The concept of teacher-researcher indicates progress in the dimension of thinking beyond the hierarchical division
between schoolteachers’ research and academic researchers in physical education (PE). Investigating the self of PE
teachers, here through self-study, allows in-depth comprehension of the (often hidden) ontology of their teaching
and ways of researching their own teaching.
The quest for the first author’s self, as a cofounder and core member of a Brazilian PE community of practice (CoP)
since 2005, follows from revisiting a dataset on the PE-CoP with the two critical friends co-authoring this study.
After 17 years since its inception, the PE-CoP consists of 13 teachers at its core, in light of the idea of Clastres (2011)
speaking of Brazilian indigenous societies against the state, i.e. who want to make decisions by themselves without
corporative constraints from external regulation, while looking for authenticity of self. This quest of self in tandem
with the PE-CoP continuity, while driven by a set of socio-critical epistemological foci on the PE subject and
professional field, seem to have been facilitated by a reciprocity of internal features of the CoP with broader
contextual features in PE such as regulatory power, curriculum design and development, and systemic (in)coherence.