Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Scholars have expressed concern about physical education (PE) researchers’: (1) lack of impact on practice, and (2) tendency to work in closed discursive communities (Armour, 2014; Casey and Larsson, 2018; Tinning, 2015). Such expressions are valuable because they give PE researchers pause for thought and encourage them to consider the purpose of researching. In this paper, we extend the discussion by considering what it means to make a scientific contribution in PE scholarship. Our specific aim is to show how the subdiscipline of physical education has a particular knowledge structure and explain how this structure affects what it means to contribute to the subdiscipline. To achieve this aim, we draw on the work of Basil Bernstein (1999). From this framework, we propose that the subdiscipline of PE has a horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar. Having such a structure and grammar means that: contributions are made as either the creation or elaboration of ‘languages’, rather than the creation of formal models that can predict empirical relations; instead of superseding old research, new PE contributions will sit along-side old ones; contributions take place within insulated perspectives that contain criteria for what constitutes legitimate questions, evidence, and problems, and; the majority of contributions within PE scholarship are derivative rather than new. Conceptualizing the subdiscipline in this way has implications for researchers concerning: (1) the possibility of communication across perspectives; (2) the ways researchers relate to existing research; (3) the relationship between research and practice, and; (4) the relationship between research and society. References Armour, K. (2014). New directions for research in physical education and sport pedagogy. Sport, Education and Society, 19, 853-854. Bernstein B. (1999). Vertical and horizontal discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20, 157-173. Casey, A. & Larsson H. (2018). “It’s Groundhog Day”: Foucault’s governmentality and crisis discourses in physical education. Quest, 70, 438-455. Tinning, R. (2015). Commentary on research into learning in physical education: towards a mature field of knowledge. Sport, Education and Society, 20, 676-690.