Union is strength. Teacher associationims and professional training in the First Argentinean Congress of Physical Education (1943)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the discussions held during the First Argentinean Congress of Physical Education in 1943, with a particular focus on the construction of discourses and meanings surrounding professional training and associationism within Argentine physical education. This event was organised in Buenos Aires in December by the Association of Physical Education Teachers (Asociación de Profesores de Educación Física), the most significant teacher union of the discipline in the country until the mid-1950s. This Association offers a significant opportunity to understand the historical development of Argentine physical culture in a broader social and political context. The present study adopts a flexible, non-experimental, qualitative research approach, employing Political Discourse Analysis to understand a variety of historical primary sources, including the bulletins of the First Argentinean Congress on Physical Education and articles from the Argentine press. This academic event is regarded as a space that facilitates the identification of shared narratives, prevailing logics of meaning, and a certain transnationalisation of disciplinary ideas. In this sense, the Congress can be considered the effect of socially available discourses, and therefore allows for the articulation and consolidation of certain signifiers and not others. These narratives functioned as guidelines, biotypes, and meanings for the configuration of a national and continental disciplinary matrix. This suggests that the APEF, through the Congress, sought to federalise Physical Education, as well as consolidate associative networks and internationalise the ways of educating bodies in Latin America.