Contemporary physical education in Sweden is characterized by a strong tradition of sport and ball games which school curriculum reforms in the last few decades seem to have had no significant impact on. Despite new curricula in Sweden, HPE teachers’ practices remain unchanged. HPE teachers still have problems catering to the needs of all their pupils (Annerstedt & Larsson, 2010; Ekberg, 2016; Redelius et al. 2009). Success in PE in the form of high grades is related to active participation in sport clubs (Jakobsson et al., 2012). One of the government’s instruments for regulating teaching in PE in schools in Sweden is teacher education. The latest reforms of Swedish teacher education including physical education teacher education (PETE) place higher scientific/academic demands on teacher education programmes. One of the goals is to develop PETE students’ ability to adopt socially critical approaches and the students should, for instance, be provided opportunities to identify, analyse and question the different beliefs, norms and values that pervade PE and that may act to exclude some pupils (SOU, 2008). However, research indicates that despite these reforms, Swedish PETE does not challenge students’ conceptions about how the subject should be taught to any great extent (Schenker, 2016). The PETE students’ still want to pursue their passion for sport through teaching practices designed to lead to their pupils (even the uninterested ones) developing the same sport interests (Larsson, 2009). Larsson et al. (2016) found that although socially critical perspectives exists in PETE today, reforming the PETE curriculum per se does not necessarily challenge the doxa of PETE. As a matter of fact, the use of socially critical perspectives in PETE may (in the name of the doxa) not challenge how power and social superiority or inferiority appear in the subject. Doxa might not be set in stone, but there seems to be a need to thoroughly reconstruct PETE if future PE teachers are going to develop socially critical approaches that truly challenge the prevailing assumptions about what competencies a PE teacher should have. In this paper the key members from Sweden involved in the EDUHEALTH project will share some of their research findings to date. We will discuss mechanisms that may contribute to the difficulty of challenging taken for granted beliefs within Swedish PETE and how and why teachers’ presumptions and teaching logics, like the one of competitive sport, continue to exclude some children and youth.

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