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Background: People often expect physical education teachers to look fit and athletic, to do lots of physical activity, and to eat well. While ample research exists on physical education teachers' bodies, relatively few scholars have investigated how physical educators relate corporeal expectations to broader ideas about subject content, pedagogy, and the purposes of the school subject. Aim: The specific aim of the paper is to identify the assumptions about content, pedagogy, and educational purposes that teachers make when they talk about a perceived need for physical educators to look fit and athletic. Method: To frame our work theoretically, we draw from a Swedish didaktik of physical education tradition and employ Bakhtin's concept of "speech genres," and Wertsch's concept of "privileging." Our empirical material consists of transcripts generated from 6 focus group and 6 individual interviews (24 teachers in total, average age of 40 years, average teaching experience 11 years). Findings: Data suggest that when teachers use an 'athletic-looking teacher as healthy role model' speech genre, they tend to privilege: (1) a particular version of health as subject content that involves not being too overweight and maintaining physical functionality in sports. This content is based on biomedical conceptions of health which foreground exercise, eating and weight, and a pathogenic reduction of risk; (2) particular pedagogies in PE that put the teacher at the centre of the pedagogical situation, and; (3) a certain educational purpose in PE, which is to educate citizens for healthy lives through participation in sport. With respect to this purpose, increasing body weight enters the genre as a potential obstacle for educational success. Discussion: The findings raise questions concerning appropriate curricular content and its relation to teacher identities. They suggest that learning possibilities may be missed when certain content, pedagogies, and outcomes are privileged. The findings also indicate how wider voices are implicated in the speech genre. Conclusion: The paper is concluded with reflections on the possibility for change regarding expectations of physical education teachers' bodies and pedagogies.

Background: In this paper, we will address the question of how physical education teacher education (PETE) matters and suggest one way to explore the potential impact of PETE. A distinguishing feature of the studies of PETE's impact on physical education is that they either include perspectives from preservice teachers involved in PETE courses or perspectives from physical education teachers in schools looking back at their education. Longitudinal attempts to follow preservice teachers' journey from education to workplace, in order to grasp how they perceive the relation between teacher education and teaching practice in schools, and the transition between these contexts, are few and far between. This gap of knowledge is a missing piece of the puzzle to further develop PETE, and to inform life-long professional development for teachers. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we develop and present a methodological approach for investigating the transition of content areas from courses in PETE into teaching practice in school physical education. Second, we will illustrate the potential utility of this methodological approach in longitudinal studies by showing how one particular content area, Assessment for Learning (AfL), was investigated through the use of methods and theories described in the first part of this paper. Methodology: The suggested longitudinal approach involves Stimulated Recall (SR) interviews with pre- and inservice teachers, observations and communication with groups of students and teachers through social media. The construction, recontextualisation and realisation of pedagogic discourses regarding content areas are suggested to be analysed through a combination of Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device and Ball's concept of fabrication. Results and Conclusions: The longitudinal design and the suggested methodology can provide answers to how content areas are transformed in and between PETE and school physical education. A combination of the theoretical perspectives of Bernstein and Ball enables us to say something not only about how pedagogic discourses regarding content areas are constructed, recontextualised and realised in PETE and school physical education, but also about what content areas become in terms of fabrications in the transition between these contexts. To conclude, we argue that the methodological research design can be used to explore different content areas in PETE and that this methodology can contribute to knowledge about how PETE matters for school physical education.

