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The role that school health and physical education (HPE) plays in the making of physically active and healthy citizens continues to be rearticulated within the field of HPE practice. In Australasia, for example, this is evident in HPE curricula changes that now span almost two decades with ongoing advocacy for greater recognition of socially critical perspectives of physical activity and health. This paper reports on one part of a larger collaborative project that focused on how HPE teachers understand and enact socially critical perspectives in their practice. The paper draws on interview data obtained from 20 secondary school HPE teachers, all of whom graduated from the same physical education teacher education (PETE) programme in New Zealand, a programme that espouses a socially critical orientation. The teaching experience of the study participants ranged from 1 to 22 years of service. The preliminary analysis involved deduction of common themes in relation to the research questions and then, drawing on the theoretical framework of Bourdieu [1990.The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press], these themes were analysed in more detail to gain insight into how and why the graduate teachers’ expressed their particular understanding of HPE and critical pedagogy. The findings suggested that this PETE programme did have some impact on the participant teachers’ perceptions of physical activity and health, and the role of socially critical thinking. However, there was also evidence to suggest that many of them did not have a clear understanding of the transformative agenda of critical pedagogy. We conclude by suggesting that although this PETE programme did plant ‘seeds’ that had an impact on the graduate teachers’ awareness and thinking about socially critical issues in relation to physical activity and health, it did not necessarily turn them into critical pedagogues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For more than 40 years, health and physical education (HPE) academics in universities and teacher education colleges have drawn attention to issues of social justice specific to the context of PE and advocated for teachers in fields, gymnasiums and other physical activity spaces to do a better job of promoting more equitable outcomes for all students. Building on this advocacy, in the late 1990s, countries such as Sweden, Norway and New Zealand designed HPE curricula that address social justice. However, limited research has focused specifically on the enactment of social justice in HPE practice. Drawing on a larger international project involving Sweden, Norway and New Zealand the aim of this article is therefore to explore the constitution of social justice pedagogies across these three different HPE contexts and more specifically how HPE teaching practice may be understood from regulative, normative and cultural perspectives on social justice. The data reported on in this paper were generated from educational acts, curriculum documents, observations of HPE lessons in each of the three countries and follow-up teacher interviews. In order to analyse the data, we employed Scott's (2008. Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed). Sage) institutional theory to further understand and discuss the enactment of social justice across the three different countries in HPE practice. In our representation and analysis of the findings we draw attention to how social justice pedagogies are informed differently by institutionalised governing systems and therefore they may be enacted differently by teachers in different societies. In particular, we highlight the influence of (i) regulative; (ii) normative; (iii) cultural-cognitive elements on practice. We conclude by pointing out the complex interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements that both enable and constrain HPE teachers' enactments of social justice in HPE practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]