Challenges of Physical Education in XXI Century

This paper seeks to contribute some thoughts and considerations on the challenges that Physical Education (PE) has to face in these early decades of the 21st century. From our point of view, the main challenges that PE must currently face in our country are: (1) considering thoughtfully and systematically what we want our students to learn in PE; (2) have clear and powerful reasons about what PE can bring to the comprehensive education of people; and (3) overcome some problems of professionalism among teachers we have been recreating for the past 30 years. We make a specific proposal to move forward on these challenges. During the past three decades many innovative proposals in PE that can be very useful for giving an educationally valuable response to these challenges have arisen in Spain. Most of these proposals have been generated by PE teachers through dynamic action research and research in the classroom. In most cases they have been generated as a group, based on collaborative groups of teachers, but we can also find some individual proposals. We ended the article with a first approach to relationships that seem to exist between the professional skills of PE teachers and PE challenges in society and in contemporary school.