Since the 1980s, advocacy for social justice in HPE has growth in volume and breadth, reflecting a range of international perspectives produced through a growing range of theoretical lenses. In regard to approaches to teaching social justice, that is, pedagogical work, there is little empirical research of HPE classroom practices to support the growing body of advocacy literature. The challenges of defining social justice and importance of context to the relevance of teaching practice are two layers of complexity that exacerbate the explication of teachers practices for social justice and have contributed to a significant gap (Tinning, 2018). The purpose of the paper is to describe the methodological design of a research project that examined teaching for social justice in HPE, the challenges encountered in the research process, along with the limitations of this research approach. We frame this paper with our conceptualisation of social justice in relation to HPE before describing the qualitative research methodology we have used to explore how high school physical education teachers in Sweden, Norway and New Zealand teach for social justice. The object of our study is teaching practices for social justice, what we are calling social justice pedagogies. We will describe how our tri-country research teams completed structured classroom observations informed by the principles of Critical Incident Technique (CIT) (Tripp, 2012) and Stimulated Recall Interviews (Lyle, 2003). In this paper we will also describe the iterative process of thematical analysis (Hastie and Glotova, 2012) that was completed initially by all individual researchers and later through a group analysis, before reflexively discussing the epistemological and pragmatic challenges that have arisen in this study.

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