Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Creative dance, that is to say, movements, with or without music, which allow participants to express ideas, thoughts, and feelings, are sometimes accompanied by a ‘there is no right or wrong way to move’ rhetoric. This may reinforce the impression among physical education teacher education (PETE) students, who often have limited experience of (creative) dance, that there is nothing to practise in creative dance and that this activity is merely directionless movement. In this paper, however, based on Aggerholm's notion of practising movements, we explore an occasion in a PETE course where a magic moment occurred, indicating that the students had practised and ‘figured out’ something that made this moment possible. The purpose of the paper is to explore the knowledge in movement that PETE students were practising as they participated in creative dance. The purpose is also to shed light on what pedagogical practice contributed to enabling such practising. Video documentation and short interviews with students in one PETE course and one continuing professional development course for physical education teachers indicate that the magic moment was made possible as the students’ practised making sense of moving in non-predetermined – creative – ways and appreciating the expressive dimension of movement. Laban's movement analysis framework seemed, along with the teachers’ knowledge of movement, to be an important element in the pedagogical practice that made the magic moment possible.

I det här kapitlet riktar vi blicken mot de normer och föreställningar om funktionsduglighet som påverkar människors villkor att vara fysiskt aktiva.

INTRODUCTION: School contexts are addressed as important for encouraging adolescents' physically active lives, where whole-school approaches have emerged as globally recognized strategies. Recent research emphasizes the need to further understand the contexts relating to physical activity (PA) and strategies to enhance students' and staff's agency in relation to PA opportunities. In the current study, we explore early adolescent students' daily PA from an ecological perspective, examining the negotiated opportunities and barriers to PA within differing school contexts and how individual agency is expressed in relation to PA.

METHODS: This ethnographic collective case study was conducted in four Swedish middle schools that varied in size, resource denseness, and whether they were independent or public providers. The main empirical material was collected through ∼720 h of fieldwork during a school year, along with 86 interviews involving 50 students and 52 staff members. A comparative reflexive thematic analytical approach was used.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The transition between educational stages brought changes that influenced students and staff's agency related to PA. Against this backdrop, the analytical findings were organized into four themes. Students' PA was negotiated against the logic associated with being a "good" middle school student and teacher. Realizing daily PA also stood in relation to an anything-is-possible spirit, which was pitted against the lack of an organizational structure and high hopes for PA outcomes-creating a tension between vision and practicality, where student voices were overlooked. While all four schools claimed a commitment to providing PA opportunities for all, students negotiated their agency based on gender, age, social status, and previous experiences with traditional sports, which dominated recess activities. Students' PA during and after school was closely interconnected, especially expressed in physical education and health classes. This connection often benefited already active students in resource-rich environments while marginalizing those who were less active, further creating an uneven playing field regarding PA opportunities. Various schools shared challenges connected to students' daily PA, but challenges differed between and within schools. Future school policies, practices, and research should aim at addressing cultural, structural, and material dimensions focusing on sustainability, equity, and pedagogical issues, enabling young people to develop autonomy and ability to shape their PA experiences in ways that are meaningful to them.

Scholars have expressed concern about stagnation in physical education research. Specifically, they have claimed that physical education researchers have been investigating the same topics, presenting the same solutions, and at times fail to build on – or in some cases, even acknowledge – existing scientific findings. These are serious assertions that call into question the enterprise of researching in physical education. In this paper, we evaluate the merits of these claims. Through a Bernsteinian reading of four illustrations, the thesis we develop is that physical education has a horizontal knowledge structure. This knowledge structure affects the ways that scholars make scientific contributions, or in other words, how they develop knowledge. Understanding the connection between the knowledge structure and how knowledge is developed draws attention to: (1) the modest ways in which researchers typically make contributions, (2) the routine nature of repetition in research, and (3) the responsibilities researchers have to acknowledge the work of other researchers. We suggest that more generally, a Bernsteinian interpretation of the examples may help researchers acknowledge and accept slow disciplinary development and gain clarity regarding how and in which areas they can contribute in the future.

Earlier research proposes that a school’s social environment among staff functions as an important facilitator for physical activity policy/curriculum dissemination, such as support among colleagues, physical activity ideas shared between teachers, as well as having individuals as ‘agents of change’. It is often proclaimed that physical education teachers inhabit these ‘agentic’ roles concerning physical activity and health promotion targeting youth during the school day. Despite this, little seems to have been researched concerning the agentic roles of physical educators and other school staff and their social networks within the school organization. Consequently, this study aims to explore relations among school staff regarding daily physical activity promotion in a Swedish secondary school from a social network perspective.  

This case study applied a convergent mixed method design with an emergent approach, where the qualitative ethnographic data and quantitative survey data were collected around the same time. Data was collected during one full school year from school staff at one secondary school (students aged 12-16 years, grades 7-9) in a larger urban area in Sweden. The sample included all staff within the school that interacts with secondary students, which involves school management, staff and teachers who are responsible for secondary students at some point during the school day, involved in student health or are engaged in physical activity, as well as physical education and health teachers. Our empirical material consists of field notes (180 hours of fieldwork), transcriptions from interviews (12 staff), as well as survey nomination data (23 participants). Qualitative data has been analyzed through a reflexive thematic analysis, and survey data through a social network analysis, and then further combined in an integrated analysis.  