Background: How teachers enact policy has been of significant interest to educational scholars. In physical education research, scholars have identified several factors affecting the enactment of policy. These factors include but are not limited to: structural support available for teachers, provision of professional development opportunities, the nature of the policy, and the educational philosophies of the teachers. A recurring conclusion drawn in this scholarship is that official documentation and teachers' work often diverge, sometimes in profound ways. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how physical education teachers in Sweden describe their enactment of policy regarding the concept "complex movement," which features in the latest Swedish curriculum. Methods: Interview data were generated with six specialist physical education teachers. Three questions guided the interviews: What is complex movement? What is not complex movement? And, can you give examples from your teaching of complex movement? Data were analyzed using a discourse analytic framework. Meaning was understood as a production of dialectical relationships between individuals and social practices. Two key concepts were utilized: "intertextuality," which refers to the condition whereby all communicative events, not merely utterances, draw on earlier communication events, and "interdiscursivity," which refers to discursive practices in which discourse types are combined in new and complex ways. Results: We identified three discourses regarding the teachers' enactment of policy: (1) Complex movement as individual difficulty, (2) Complex movement as composite movements, and (3) Complex movement as situational adaptation. Several features were common to all three discourses: they were all related to issues of assessment; they suggested that complex movement is something students should be able to show or perform, and; they left open room for practically any activity done in physical education to be considered complex. Discussion: Three issues are addressed in the Discussion. The first concerns the intertextual nature of the teachers' statements and how the statements relate to policy and research. The second concerns the way that knowledge, and specifically movement knowledge, becomes problematic in the teachers' statements about complex movement. The third concerns more broadly the language used to describe the relationship between policy and practice. Conclusions: We propose that modest levels of overlap between teachers' discursive resources, policy, and research is unsurprising. In line with earlier research, we suggest that the notion of 'enactment' is a more productive way to describe policy-oriented practice than notions such as 'implementation' or 'translation', which imply a uni-directional, linear execution of policy.

Background: Group work is often used in Physical Education (and Health-HPE). In this paper, we propose that despite: (1) its widespread use; (2) advances surrounding HPE models that utilize group strategies; and (3) a significant amount of literature dealing with group work in other school subjects, we do not have a particularly good theoretical understanding of group learning in HPE. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose one way of conceptualizing individual learning in peer interaction based on three tenets of post-Vygotskian theory that relate to the zone of proximal development (ZPD); namely that in learning situations: (i) group members engage in shared communication; (ii) expert-novice relationships can develop and change during group activities and (iii) constructing knowledge can be thought of as reaching agreement. Participants and setting: Empirical material was generated with eight different HPE classes in lower and upper secondary schools in Sweden. Schools were selected in a way that maximized variation and were distributed across four geographic locations with varying sizes and types of communities. Data collection: Observational material was produced at each of the sites with the use of two cameras: one stationary and the other mobile. Stationary filming maintained a wide-angled focus and captured the entire class. Mobile filming focused on different groups working within the classes. During mobile filming, between two and five students were generally in the frame and filming was directed at sequences in which a group of students worked together on a specific task. Data analysis: Analysis of the data focused on two kinds of incidents. The first comprised a sequence in which two or more students were interacting to complete a task which they could not immediately do and were engaged in collective signification by talking about or doing the activity in mutually compatible ways. These conditions were sufficient in our view to signal the creation of a ZPD. The second kind of incident fulfilled the first criteria but not the second--i.e. the students were interacting but not in mutually compatible ways. Findings: A post-Vygotskian interpretation of three group work sequences draws attention to: (i) the flexible and fluid nature of "expertness" as it exists within groups; (ii) the unpredictable nature of member interactions and (iii) the challenging role that teachers occupy while trying to facilitate group work. Conclusion: Such an interpretation contributes to a growing understanding of group work and helps HPE practitioners to make the most of a teaching strategy which is already used widely in schools.

