Social justice is now a central yet contested horizon in education. The challenge is not recognizing inequality but translating equity commitments into pedagogical and institutional decisions that change students’ experiences. This article offers a contextual analysis of social justice in Physical Education (PE), linking syntheses on leadership and justice-oriented teacher education with scholarship in PE and Health and Physical Education (HPE). It examines recurring tensions (equality vs. equity, care vs. confrontation, inclusion vs. transformation) and organizes contributions across three axes: (1) classroom pedagogies that operationalize social justice; (2) institutional and material conditions that enable or constrain implementation; and (3) teacher education mechanisms that sustain conflict and critical dialogue. We propose a multi-level map spanning classroom, curriculum, school, system, conflict culture, and space, and derive implications for practice, leadership, and teacher education. Advancing social justice in PE requires cross-level coherence and a research agenda centered on student experience and institutional transformation.
García-Valiente et al. (Wed,) studied this question.