Doing trans-national research in physical education: reflections on a China–New Zealand research collaboration

This paper examines the methodological challenges and issues that arose within a transnational research collaboration between physical education teacher education (PETE) researchers from China and Aotearoa New Zealand. The project sought to enhance school-based Physical Education through collaborative forms of practitioner research. Drawing on reflective journals, meeting transcripts, interviews, and email correspondence, we used thematic analysis to trace how methodological tensions emerged and evolved through the relational, institutional, and cultural dimensions of the research process. Four interconnected challenges were identified: negotiating equitable partnerships, navigating language and cultural differences, addressing issues of positionality, and challenging subject essentialism. These challenges revealed how transnational research collaborations demand sustained reflexivity around power relations, epistemic authority, and contextually embedded norms. Key points of tension included negotiating research design across different institutional and policy environments, managing communication across technological and cultural divides, aligning divergent ethics processes, and resisting dominant, often Eurocentric, framings of Physical Education. The central role of cultural brokers and bilingual team members emerged as crucial in enabling epistemic translation and fostering more equitable collaboration. We argue that transnational research is most productive when understood as a situated, ethical, and relational practice. Rather than proposing universal solutions, we foreground methodological humility, attentiveness to context, and dialogic engagement as essential principles for researchers working across national and cultural borders in Physical Education.