In this paper, we will address the question of how physical education teacher education (PETE) matters and suggest one way to explore the potential impact of PETE. A distinguishing feature of the studies of PETE's impact on physical education is that they either include perspectives from preservice teachers involved in PETE courses or perspectives from physical education teachers in schools looking back at their education. Longitudinal attempts to follow preservice teachers' journey from education to workplace, in order to grasp how they perceive the relation between teacher education and teaching practice in schools, and the transition between these contexts, are few and far between. This gap of knowledge is a missing piece of the puzzle to further develop PETE, and to inform life-long professional development for teachers. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we develop and present a methodological approach for investigating the transition of content areas from courses in PETE into teaching practice in school physical education. Second, we will illustrate the potential utility of this methodological approach in longitudinal studies by showing how one particular content area, Assessment for Learning (AfL), was investigated through the use of methods and theories described in the first part of this paper. The suggested longitudinal approach involves Stimulated Recall (SR) interviews with pre- and inservice teachers, observations and communication with groups of students and teachers through social media. The construction, recontextualisation and realisation of pedagogic discourses regarding content areas are suggested to be analysed through a combination of Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device and Ball's concept of fabrication. The longitudinal design and the suggested methodology can provide answers to how content areas are transformed in and between PETE and school physical education. A combination of the theoretical perspectives of Bernstein and Ball enables us to say something not only about how pedagogic discourses regarding content areas are constructed, recontextualised and realised in PETE and school physical education, but also about what content areas become in terms of fabrications in the transition between these contexts. To conclude, we argue that the methodological research design can be used to explore different content areas in PETE and that this methodology can contribute to knowledge about how PETE matters for school physical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People often expect physical education teachers to look fit and athletic, to do lots of physical activity, and to eat well. While ample research exists on physical education teachers' bodies, relatively few scholars have investigated how physical educators relate corporeal expectations to broader ideas about subject content, pedagogy, and the purposes of the school subject. Aim: The specific aim of the paper is to identify the assumptions about content, pedagogy, and educational purposes that teachers make when they talk about a perceived need for physical educators to look fit and athletic. Method: To frame our work theoretically, we draw from a Swedish didaktik of physical education tradition and employ Bakhtin's concept of speech genres, and Wertsch's concept of privileging. Our empirical material consists of transcripts generated from 6 focus group and 6 individual interviews (24 teachers in total, average age of 40 years, average teaching experience 11 years). Findings: Data suggest that when teachers use an 'athletic-looking teacher as healthy role model' speech genre, they tend to privilege: (1) a particular version of health as subject content that involves not being too overweight and maintaining physical functionality in sports. This content is based on biomedical conceptions of health which foreground exercise, eating and weight, and a pathogenic reduction of risk; (2) particular pedagogies in PE that put the teacher at the centre of the pedagogical situation, and; (3) a certain educational purpose in PE, which is to educate citizens for healthy lives through participation in sport. With respect to this purpose, increasing body weight enters the genre as a potential obstacle for educational success. Discussion: The findings raise questions concerning appropriate curricular content and its relation to teacher identities. They suggest that learning possibilities may be missed when certain content, pedagogies, and outcomes are privileged. The findings also indicate how wider voices are implicated in the speech genre. Conclusion: The paper is concluded with reflections on the possibility for change regarding expectations of physical education teachers' bodies and pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Group work is often used in Physical Education (and Health – HPE). In this paper, we propose that despite: (1) its widespread use; (2) advances surrounding HPE models that utilize group strategies; and (3) a significant amount of literature dealing with group work in other school subjects, we do not have a particularly good theoretical understanding of group learning in HPE. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose one way of conceptualizing individual learning in peer interaction based on three tenets of post-Vygotskian theory that relate to the zone of proximal development (ZPD); namely that in learning situations: (i) group members engage in shared communication; (ii) expert–novice relationships can develop and change during group activities and (iii) constructing knowledge can be thought of as reaching agreement. Participants and setting: Empirical material was generated with eight different HPE classes in lower and upper secondary schools in Sweden. Schools were selected in a way that maximized variation and were distributed across four geographic locations with varying sizes and types of communities. Data collection: Observational material was produced at each of the sites with the use of two cameras: one stationary and the other mobile. Stationary filming maintained a wide-angled focus and captured the entire class. Mobile filming focused on different groups working within the classes. During mobile filming, between two and five students were generally in the frame and filming was directed at sequences in which a group of students worked together on a specific task. Data analysis: Analysis of the data focused on two kinds of incidents. The first comprised a sequence in which two or more students were interacting to complete a task which they could not immediately do and were engaged in collective signification by talking about or doing the activity in mutually compatible ways. These conditions were sufficient in our view to signal the creation of a ZPD. The second kind of incident fulfilled the first criteria but not the second – i.e. the students were interacting but not in mutually compatible ways. Findings: A post-Vygotskian interpretation of three group work sequences draws attention to: (i) the flexible and fluid nature of ‘expertness’ as it exists within groups; (ii) the unpredictable nature of member interactions and (iii) the challenging role that teachers occupy while trying to facilitate group work. Conclusion: Such an interpretation contributes to a growing understanding of group work and helps HPE practitioners to make the most of a teaching strategy which is already used widely in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to identify the dominant discourses of health and wellbeing that are offered in health education in Swedish schools. Issues of health and wellbeing are covered mainly in four school subjects in Sweden: physical education and health, home and consumer studies, biology, and social studies, and therefore, we interviewed teachers from those subjects to generate data. Six interrelated health discourses were identified from the data. All discourses were, however, also embedded within a health discourse with a comprehensive description of health as physical, psychological and social wellbeing. Results suggest that schools offer a Western and White discourse of health and that some content is overemphasised, and some is missing in relation to other non-dominant discourses of health and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Examine health resources that physically active older adults consider meaningful when participating in physical activity initiatives. Health resources are protective factors, including attitudes, knowledge, material factors or social support, that potentially enable people to understand and make sense of their lives or to cope with life stressors., Design and Main Outcome Measures: A cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted with two questionnaires used to serve as a compiled 'ageing well' survey: the Salutogenic Physical Activity Health Resources Questionnaire (SPAHRQ) and the short form of the Sense of Coherence questionnaire, SOC-13., Results: The study included 372 participants ranging from 60 to 96 years of age (mean age: 74.4 ± 7 years; 60% women). Social relations, positive energy, the habit of exercising and embodied satisfaction were considered important by more than 70% of the participants. Social relations were the most meaningful health resource for both men and women (89%). Women rated positive energy as a significantly more important consequence of their participation in physical activity than men (W 88%, M 72%; p  = .001). The three health resources that were considered less important were capability in and about physical activity, self-worth and identity as an exercising person. Those who were more physically active considered social relations, self-worth and the habit of exercising to a higher extent. Participants with higher sense of coherence consider the habit of exercising to a greater extent to be important., Conclusions: Findings that social relations, positive energy, the habit of exercising and embodied satisfaction were considered important by more than 70% of the participants, can contribute to a wider understanding of health resources that older adults consider meaningful in their participation in organised physical activity initiatives., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)., (© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

