New national standards for initial teacher training in physical education in Chile: reflections from educational communities

This study critically examines the implementation of the new initial teacher training standards in physical education in Chile, framed within an epistemological shift that moves the historical-sportivist paradigm focused on performance toward an approach to human motor skills and integral well-being. Using a qualitative interpretive design, the perspectives of 56 participants were collected through a research workshop, including physical education teachers from the school system and university academics involved in initial teacher training processes. The analysis was designed to identify critical issues, structural tensions and conditions of possibility for the operationalization of policy. While stakeholders recognize the transformative potential of standards in terms of inclusion, comprehensive training and coherence with contemporary approaches to the discipline, significant gaps emerge between the declarative-normative level and its practical viability. The highly technical, abstract and semantically ambiguous nature of the language of politics is problematized, which limits its intelligibility and pedagogical translation in real school contexts. Furthermore, there is evidence of weak institutional ownership by the training universities, expressed in incipient processes of curricular alignment, scarce inter-level articulation and limited participation of key actors in the implementation phase. It is concluded that, while the progress represented by the paradigmatic shift toward human motor skills, the centrality of student training processes, and the displacement of a historically technical and fragmented physical education is substantially valued. The new policy, in its current configuration, runs the risk of operating as a prescriptive framework of low performativity, requiring mediation devices, situated support and collaborative governance to avoid its reduction to a merely nominal reform.