Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Background: Masculinities are fluid and socially constructed. Physical education is one means by which masculinities are constituted. Some masculinities may be limited through content, activities, and pedagogy of physical education that shape the way students come to know gender. The purpose of this study was to explore how movements contribute to the discursive construction of masculinities in secondary school physical education; specifically, how body movements constitute masculinities. Methodology: This study uses a poststructural theoretical framework to explore how masculinities are constituted through body movements. The methodology is also informed by knowledge production from bodily practices known as embodied knowledge. Video recordings of physical education classes from eight Swedish secondary schools were observed. The body movements of students were noted and analyzed through discourse analysis. Results: Masculinities were constituted in the moments between formal teaching and activities within the classrooms. Five themes were constructed from the visual observations of students' movements from all lessons including: 1) Movements of energy, 2) Movements of playfulness and bonding, 3) Swaggering movements, 4) Dividing movements, and 5) Regulating movements. These different movements are the ways boys come to know masculinities. Conclusion: This study highlights how embodied knowledge and movements of boys constitute masculinities. It is recommended that pedagogical practices that examine, challenge, and disrupt limiting gender performativity are developed in physical education teaching. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Over the last few decades, focus in educational research – as well as in policy – seems to have shifted from teaching to learning. As a result of this, we know little about what different teaching methods are used in the subject, and how. The purpose of this article is to explore how different teaching methods are used in Swedish secondary physical education. Video recorded physical education lessons in eight Swedish secondary schools were used to identify different teaching methods. Kirk’s (1996) elaboration of the Spectrum of teaching styles formed the basis of the analysis. In subsequent interviews, teachers (8) and students (24) were asked questions about teaching and learning in the subject. All of the five methods that Kirk (1996) outlined were identified in the lessons, but they were very unevenly used. The task-based method was the most frequent one, while the guided discovery method was hardly used at all. The impression was that the teachers did not seriously consider the selection of methods in relation to objective, content and group of students. The students, for their part, described a situation where they were often left to their own devices regarding what they were supposed to learn. Based on the analysis, we argue that teachers need guidance to improve and develop their deliberate use of teaching methods in general, and especially student-centred methods. This is necessary if the goals of the subject are to be achievable for all students. We conclude that the marginal focus on teaching methods in physical education is not related to a parallel increase of the interest in student learning in the subject. On the contrary, the low interest in the use of different teaching methods seems rather to be related to a low interest in what students are to learn in the subject.

Background: Movement is key in physical education, but the educational value of moving is sometimes obscure. In Sweden, recent school reforms have endeavoured to introduce social constructionist concepts of knowledge and learning into physical education, where the movement capabilities of students are in focus. However, this means introducing a host of new and untested concepts to the physical education teacher community. Purpose. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish physical education teachers reason about helping their students develop movement capability. Participants, setting and research design. The data are taken from a research project conducted in eight Swedish secondary schools called ‘Physical education and health – a subject for learning?’ in which students and teachers were interviewed and physical education lessons were video-recorded. This article draws on data from interviews with the eight participating teachers, five men and three women. The teachers were interviewed partly using a stimulated recall technique where the teachers were asked to comment on video clips from physical education lessons where they themselves act as teachers. Data analysis. A discourse analysis was conducted with a particular focus on the ensemble of more or less regulated, deliberate and finalised ways of doing things that characterise the eight teachers’ approach to helping the students develop their movement capabilities. Findings. The interviews indicate that anactivation discourse(‘trying out’ and ‘being active’) dominates the teachers’ ways of reasoning about their task (a focal discourse). When the teachers were specifically asked about how they can help the students improve their movement capacities, asport discourse(a referential discourse) was expressed. This discourse, which is based on the standards of excellence of different sports, conditions what the teachers see as (im)possible to do due to time limitations and a wish not to criticise the students publicly. The mandated holisticsocial constructionist discourseabout knowledge and learning becomes obscure (an intruder discourse) in the sense that the teachers interpret it from the point of view of a dualist discourse, where ‘knowledge’ (theory) and ‘skill’ (practice) are divided. Conclusions. Physical education teachers recoil from the task of developing the students’ movement capabilities due to certain conditions ofimpossibility related to the discursive terrain they are moving in. The teachers see as their primary objective the promotion of physical activity – now and in the future; they conceptualise movement capability in such a way that emphasising the latter would jeopardise their possibilities of realising the primary objective. Should the aim be to reinforce the social constructionist national curriculum, where capability to move is suggested to be an attempt at formulating a concept of knowledge that includes both propositional and procedural aspects and which is not based on the standards of excellence of either sport techniques or motor ability, then teachers will need support to interpret the national curriculum from a social constructionist perspective. Further, alternative standards of excellence as well as a vocabulary for articulating these will have to be developed. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

