We will present the background, theoretical framework, methodology, and some preliminary findings of a project that aims to provide knowledge about how movement subject knowledge is conceptualised in physical education teacher education (PETE). Teachers need this knowledge to fulfil PE’s purpose of helping students develop what is in Swedish national curricula called “movement capacity” and “physical ability”.

The background for the project can be found in long-standing criticism of physical education (PE). For some time now, PE has been described as in a state of crisis due to declining legitimacy in education systems that increasingly value ‘academic knowledge’ (Hardman 2011), and/or due to current forms of PE being out of step with broader health and recreational trends (Tinning 2006). Kirk (2010) holds that, if not radically reformed, PE faces extinction as a school subject. Specifically, Kirk claims that movement knowledge is taught to students mainly in the form of decontextualized sport techniques in short bursts of practice that offer little in terms of learning.

In the Swedish context, national evaluations (SSI 2010, 2018) and research (Redelius & Larsson 2020) highlight PE’s struggle to evolve from an ‘activity subject’ to a ‘knowledge subject’, a transformation mandated in national curricula since 1994. These investigations of PE paint a picture where systematic attempts to develop movement knowledge are conspicuous by their absence (see also Larsson & Nyberg 2017).

Kirk (2010) proposes that PETE educators have a responsibility to lead reform in PE, and this includes defining subject knowledge. It is primarily PETE institutions that have the competence and critical mass for this purpose. Some researchers, however, suggest that PETE has itself been slow to change (Larsson, Linnér & Schenker 2018), that it has continued to emphasise traditional teacher knowledge (Mordal-Moen & Green 2014), and that it has struggled to present alternatives to movement knowledge that are not based on competition or fitness (Backman & Larsson 2013). Exacerbating PETE’s difficulty to lead knowledge reform is a tendency to distinguish between ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘academic knowledge’ (Herold & Waring, 2017).

Attempts to reform PETE have mainly focused on didactics and calls for the inclusion of socially critical perspectives (Larsson, et al 2018; Backman & Larsson 2013). We agree that didactics and critical perspectives are well worth attention in PETE. Still, without a clear definition of the subject knowledge, these efforts may prove literally baseless. Therefore, there is a need to define the subject knowledge required for the practice of the PE teacher profession. Similar work is carried out under the name content knowledge (CK) for physical education (see, e.g., Ward, 2013; Iserbyt, Ward & Li, 2017), but this research focuses primarily on student performance while we rather focus on students' movement knowledge.

Theoretically, the project is grounded in Young’s (2013) notion of powerful knowledge. The notion of powerful knowledge was developed in curriculum research because of ‘a neglect of the knowledge question itself and what a curriculum would be like if an “entitlement to knowledge” was its goal’ (Young, 2013, 107). Powerful knowledge concerns “specialized knowledge in contrast to everyday or contextualized knowledge. It is knowledge that can help students understand and explain the world and give them certain ‘powers’ in terms of capacity to move beyond their context-bound experience” (Carlgren 2020, 323). According to Young, powerful knowledge opens doors to new understandings and should be offered to all students in school.

The methodology involves pedagogical sequences where movement content included in existing PETE courses is planned, taught, and explored (cf., Nyberg, Barker & Larsson, 2021). PE teacher educators are participating in the project because we assume that they embody powerful, yet to a great extent tacit, knowledge that needs to be brought to light to allow for critical deliberation and change. Additionally, student teachers are participating in the project to provide insights into how a taught content is embodied, thus adding to the possibilities for critical deliberation and knowledge restructuring to generate powerful knowings. It should be noted that while PE includes a wide range of knowledge, which derives from different scientific disciplines as well as non-scientific contexts, we focus specifically on movement knowledge, which we consider to be a curiously neglected aspect in PETE research. We have organized analytic and empirical activities into ‘research sets’ where each set involves three phases: (i) collaborative design of a pedagogical sequence, (ii) generation of data on the ways which participants produce knowledge through systematic observation, interviews, and diaries, and (iii) analysis of knowledge production in relation to formal theory to see how theory and empirical material can inform one another. The pedagogical sequences concern knowledge derived from four movement cultures: contemporary dance; games and play; outdoor life (friluftsliv); and athletics, gymnastics, and other acrobatic movement activities, which are reconceptualised in a PETE context. Observations, interviews and learning diaries during implementation of pedagogical sequences have so far provided knowledge that can be used to analyse and articulate the subject knowledge required for the practice of the (PE teacher) profession. Observations and interviews have taken place in an ethnography-inspired way. That is, during the courses, some of the researchers have attended lessons with GoPro cameras mounted on their chests. In these courses, the researchers filmed the lessons and held short conversations/interviews with the course participants. Additionally, some of the researchers have followed the teaching from the side-lines and have taken field notes. The project has been approved by Sweden's Ethics Review Authority. A significant ethical concern in this project is that the researchers are often colleagues with the TEs and teach the same students in other courses.

The first pedagogical sequence was implemented during the autumn semester 2022. Analysis of the collected material from this sequence has been initiated. Here, we present initial analysis of this data set. The documented course was led by subject specialists in the respective fields of ball games, dance, athletics/gymnastics, and outdoor life, and was offered as advanced level continuing education for teachers and teacher educators in the field of PE. Some key questions that guided the course were: what does it mean to teach ball games, dance, etc., in a school context compared to contexts outside of school? What constitutes knowledge in athletics, outdoor life, etc.? And what can you do when you can play, dance, etc.? To some extent, it is possible to talk about ‘movement knowledge’ in the teacher education context in the same way as we have proposed in previous publications, that is, in terms of dispositions and connoisseurship. This is the case especially in movement practices such as athletics and gymnastics, which have several features in common with movement practices that we have studied before, such as juggling and unicycling (Nyberg, Barker & Larsson, 2021). In ball games and dance, respectively, we discovered that there are already various frameworks that can contribute to structuring knowledge, such as the classification of games (O’Connor, Alfrey & Penney, 2022) and Laban’s movement analysis (BESS) (Mattsson & Larsson, 2021). However, in their current forms, these frameworks do not focus specifically on what you can do when you know ‘X.’ Outdoor life appears to be a particularly challenging area because there is little consensus within the secondary field of education about what constitutes the primary field of knowledge.

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