Sports participation has the potential to contribute to young people's health. A prerequisite for young people to benefit from sports is that they stay in sports. Studies that consider both personal and contextual factors are needed to unpack the broader health-promoting potential of youth sports. The purpose of the study is to contribute to knowledge about the health-promoting potential of young people's participation in organized sports by exploring youth perspectives on what makes a sports club health-promoting with a focus on health resources that young people consider important for sports club participation. For this cross-sectional study a brief survey was conducted with 15-16 year old students ( n = 123) at two schools in Sweden, asking three open-ended questions about their participation in sports. The study used a salutogenic theory-driven analysis in combination with statistical analysis. Five health resources that young people consider important for sports club participation are revealed. On an individual, more 'swimmer'-related level, these are personal well-being and social relations, including relationally meaningful activities, and on an organizational level, relating to the 'river', that sports clubs offer a supportive and well-functioning environment. For sports clubs to be health-promoting settings for young people and thus hopefully to reduce drop-out, we need a more sustainable approach emphasizing drop-in, drop-through , and drop-over as a continuous iterative process. We also need to consider the complexity of sports participation for young people, involving individual, organizational and environmental issues.

This paper provides in-depth knowledge into young girls' learning processes in relation to physical activity, diet/nutrition and body image. Data were generated from interviews with 49 girls (age 13-15) in England. The practical epistemological analysis technique was used to explore young people as both producers and consumers, or prosumers, of content and knowledge. The data illustrate that adolescent girls navigate two interrelated health-related paradoxes within publicly private spaces: (i) skinny fat and (ii) naturally fake. Skinny fat refers to how participation in social media represents a continuous struggle of becoming skinny, but at the same time not trying too hard to become too skinny. Naturally fake refers to how having a 'natural' look is highly valued, but equally, it is acceptable to be 'fake'. Overall, adolescent girls are competent users of social media, who are able to navigate the complexity of the medium and its contents. At the same time, the adolescent girls sometimes found themselves, unintentionally, exposed to risks (e.g. bullying or body dysmorphia), particularly when social media was experienced publicly in a temporal order, connected to the past or present, and without control of potential future effects and impacts. Relevant adults should acknowledge young people's vast competence of life on social media and further empower young people to self-regulate their learning through social media, and in ways that help them to learn from experiences about their health and bodies to shape future actions., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors., (© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

