ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses key elements of the Italian physical education (PE) panorama that can act as facilitators, constraints or barriers for PE redesign. It offers a national view on what elements for innovation are present at which jurisdictional levels and what elements are missing and how they should and might work. After an overview of needs, the chapter briefly depicts historical factors relevant to the redesign of PE and PE teacher education (PETE). Moving to actual educational policy, the focus is on multisectoral co-responsibility for PE and the emergence of prototypical regional experiences of an open source ecosystem. Joint governance by the education and sport systems has special redesign potential, but it is limited by the inherent divergence of goals and lack of interprofessional training. Italian social responsibility commitments for PE innovation by private actors also are presented, based on the benefits of shared value instead of narrowly defined stakeholder interests. Forward-thinking in PE has emphasized windows of opportunity provided by policies of local integrated services for social inclusion. Finally, the ongoing roundtrip between policy and research evidence is described, emphasizing that any redesign proposal must start with children’s ecologies and be projected toward a grand vision.