Preliminary results of the current study show that the school staff’s social networks are characterized in different ways within close everyday-discussion colleague networks, peer networks concerning physical activity, and advisory networks regarding physical activity. In the everyday discussions among staff on topics regarding secondary students, physical education teachers are positioned as isolated islands in the networks. While physical education teachers hold a somewhat key role relating to discussions about physical activity, these discussions also go through other, and sometimes more influential, agents. Conflictingly, the physical education teachers still picture themselves as physical activity ambassadors for students’ daily physical activity. This picture is also shared by other school staff. At this school, the results shed light on important issues concerning how the social (network) context among school staff helps promote and inhibit physical activities for the students. 

In recent decades, the development of the school subject of physical education (PE) has in some countries led to that various movement activities (e.g., sports) are no longer seen as synonymous with the notion of ‘content’, although such activities still appear during lessons. Instead, content is now considered to refer to the knowledge and capacities that are integral in movement practice, or which are necessary to fulfil the purpose of the activity (be it recreative, competitive, exercise-related, or else). Partly, this development is related to a greater focus in physical education curriculaon generalised rather than specialised knowledge in movement. Partly, the develop-ment is also spearheaded by assumptions that too great focus of specialised knowledge in movement contributes to marginalisation and exclusion of some groups of students (among other things because specialised knowledge is often as-sociated with set standards, competition and elimination). However, it has proven difficult to articulate what the generalised knowledge in movement consists of. Even if knowledge in movement is mainly embodied (i.e., there is not necessarily any need to be able to verbalise it in order to be able to solve movement tasks), it is nevertheless important within educational contexts to be able to put it into words in order to also be able to, for example, problematise – and possibly critique – it. Not only is generalised knowledge in movement hard to conceptualise, it has also proven difficult to identify a) the primary source of this knowledge, or where it is developed and refined, and b) which ‘parts’ or aspects of the knowledge are selected for teaching purposes in PE. The purpose of this symposium is to present insights from recent and ongoing research that aims to explore, verbalise, and problematise generalised knowledge in movement in PETE. How can this knowledge be systematised and codified, if not in terms of sports and various other movement activities? Or in simpler terms, how can generalised knowledge in movement be described? What are its primary sources and based on what principles is the knowledge to be recontextualised within PETE selected? What happens to the knowledge in the process of recontextualization? How can generalised knowledge in movement become powerful for students in their general education? We perceive that there is significant value in including a symposium about knowledge in movement. The development within PETE over several decades has meant that knowledge in movement more generally is getting less and less space in the education. This can have many reasons. Knowledge in movement is not valued in an academic context. Unlike in most other subjects, future PE teachers are assumed to already know large parts of their subject content. Sometimes, PE is not even perceived to aim at developing knowledge in movement among students and therefore future teachers do not need to be trained in that aspect either.

The interest in yoga, mindfulness or similar yoga-based practices (YBP) has grown exponentially in the western world, also within education, including physical education (PE). Although some studies have been conducted on YBP in PE, yoga has not yet been researched in the framework of physical education teacher education (PETE). Using a regional lifeworld approach, the purpose of this article is to investigate how PETE students experience their participation in a YBP didactics unit when it was included in the PETE programme. What thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations were evoked in the students as they explored YBP and their prospects for teaching it themselves? The project involved 13 students during their fifth year in one of Sweden's PETE programmes. Questionnaires and diaries were used as information sources. Ten of the 13 students were also interviewed. In the phenomenological analysis, the phenomenon of friction 'showed itself' to be an essential part of the perceived experiences. Friction was characterised by a tension between an absence of friction, which describes experiences of participating in YBP smoothly, and the presence of friction, which included experiences of resistance. The students also oscillated between experiences of I-here and now, and Me-my future teaching profession. At least to some extent, the YBP that was practised during the course changed the students' views of what education in 'human in motion' can be by discovering and breaking their habitual attitudes towards PE. Rather than being discussed in terms of 'benefits', the YBP practice charged the body, the room and the group with a heightened awareness of the present moment that could also be expressed verbally. It is anticipated that this kind of reflexive knowledge will help the student to make careful didactical considerations in their future teaching practices.

Various attempts have been made to emphasise the educational purpose of physical education (PE). Ennis (2011) has noted that understandings of content shift depending on curriculum. The aim of the paper is to explore what the enacted content becomes when the Practising Model is implemented in PE. Four PE teachers, in two Swedish secondary schools, enacted the Practising Model with five classes for 10–17 lessons. Qualitative data were generated in the form of video recordings of lessons, interviews with students and teachers, and student-produced material.

The findings are presented as three main content areas: (a) general-subject content, typically teacher-initiated and involving planning and evaluation; (b) subject-specific content, largely student- initiated and encompassing the adoption, appreciation, exploration, understanding, and grasping of movement qualities; and (c) persona-developing content, focusing on character development through persisting and daring. A discussion of the findings using Categorical Bildung is presented, illustrating the added value the enacted content may bring students in terms of their Bildung. The study highlights the diversity of content engagement and the fluidity between content categories.

This diversity also introduces a challenge in the changing relationship between content and teaching. The organising centre for PE and its relation to content are discussed. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

"Gender Performativity in Sports and Physical Education" explores a perspective of gender called gender "performativity," coined by Judith Butler in the early 1990s. It starts from the idea that gender is something people do rather than something they are. Such a perspective offers new ways of understanding gender, and therefore also gender equity, in sports, and physical education. It provides new ways to think about how inequitable practices can change. Empirical illustrations of gender performativity in sports and physical education are mainly drawn from Håkan Larsson's thirty-year research on the matter, but connections are also made to other research in the field.

(Additional Digital Resources can be found at: https://sportandsociety.com/books/teaching-series/gender-performativity-in-sports-and-physical-education)