The starting point for this paper is Gerdin et al. (2024), which highlights social justice in physical education (HPE) curricula across Sweden, Norway, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Gerdin et al. (2024) demonstrate that while expectations of social justice are present in all five curricula, the language used to orient teaching towards social justice is often ambiguous. Using Norway as an example, this paper examines how expectations of social justice are embedded in and aligned across various governing educational documents and policies. According to the overarching curriculum aims, HPE in Norway should foster respect for others, promote democracy, and ensure equal opportunities for all. However, research suggests persistent challenges related to gender and disabilities, with sports-active students often receiving higher grades and more benefits from HPE than their less active peers (Säfvenbom et al., 2015). This study aims to explore and illuminate how social justice is conceptualized within Norwegian curricula and educational policy documents. It employs the nine pedagogies of social justice outlined by Gerdin et al. (2022) as a theoretical framework. These pedagogies include care, inclusion, democracy, and explicit strategies for teaching social justice. The research question guiding this study is: How, and to what extent, are expectations of pedagogies for social justice present in the Education Act (1998), the Core Curriculum (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2017), and the HPE curriculum (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2019)? Analyzing policies and governing documents requires rethinking politics as a creative rather than a reactive process (Bacchi, 2009). The study adopts a qualitative research approach inspired by content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), using the What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) approach (Bacchi, 2016) as its methodological foundation. The research was conducted in two stages: (1) a quantitative summative content analysis, identifying and counting terms within the framework of the nine pedagogies of social justice, followed by (2) a direct qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) guided by the findings from the summative analysis. Findings reveal discrepancies between the documents, both in the breadth of terms associated with the pedagogies and in the prominence of specific pedagogies. Across all nine pedagogies, social justice is less explicitly articulated in the HPE curriculum than in the other documents. The presentation will discuss these findings and argue that if the HPE curriculum is to effectively guide efforts toward social justice, it must be more clearly articulated within the curriculum text than is currently the case in Norway.

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