Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

This paper focuses on the subject content in Swedish Physical Education (PE), and in the paper Dewey’s transactional perspective on meaning making (Bentley & Dewey 1949) is used in the understanding of how people create meaning by means of their actions in specific situations. These actions form patterns and regularities (Sullivan 2001), and by also applying discourse theory a better understanding of these patterns in an institutional practice can be gained. Further with Foucault’s (1982) concept of power relations an understanding can be reached how certain actions are privileged in favour of other potentially acceptable actions. The approach in the paper also allows for the possibility of how one can relate to different aspects of meaning making within a practice (Rogoff 1995). The aspect of particular interest in this paper is the institutional dimension of meaning making in PE (Quennerstedt & Sundberg 2004).

In the study local curriculum documents from 116 Swedish compulsory schools is analyzed. The documents are within the Swedish school system regarded as important documents, where teachers express the purposes, the goals and the ways the teacher together with the pupils will work towards the nationally set goals in PE.

The discourses identified in the study of the local documents are; activity discourse, physiology discourse, sports discourse, motor development discourse, body experience discourse, social development discourse, risk discourse, nature experience discourse, hygiene discourse and moral discourse. There is dominance in the documents of the activity-, physiology- and social development discourses. These discourses constitutes the subject content offered to the pupils, and also constitutes the institutionalised dimension of the pupils meaning making. In the paper I argue that it is the combination of discourses that concludes how the subject content offered to the pupils is constituted.