Classroom Ecology (Allen, 1986; Doyle, 2006) analyses the classroom management phenomenon from an ecological vision on educational settings (Bronfenbrenner, 1976), presenting students' engagement as a central pedagogical goal in classroom management. Doyle concurs with Allen in arguing for the reciprocal influence between teachers and students in achieving high levels of students’ cooperation and engagement with the proposed activities across interdependent task systems, namely the instructional, managerial, and social. Overall, these authors agree on how classroom environments are shaped by primary vectors - engaged by the teachers -, and secondary vectors – students’ behavioural responses - as either concurring or opposing forces that shape the real characteristics of the program of action. When students express opposing vectors, it is initiated a tacit negotiation process pushing teachers to respond with: a) forcing instruction by ignoring the students’ social agenda; b) allowing the manifestation of their behaviour by suspending the instructional task system, traded for good standing and cooperation in the managerial system; or c) implementing instructional and managerial by taking into account the students’ social agenda. These authors’ research concurs that the latest response, here identified as integrative pedagogies, promotes higher levels of students’ engagement.

Hastie and Siedentop (2006) stress that initial findings on classroom ecology in Physical Education (PE) settings are not only consistently replicated for PE, confirming common themes and concerns throughout the various educational and instructional contexts, but also that research in this subject area has contributed to broaden the initial framework. More specifically, classroom ecology research in PE has confirmed and clarified the importance for students’ engagement of curriculum design, accountability and negotiation as mechanisms that facilitate the integration of instruction, organisation and social relations under consistently learning-oriented programs of action. Thus the interaction between these mechanisms converges in the following theoretical proposition: Integrative pedagogies are critically defined by merging meaningful curriculum contents with a multidimensional and content-embedded accountability to intentionally accommodate the students’ social system within instruction and organization.

As research demonstrates that integrative pedagogies induce ideal classroom environments for influencing student’s engagement, these pedagogies seem scarce in teaching practice raising questions of how and why only some teachers’ develop them. Part of the answer relies on rarely responded solicitations to understand classroom ecologies attending to the wider school context (Cross & Hong, 2012; Doyle; Hamilton, 1982; Hastie & Siedentop), where Castelli and Rink’s (2003) results converged with broader educational research on the importance of the subject department as a critical external context in promoting students’ success (Harris, 2001).

Bronfenbrenner (1976) introduces the mesosystem as an important notion that facilitates the search for answers on how students’ engagement in the classroom can be amplified by external contexts, namely, the subject departments. The mesosystem is the level of interaction between different microsystems and carries elements of reciprocity that hold the potential to increase behavioral and developmental outcomes in each microsystem. In this line, the classroom is the microsystem where a common vision of PE is materialized, a vision that is constructed at the microsystem of the teachers’ subject department collaborative work, thus framing a mesosystemic relationship with unclarified interactions with students’ engagement. Latest OECD report on the relationship between teachers’ collaborative work and teachers’ classroom practices (Vieluf, Kaplan, Klieme, & Bayer, 2012) confirm the need to clarify in Europe the classroom experiences of both teachers and students, especially attending to the underexplored nature of its interaction with the subject departments’ collaborative work (Louis & Marks, 1996).

Attending to the stated necessities, our study sought to explore the following research question: Under strong collaborative work conditions, how is students’ engagement promoted/achieved through integrative pedagogies?

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