Conference Agenda

Introduction

This presentation explores the overarching societal mission of physical education (PE) as expressed by Norwegian PE teacher educators. PE scholars have over the last decades debated the aims and purposes of PE (Fernandez-Balboa, 2009; Jess et al., 2024; Tinning, 1994), and the discussion remains ongoing (Quennerstedt et al., 2025). In 1994, Richard Tinning provocatively asked, “If physical education is the answer, what is the question?” (Tinning, 1994). Fernandez-Balboa (2009) followed up, stating: “I am not sure that physical education is the answer to anything. It may very well be. I prefer […] to think of it as a means toward a worthy end: Universal dignity” (p. 160). These reflections highlight the search for PE’s legitimate place in schools and society and raise concerns about ideologies, discourses, and practices shaping the subject (Tinning, 1994; Fernandez-Balboa, 2009).

Discourses significantly influence PE’s content, teaching practices, and aims (Tinning, 1994). The dominant discourses have been centered around sports (Hastie & Mesquita, 2017), health and fitness (Webb et al., 2008), and activity (Larsson & Nyberg, 2017), as well as a movement discourse (Moen & Westlie, 2025). PE has also often been criticized for lacking academic rigor, being perceived as a break from academic subjects, and not fostering broader knowledge and competencies (Quennerstedt et al., 2025). Landi (2025) even describes PE as “a subject with an identity crisis” (p. 2).

Teacher educators play a pivotal role in shaping the ideologies and discourses of PE by educating future teachers and citizens. Hence, interviews with key teacher will gain a deeper understanding of PE’s overarching societal mission. Teacher educators in our sample are significant contributors, having worked in PETE for decades and influenced policy and knowledge development in Norway and beyond.

Recent studies have explored teacher educators’ views on PE’s purpose, but lack representation from Scandinavia (Jess et al., 2024). To address this gap, we include perspectives from Norwegian PETEs to enrich the debate about PE’s societal mission.

Context matters when exploring PE’s role in society (Gerdin et al., 2022). Norway, like other Scandinavian countries, has historically been a stable social democracy (Moene & Barth, 2004) but has shifted toward neo-liberal, market-oriented policies in recent decades (Tvedt, 2017). This shift is also evident in education, where curricula now emphasize individual learning outcomes over collective democratic values (Engelsen, 2008).

Research question

This presentation addresses the following research question: How do key teacher educators in PETE in Norway perceive the overarching societal mission of PE?

Theoretical perspective

To better understand PE’s societal mission in shifting times, we employ the theoretical lenses of communitarianism and liberalism (Briseid, 2012). Communitarianism emphasizes the role of the community in fostering individual well-being. Rooted in Durkheim’s social theory, it highlights how a strong community creates the foundation for individual freedom and dignity (Snyder, 2024). Communitarian values include cultural heritage, shared norms, consensus, and local belonging, with schools seen as spaces to foster unity and responsibility (Briseid, 2012).

In contrast, liberalism places the individual at the center, emphasizing personal freedom, independence, and individual development. This perspective, influenced by thinkers such as Kant’s categorical imperative, prioritizes education tailored to the individual’s needs, aiming to provide knowledge and skills for personal growth and independent choices (Briseid, 2012). The current Norwegian curriculum reflects this with its focus on ‘Health and Life Skills’ rooted in liberalist ideals.

Historically, Norwegian education has balanced both perspectives, emphasizing equal opportunities for individuals within a communal framework (Dokka, 1987), but has been contested over the last decades (Engelsen, 2008; Education and Research, 2017). The two theoretical perspectives employed are complementary, yet sometimes contradictory, perspectives, and will guide the discussion on PE’s societal mission.

Understanding how physical education (PE) teachers work with their national PE curriculum is important (Alfrey & O’Connor, 2024). It helps us to identify the rules, norms and discourses that (re)produce the ‘inner logic’ of PE - a logic that shapes what is taught and assessed, and thus what is valued, or what counts as legitimate knowledge in the subject (Bernstein, 1996; Penney, 2013). In PE, this ‘legitimate knowledge’ is often aligned strongly with sport performance and physical health, which can operate to marginalise many learners by limiting access to more diverse forms of (embodied) knowledge. However, while research has shown that some PE teachers can challenge these dominant forms of PE (Alfrey & O’Connor, 2024), less is known about how PE teacher educators within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) understand and work with curriculum (Lorusso et al., 2022). This is a significant gap, given teacher educators’ central role in supporting pre-service teachers to think critically about curriculum (Lambert & Penney, 2020).
Addressing this gap, the current research is guided by the following research question: how do PE teacher educators from across the four nations of the UK (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) understand and work with their respective national PE curricula? Similar to Penney (2013), we are influenced by the work of Bernstein (1996) and his concept of boundaries to examine how teacher educators interpret the messages legitimised within national curriculum documents and how they navigate, critique and potentially re-imagine PE within ITE. While this research is significant at a local (UK) level, sharing and comparing interpretations across different country/ITE contexts, has the potential to serve as a form of professional learning for all ITE practitioners - deepening their curriculum knowledge and enhancing the ways they support pre-service teachers in developing critical thinking and context-responsive approaches to curriculum.

