Within Physical Education (PE) and Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) research there has been a recent increase in studies looking into policies – here I use a broad understanding of policy as a “set of ideas or a plan … that has een agreed to officially by a group of people, organisation, government, or a political party” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) – for instance PE curriculum (e.g., Dowling & Flintoff, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Allen, 2019; Petherick, 2018) or PETE programmes/course syllabi (e.g., Apelmo, 2022; Backman & Larsson, 2016; Philpot, 2017) . Policies are “the operational statement of values”, and they “project images of an ideal society (education policies project what counts as education)” (Ball, 1990, p. 1), in the same way, curricula and syllabi  state what is worth knowing and what is not, they prescribe behaviour and action, and create ‘subjects’ and ‘problems’ (Alfrey et al., 2021; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). Since values are always embedded within a cultural context, we need to ask whose values are represented in policies and whose are left out.

In this study I seek to investigate how ethnic and cultural diversity are problematised in PETE policy in three countries: Norway, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following Carol Bacchi’s (2016) approach for analysing policy ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR), I take a closer look at programme descriptions and course syllabi from one case PETE programme from each country, additional documents are examined to trace back discourses and examine how a problem is represented as a certain type of problem. The main research question that will guide my investigation is how are ethnic and cultural diversity problematised in PETE course syllabi. This paper is important because it shows how each country’s context can amplify or silence certain discourses and voices (Alfrey et al., 2021) within policy documents. Furthermore, Bacchi’s WPR approach – which is about “teasing out the conceptual premises underpinning problem representations, tracing their genealogy, reflecting on the practices that sustain them and considering their effects” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 17) – stimulates to think about policies in a different way, with a critical perspective, something that can be helpful for teacher educators who have to interpret these texts.

PETE is changing in many countries, while in Norway a new five-year PE specialist programme was introduced last fall, time and courses are being cut from PE in favour of more ‘sport science’ content in Canada and New Zealand. These changes will of course have an effect on PETE. By comparing different national contexts, I hope to highlight contextual possibilities and constraints of how ethnic and cultural diversity are addressed in PETE, as well as commonalities across borders. What the three countries have in common is that they are all getting increasingly more diverse populations and that all three have indigenous populations. Obviously, there are many differences given that each country is located on a different continent, with different historical trajectories of immigration, multiculturalism and the relation with Indigenous peoples. Both Canada and New Zealand are settler countries and historically have been immigrant countries, but while Canada is set in a multicultural framework, New Zealand is officially a bicultural nation, whereas Norway has only recently experienced immigration on a larger scale. Given the global nature of concerns around how increasing diversity should be addressed in teacher education, it is important to explore how these issues are approached in different contexts. According to Broadfoot (1999, as in Afdal, 2019, p. 261), comparative education research can “enhance awareness of possibilities, clarify contextual constraints and contribute to the development of a comprehensive socio-cultural perspective” of educational issues.

I used a multiple case study approach (reference) for this study to be able to consider the contextual variations between the three PETE programmes, from Norway, Canada and New Zealand. Thus, the aim of this study is not to give a comprehensive, or representative picture of PETE in the chosen countries, but rather, the case study approach can provide an in-depth view of one case per country with its contextual variations. The data for this study consists of course syllabi and programme descriptions (in one case programme accreditation documents) from three higher education institutions in Norway, Canada and New Zealand respectively. The institutions were chosen with the help of contact persons (who also helped me in identifying important documents) from the respective countries with the purpose of having either diverse student populations and/or known for implementing critical perspectives in their education. For the analysis of the material, I used Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach. WPR is a Foucault-inspired, poststructuralist approach to analysing policy texts. The WPR approach challenges the claim that policies solve problems which are pre-existing, instead it encourages thinking of policies as practices that ‘produce’ problems as certain type of problems (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). In other words, looking at what the proposed solution is makes us understand what we think the problem is. The WPR approach thus encourages asking what kind of problem is produced exactly, how is it produced and what are the effects of it? To do that, Bacchi proposes a set of six questions which “work backwards from policy proposals to examine the unexamined ways of thinking on which they rely” (p. 21). However, the aim here is not to critique policies and replace them with another ‘truth’, but rather to invite to a critical reflection. The six interrelated questions are: Q1. What is the ‘problem’ represented to be in a specific policy? Q2. What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the “problem”? Q3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about? Q4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the “problem” be conceptualized differently? Q5. What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the “problem”? Q6. How and where has this representation of the “problem” been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

The analysis revealed that while ethnic and cultural diversity are generally assumed to be a value added to the education, they also represent a challenge for which the future PE teachers need to be prepared for by gaining certain abilities and knowledges. Looking at the problematisations of ethnic and cultural diversity through Gorski’s (2009) typology of multicultural education, one can say that in all the programmes from the three countries there is an overlap between discourses of liberal and critical multicultural education. With more distinct tendencies towards liberal multiculturalism in the Norwegian case and stronger tendencies towards critical multiculturalism in the Canadian but especially in the New Zealand case. Especially in the Norwegian case this could have effects on the preparedness of future PE teachers in addressing Sami issues and including Sami culture and worldviews in their teaching. However, it is important to keep in mind that while the Canadian and the New Zealand case dedicate more curriculum space to issues of ethnic and cultural diversity, a look at the actual time dedicated to education calls for a cautionary interpretation. With Norway just having developed a new 5-year PETE programme, while Canada and New Zealand have their, respectively, four- and three-year undergraduate programmes (in the best case with some PE content, and worst case very little to none) plus a one-year teacher education programme. This opens the question of how much time is actually spent on these topics in courses, with a busy schedule and many different aspects which need to be addressed within a short period of time.

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