The purpose of this article is to explore physical education (PE) teachers' content knowledge of the emerging concept movement capability. Interviews with eight PE teachers were conducted, partly using a stimulated recall technique which involved watching and commenting on video recorded PE lessons. A phenomenographic analysis was used to outline the different ways of conceptualizing movement capability. Five different ways of conceptualizing movement capability were identified, which indicates the complexity of the concept movement capability. However, the result also provides a structure for developing a systematic and structured way of conceiving movement capability. In this study we have highlighted a multifaceted, nuanced and differentiated picture of movement capability to see moving as educationally valuable. We conclude by emphasizing that movement capability should not be restricted to only its constitutive parts as teachers' plan PE teaching, but should be approached as a whole. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Based on a socio-cultural perspective on learning, the aim of this article is to examine how aims and learning goals are communicated in physical education (PE) practice. A special focus is on scrutinising how teaching practices are framed in terms of whether and how the aims and learning goals are made explicit or not to students. The aim is also to relate these kinds of communications to different movement cultures. The result shows that many of the students taking part in the study do not understand what they are supposed to learn in PE. However, if the goals are well articulated by teachers, the students are more likely to both understand and be aware of the learning outcomes and what to learn in PE. The opposite is also true. If the goals and objectives are not clarified, students find it difficult to state the learning objectives and know what they are supposed to learn.

Introduction

The focus of this special issue is how learning occurs in physical education (PE) practice in relation to different movement cultures in various contexts. The basis for the special issue is the Invited Symposium held at the AIESEP World Congress 2014 in Auckland, New Zealand, entitled Physical education – a subject for learning? The symposium revolved around learning in PE and the presenters, in line with a Swedish Didactics of Physical Education research tradition, were inspired by research in didactics and what in a wide sense can be called a sociocultural perspective of learning. In relation to learning, Wertsch (1998 p. 24) states that: ‘The task of a sociocultural approach is to explicate the relationship between human action, on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional and historical contexts in which action occurs on the other’.Researchers from other countries were also involved in the special issue in order to attract and include scholars from a wider research community. The special issue accordingly aims to bring scholars from different countries together in order to explore learning in PE and what is considered as valuable knowledge in different movement cultures.

In a significant article from 1993, Crum describes the purpose of physical education (PE) as a ‘planned introduction into movement culture’. In broad terms, this purpose is tantamount to the stated purpose of Swedish PE in national steering documents. Crum contends, however, that physical educators do not prioritise learning, which is largely due to the different ‘movement cultures’ that constitute the PE lessons. This article explores how practice unfolds in movement cultures that are included in Swedish PE and their implications for teaching and learning in the subject. Some 30 (indoor) PE lessons in eight secondary schools in four cities throughout Sweden were video recorded. At ‘first glance’ these lessons indicated the prevalence of four logics of practice: a physical training logic, a sports logic, a sport technique logic and a dance logic. However, further analysis revealed that the teachers' and students' actions were not entirely in line with a logic of practice of training the body, winning the game, learning sporting skills or learning to dance. Instead, the PE practice largely unfolded as a ‘looks-like-practice’, where the purpose of teaching was blurred, and where any ‘planned introduction into movement culture’ was difficult to identify. In the final section, the authors discuss how physical activity logics can be recontextualised in a PE setting in order to emphasise the educational contribution of PE.

This article sets out to outline how prevailing gender structures can be challenged in physical education (PE) by exploring queer potentials in an event that took place during a dancing lesson in an upper secondary PE class. The event and its features were documented through video recording and post-lesson interviews with the teacher and some of the students. It is argued that the event can be seen as aheterotopia, according to Michel Foucault a ‘counter-site’ enabling the resistance to authority, where the production of normalcy was challenged. Furthermore, even though the event happened spontaneously, the authors suggest that it can show a way towards a queer pedagogy for PE through teaching paradoxically; it indicates a preferred ethos of the lesson and the use of conceptual tools by teachers and students that make them able to intervene in the production of normalcy.

This paper outlines a method for exploring learning in educational practice. The suggested method combines an explicit learning theory with robust methodological steps in order to explore aspects of learning in school physical education. The design of the study is based on sociocultural learning theory, and the approach adds to previous research within the field, both in terms of the combination of methods used and the claims made in our studies. The paper describes a way of collecting and analysing the retrieved data and discusses and illustrates the results of a study using this combination of explicit learning theory and robust methodological steps.