Why is it so challenging to answer the question of what knowledge the subject physical education (PE) should contribute? Physical education teachers often do not conceptualize their work in terms of knowledge, but rather in terms of activities (Larsson & Nyberg, 2017). The lack of a sustained discussion regarding the underlying purpose of a school subject - and consequently what students are expected to learn - appears particularly pronounced within PE, including Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) (Herold & Waring, 2017; Kirk, 2010). What to teach and learn in PE and PETE is especially blurred regarding movement (Herold & Waring, 2017; Kirk, 2010; Nyberg & Larsson, 2014). This raises questions such as: What kinds of knowledge can, for instance, playing football or participating in gymnastics provide? One answer to the question, ’what do you know when you know how to move in specific ways’, could be ‘you can perform a handstand or a cartwheel’, but this answer reflects what a person can do. Instead, we need to seek an answer to what a person needs to know in order ‘to do a handstand or a cartwheel’, that is, the knowing involved in the doings (Carlgren, 2020, p. 5). The answer must take into account the agent and the kind of knowing this agent must develop to master specific ways of moving when participating in different movement cultures. Verbalizing what knowing could be involved in the doings requires thus a widened view on the concept of knowledge as embracing also the subjective aspect of knowledge.

In line with Polanyi’s (1969) theory of knowledge, we conceive knowledge as personal and developed in practice. When we “dwell” in our experiences, we develop our knowing, which to a large extent involves tacit components, difficult to articulate in lucid propositions. (Polanyi 1962, p. 1) In the case of knowing how to move in a movement culture, these tacit aspects constitute a substantial part of one’s knowing and is “massively embodied” (Polanyi 1954, p. 382) in the knowledgeable act of moving in specific ways. As is apparent, Polanyi’s perspective on knowledge embraces the agent’s (the knower’s) relation to a content to be known. This relation can be described as the knower’s knowing.

In this paper, we present examples of how the knowing in the doings of athletics and ballgames can be articulated. To do this, we used a phenomenographic approach (Marton & Pong, 2005) and will show how it is possible to analyze qualitatively different ways in which pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience, or in other words, know, movements included in exercises within the activities of athletics and ball games. By further analyzing these different ways of ‘knowing ways of moving’ we can also identify and describe aspects of moving that learners need to be able to experience in order to develop a more complex way of knowing in moving.

In this presentation, we aim to present and discuss preliminary findings from an ongoing study investigating the Practising Model in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE).

In school-based physical education (PE), the use of pedagogical models has been established as a favourable practice to work with the complex and diverse educational potential of the subject (Aggerholm & Hordvik, 2024; Fernandez-Rio & Iglesias, 2022). One of the most recent additions to the field of pedagogical models is the Practising Model (Aggerholm et al., 2018). This model concerns practising as an activity in which pupils in PE seek to improve their capabilities through repeated efforts. It emphasises agency, personal goals, high effort, active repetition, uncertainty of the outcome, and qualitative improvement. Also, like all pedagogical models, the practising model presents critical elements relating to teacher and pupil interactions. These are elements that challenge teachers to 1) acknowledge subjectivity and work to provide meaningful challenges for all pupils, 2) provide sufficient time for practising, 3) help pupils focus on their aims, and 4) help pupils specify and negotiate their own standards of excellence. Adhering to these hallmarks of practising should challenge the domination of a one-size-fits-all approach to PE (Kirk, 2013), where pupils are rarely given the chance to experience real progress and reach new and meaningful learning plateaus (Kretchmar, 2006).

The last few years have seen an increase in empirical research investigating pupils’ and teachers’ experiences of applying the model in primary and secondary education (Askildsen & Aggerholm, 2023; Askildsen et al., 2024; Askildsen & Løndal, 2024; Fjellner et al., 2024; Lindgren & Barker, 2019). These studies have demonstrated that practising is indeed a valuable approach to teaching and learning in PE. More specifically, practising can provide pupils with meaningful experiences of broadening and refining their movement repertoire and developing their attitudes and strategies towards facing challenges, tensions, and discomfort. In addition, practising can contribute to a broader Bildung process in which character development through persisting and daring is identified as essential. Despite these findings from PE, to our knowledge, the Practising Model has not been examined in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE). Accordingly, this study aims to contribute to insights into this knowledge gap by asking the following research questions: 1) How do PETE educators experience using the practising model in PETE, and 2) how do they adapt the model to the context of higher education?