Gender Issues in Initial Training in Physical Education

The aim of this paper is to analyse the perception of teachers on the Bachelor of Physical Education course at Unochapecó in relation to gender issues in initial training. Our intention is to reflect on the teachers' understanding of gender issues in the context of higher education. We used Bardin's (1977) Content Analysis technique to analyse the findings. The discussions and results show that it is difficult to differentiate between categories such as sex, gender and sexuality, which means that this topic is not discussed in their subjects. The data revealed that there is a need to move forward with reflections in order to deconstruct some understandings of gender, since in many instances the collaborators did not distinguish between the different categories. As for the treatment of these issues in the subjects, we realised that while research and studies on gender have occupied an increasingly visible space in our field, on the other hand gender is still a silent field in the formal curriculum, present in a hidden way in classroom relationships and in practice.