From regulative ideals to instructional realities: the recontextualisation of physical fitness knowledge in physical education

Background Physical fitness is not contested as a curricular concern in itself; what remains debated is how fitness knowledge is pedagogically framed in school physical education, particularly when it is reduced to fitness testing, performance metrics, or body-normative health narratives. Scholarship has examined fitness testing, students’ affective experiences of fitness testing and assessment, and teacher education structures, yet the process through which fitness knowledge is reconstructed as beginning teachers move from university to school remains empirically underexplored.Purpose Guided by Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogic device, this study examines how beginning physical education teachers in Italy reflect on the recontextualisation of fitness knowledge from university preparation to school practice. Three research questions investigate which elements of fitness pedagogy are taken up, which instructional capacities remain underdeveloped, and how school-based evaluative rules shape what beginning teachers can legitimately enact.Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fifteen beginning teachers (aged 25–29; 1–3 years’ experience) graduated from three Italian universities with different orientations toward fitness education. Data were analysed through theoretically driven reflexive thematic analysis, using Bernstein’s concepts of regulative discourse, instructional discourse, and evaluative rules as sensitising frameworks.Results Three themes were constructed. First, participants took up a coherent regulative discourse grounding fitness in health literacy and student autonomy. Second, an underdeveloped instructional repertoire left them with limited pedagogical architectures for planning, assessment, and affective management. Third, school-based evaluative rules – including digital and commercial fitness culture, material constraints, and student heterogeneity – compounded this asymmetry, producing pedagogical precarity.Conclusion The findings reframe the enduring theory – practice gap between university preparation and school enactment as a structurally produced asymmetry within the recontextualisation process itself, in which regulative and instructional discourse follow different trajectories across institutional fields.Impact statement This study advances understanding of how fitness knowledge is structurally transformed – not merely transferred – between teacher education and school practice. It offers PETE programmes a framework for identifying the instructional competencies that fitness education demands, including competence-based assessment, affective safety, and adaptation to digital fitness cultures. By showing that beginning teachers can possess critical educational orientations while lacking access to situated pedagogical repertoires, the findings challenge deficit-based accounts of teacher readiness and redirect attention toward institutional conditions through which educational values are translated into coherent classroom practice.