Recent systematic reviews identify that the factors mediating and/or moderating the relationship between social media and health outcomes are sparse. There have also been few attempts to analyse gender specific uses of social media. This paper investigated young boys health-related learning in relation to social media. Data were generated from class activities and interviews and from a large data set that included 1346 young people. The approach to the empirical data adopted was Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA). The findings reveal two main purposes of young boys engagement with social media: (i) communicating with friends, and (ii) accessing health-related information. Irony and humour were central learning mechanisms used by young boys to participate within health-related social media, and in a way that enabled them to engage with, uphold, and handle health discourses associated with masculinity - such as being ripped - without fear of 'literal' peer ridicule and within a context of acceptable 'banter'. There was evidence that young people were critical users and generators of social media, who were clearly thinking through what they see, do, and use online. Hence, this paper provides a fresh evidence-based perspective on the potentially positive role of social media as a health-related learning resource. PEA is illustrated as a new methodological approach for investigating learning in the context of social media. The evidence generated can be used to inform future evaluations of social media use, the design of educative support for young people, and guidance and training for key stakeholders., (© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to investigate how boys communicate previous experiences of cultural norms in physical education (PE) practice. This was done by analyzing what boys (from a school in the United Kingdom) remember about PE 2 years after they last participated. Making use of autobiographical memory theory and John Dewey's notions of reactualization of experience and collateral learning, we discuss the results of the study in terms of re-membering., Method: The participants in this study were 20 boys from a secondary school in the United Kingdom. At the time of the study, 11 of the boys were aged 16 to 17 years old and 9 were aged 17 to 18 years old. These boys were interviewed using a semistructured approach to explore their autobiographical memories of PE., Results: The overarching "logic" of memories of PE was sport. Almost all of the boys' articulated memories were of doing sports, albeit in various capacities. Beyond the main theme, the article positions the boys' recollections against established cultural norms of PE as a social practice and explores three subthemes: (a) just doing the game in a traditional curriculum though a multiactivity sport discourse; (b) learning the games in a technical sport discourse; and (c) learning beyond the game around an educational sport discourse., Conclusions: These boys reactualized memories of learning within an educational discourse, which suggests that what they learned goes beyond the simple consequence of participating.

Since the development of the welfare state, the Swedish school subject Health and Physical Education (HPE) has been regarded as an important site for public health work, and still assumes a central role in promoting the health of the coming generation. A specific type of health intervention, promoted by researchers in recent years, is the use of so-called exergames. In some countries, these fitness games are used as teaching aids in physical education classes and can be seen as examples of how public health issues and popular culture are shaping HPE in schools. The aim of the study reported in this paper is to examine which messages about health and body are offered, and how these are expressed in some of the fitness games used as teaching aids in school. The results of the study highlight the dangers of using exergames in the teaching of HPE in schools. The messages communicated by the games have a number of potentially harmful consequences, particularly with regard to the creation of specific health and bodily norms based on a measurable ideal. The use of this tool in education is thus far from value free, and the problems that might be solved when using the games are not necessarily the ones that education should privilege.

Aims: The aims of this review is to compile and identify key issues in international research about youth sports clubs as health-promoting settings, and then discuss the results of the review in terms of a framework for the youth sports club as a health-promoting setting., Methods: The framework guiding this review of research is the health-promoting settings approach introduced by the World Health Organization (WHO). The method used is the integrated review. Inclusion criteria were, first, that the studies concerned sports clubs for young people, not professional clubs; second, that it be a question of voluntary participation in some sort of ongoing organized athletics outside of the regular school curricula; third, that the studies consider issues about youth sports clubs in terms of health-promoting settings as described by WHO. The final sample for the review consists of 44 publications., Results: The review shows that youth sports clubs have plentiful opportunities to be or become health-promoting settings; however this is not something that happens automatically. To do so, the club needs to include an emphasis on certain important elements in its strategies and daily practices. The youth sports club needs to be a supportive and healthy environment with activities designed for and adapted to the specific age-group or stage of development of the youth., Conclusions: To become a health-promoting setting, a youth sports club needs to take a comprehensive approach to its activities, aims, and purposes.