Where does teacher professional learning happen? An ethnographic inquiry into learning spaces of health and physical education teachers

This article examines how the professional learning of secondary health and physical education (HPE) teachers is shaped by the material and relational configurations of the everyday practice spaces they navigate within and beyond school. Based on an ethnographic study in a New Zealand secondary school, data were collected through participant observations, interviews, artefacts, and documents over 20 weeks. The findings identify three interrelated themes of learning spaces: teaching spaces, school spaces, and spaces beyond school, that together form a distributed ecology of professional learning. Each space afforded distinctive opportunities for engagement, reflection, and collaboration, enabling HPE teachers to learn through experimentation, observation, conversation, mentoring, and participation in broader professional networks. The study advances understanding of professional learning as a relational and emergent process, both spatially enacted and contextually grounded. It highlights the significance of informal and incidental learning environments, such as staffrooms, online platforms, and personal relationships, in sustaining teachers’ professional growth. The article concludes by arguing for more flexible and ecologically responsive approaches to supporting teacher professional learning across the multiple spaces of educational practice.