The destabilization of certainties made the physical education face the urgency of overcoming the search for an official, true conception and practice. In this sense, new requirements focus on the studies involving the insertion of this curricular component in the schools, assigning importance to the effort of understanding the decisions and the rationales that underlie the teachers' actions in the school. This implies new requirements/cares, such as the risk of a radical relativization of - and a deviation from - broader structural issues in an undesirable degree. This text aims at presenting the challenges faced by this area and at showing the importance of understanding what type of physical education cultures have been created in the schools. For achieving this goal, this study is based on an ethnographic study of two cases of insertion of physical education in the routine of two state schools.
School culture; physical education; teacher's action