Research indicates that outdoor teaching practices within a physical education (PE) context are controlled by several factors with the potential to weaken or strengthen PE teachers' communication of pedagogic messages. Drawing on 12 qualitative interviews with PE teachers in compulsory schools in Sweden, the findings in this study suggest that factors claimed to control teachers' pedagogic communication of friluftsliv (the Scandinavian equivalent to outdoor education) are based on the construction of a dominating pedagogic discourse for outdoor teaching in Swedish schools. Inspired by Basil Bernstein's theoretical concepts of the pedagogic device, the analysis of this discourse indicates that Swedish PE teachers and PE teacher education appear to reproduce friluftsliv as a teaching practice carried out in a remote wilderness setting involving specific equipment, financial resources and a certain amount of risk. In relation to these results, alternative ways to think of outdoor teaching in relation to the achievement of the national aims in Swedish PE are discussed.