching Games for Understanding (Casey & Dyson, 2010), and cooperative learning (Casey et al., 2009). However, much of this research has tended to position practitioner inquiry as a methodological tool or intervention, focusing primarily on outcomes, effectiveness, or teachers’ perceptions and experiences. As a result, practitioner inquiry is often portrayed as an individual or technical endeavour, rather than as a socially and materially situated practice shaped by the everyday conditions of PE teachers’ work. This outcome-oriented framing risks overlooking how practitioner inquiry is enabled, constrained, enacted, and sustained within specific practice contexts.

From a practice-based perspective, changes in teachers’ practice through practitioner inquiry cannot be understood as linear or straightforward processes. Teachers’ engagement in inquiry is shaped by multiple, interrelated conditions embedded in their everyday professional environments, including school cultures, organisational structures, material arrangements, time constraints, professional discourses, and power relations ( Goodyear et al., 2013). While teachers may recognise the value of practitioner inquiry for professional learning, limited time, heavy workloads, restricted access to resources, and uncertainty about what constitutes “research” can constrain their sustained engagement (Ellis & Loughland, 2016; MacPhail et al., 2025).. At the same time, collaborative relationships with researchers and colleagues, as well as access to supportive conceptual and theoretical resources, can enable teachers’ confidence, agency, and participation in inquiry processes (Philpot & Ovens, 2025). Although existing studies acknowledge that practitioner inquiry is shaped by such conditions, there remains limited research that systematically examines how these conditions interact to shape practitioner inquiry as a situated practice, particularly within the Chinese PE context.

To address this gap, this study draws on the theory of practice architectures to examine practitioner inquiry as a socially and materially embedded practice (Kemmis et al., 2014). The theory conceptualises practices as configurations of sayings, doings, and relatings, which are prefigured by three interrelated sets of arrangements: cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political (Mahon et al., 2017). These arrangements shape what is sayable, doable, and relatable within a given practice, thereby enabling or constraining what becomes possible in practice. From this perspective, practitioner inquiry is not treated as an individual method or technical procedure, but as a practice that unfolds within a complex micro-ecology of cultural meanings, material conditions, and social relationships.

Taken together, this study explores how three Chinese PE teachers’ engagement in practitioner inquiry, in collaboration with three university-based researchers, unfolds within their everyday practice contexts. By foregrounding the conditions that enable and constrain practitioner inquiry, this study contributes a nuanced, context-sensitive understanding of practitioner inquiry as a practice-based change process and offers insights into how practitioner inquiry might be more thoughtfully designed and supported within PE teacher professional learning in China and beyond.

Middle school physical education in China is increasingly shaped by Zhongkao related fitness testing and score-based evaluation (Weng and Xie, 2024). Zhongkao pressure does not only change what is assessed. It also reshapes physical education pedagogy by influencing how lessons are organised and managed in everyday practice (Meng et al., 2020). This paper examines how exam pressure becomes visible in lesson organisation through four priorities: order, safety, efficiency, and measurable performance. Rather than explaining participation mainly through individual factors, it focuses on how routine pedagogical decisions, including task sequencing, grouping, spatial organisation, monitoring, and feedback, shape participation conditions.

Zhongkao is a high stakes transition point in Chinese schooling, and physical education has become embedded within this broader assessment and admissions system through fitness testing and score based outcomes (Wu, 2015). The Zhongkao physical education test marked an important shift by integrating a compulsory non written assessment into the junior secondary admissions system (Weng and Xie, 2024). It is typically scheduled several months before the written examinations, often producing the first tangible score in the Zhongkao cycle (Chen and Brown, 2013). This score contributes directly to the total admission score, with weighting varying across locations (Yang et al., 2025). Because admission to selective senior high schools is determined by the cumulative Zhongkao score, the physical education component can materially affect placement, particularly for students near cut off points (Weng and Xie, 2024). In this context, students, parents, and schools often intensify their focus on measurable physical performance, especially in the final year, when preparation becomes more structured and time sensitive (Weng and Xie, 2024). Although test formats and weightings vary across locations, the shared feature is that students’ performance is rendered visible and comparable through standardised indicators, which encourages a narrow emphasis on what can be measured and verified (Luo and Yang, 2025). In school physical education, this assessment environment can encourage lesson designs that prioritise demonstrable results within limited time, for example through repeated practice of test related tasks, tight pacing, and frequent checking of performance (Meng et al., 2020). It can also heighten concerns about disorder and accidents, because incidents may interrupt preparation and create accountability risks for teachers and schools (Meng et al., 2020). These conditions make Zhongkao pressure an important context for sports pedagogy research, because they raise questions about how assessment priorities travel into everyday teaching and how routine lesson organisation shapes participation opportunities and the terms of legitimate engagement for girls.

By positioning Zhongkao pressure as a pedagogical influence rather than only a policy context, the paper contributes to sports pedagogy scholarship on assessment, lesson organisation, and gendered participation. It also provides a basis for identifying feasible leverage points for improving participation within exam pressured constraints, while avoiding deficit narratives that locate the problem primarily within girls themselves.