To Örebro University

Teaching approaches in ball games in school physical education (PE) have traditionally focused on technical proficiency. Technical approaches have been criticised for being teacher-centred, exclusive, and lacking meaning. Game-based approaches (GBAs) have been presented as an alternative way to teach ball games. Employing GBAs is, however, not without challenges. Scholars have pointed to teachers' limited content knowledge of games, their poor understanding of GBAs, and cultural expectations of ball games as factors that constrain teachers' work with GBAs. The aim of this article is to provide an understanding of how beginning teachers describe ball games as a pedagogic practice in Swedish PE. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 beginning teachers who had graduated from two physical education teacher education (PETE) institutions. Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing were used to analyse the teachers' descriptions of pedagogic practice. The findings illustrate how the classification of ball games knowledge varies. Some of the beginning teachers aimed to develop pupils' understanding of games while others instead used ball games as a means for developing general movement capability or cooperation. Ball games teaching was characterised by a combination of GBAs and technical approaches. The influence of competitive sport outside of school was seen as a challenge, and the beginning teachers used strong framing and different teaching strategies combined with assessment to manage this challenge. The findings raise questions about ball games education in PETE in relation to specific national contexts.

This article focuses on teachers’ responsiveness to changes in assessment policy and how new guidelines affect assessment and grading practices in school physical education (PE). The previous national curriculum in Sweden directed many teachers towards an atomistic approach to assessment.The reformed guidelines, in contrast, mandate that teachers should strive for holistic assessment.Thus, the purpose of this study was to generate an understanding of how teachers interpret and translate the policy for holistic PE assessment and discuss potential consequences of their policyenactments. Data were generated through six focus group interviews with 22 PE teachers working at different secondary and upper secondary schools. The theoretical framework usedin the analysis is based on Ball et al.’s (2012a) work on policy enactment. The findings show that teachers view the policy for holistic assessment in PE positively. They claim that it enables them to concentrate on the bigger picture, weigh factors in terms of significance during assessment, and connect to students’ lives outside of PE. We discuss the potential consequences ofthe teachers’ policy enactments in terms of the backwash of the reform. On the one hand, the reform results in reduced transparency and a risk that certain areas of knowledge may be marginalised. On the other hand, the study suggests that teachers’ autonomy with respect to assessment increases. This autonomy, which ideally leads to valid holistic assessments and fair grades, is tailored to the students’ conditions and what they see as meaningful knowledge in life outside ofschool.

This thesis is about ball games as content within physical education teacher education (PETE) and physical education (PE) in a Swedish context. The focus of the study is on how knowledge related to ball games becomes legitimate in PETE, and how this knowledge is transformed and used in pedagogic practice in PE. This thesis consists of four articles investigating these questions in different educational contexts. In Article I, I examine how PE teacher educators define legitimate ball games knowledge in PETE through the lens of Shulman’s theory on teachers’ knowledge. The findings suggest that PE teacher educators define legitimate knowledge as a combination of content knowledge related to participation in sports and pedagogical content knowledge related to learning for all pupils. In Article II-IV the focus is on how knowledge is recontextualised in transitions from PETE to PE and the analysis is done through Bernstein’s theoretical framework. The findings in Article II show that the pre-service teachers’ pedagogic discourse of ball games involved substantial changes and transformations in the transition from university to school placement. These changes can be explained by recontextualising rules that either constrain or enable the use of knowledge. The findings in Article III indicate that beginning teachers had different aims in their teaching, some aimed to develop pupil’s understanding of games while others used ball games as a means to develop movement or cooperative capabilities. The teachers employed different strategies to handle challenges of the cultural influence from competitive sport. The findings of Article IV suggest that beginning teachers consider knowledge from PETE useful and relevant and were able to reproduce this knowledge in PE practice. They were also missing important knowledge, and their teaching was affected by contextual factors. The thesis contributes to existing scholarship with knowledge about the recontextualisation process in which the pedagogic discourse of ball games is constructed within PETE and transformed and reproduced into PE practice.

Background: Various forms and types of knowledge have enjoyed legitimacy in physical education (PE) since sports techniques became the orienting idea for PE in economically advanced countries in the mid-twentieth century. The forms and types of knowledge granted legitimacy at any one moment are dependent on a range of socio-discursive factors. In this paper, we consider ball games knowledge within the Swedish PE teacher education context in the 2020s.

Purpose: The specific aim of the paper is to generate insights into how ball games experts within PE teacher education define legitimate ball games knowledge. Our proposition is that by examining the ways these experts define ball games knowledge, physical education teacher educators may develop more nuanced understandings of how and why knowledge comes to be seen as legitimate.

Methods: In order to conceptualize experts' knowledge of ball games, Shulman's concepts of content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) were employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two teacher educators who specialized in ball games education from three different PETE institutions in Sweden (n = 6). The interviews focused on the PETE educators' understandings of ball games and how they prepared preservice teachers to teach ball games.

Findings: The PETE educators defined ball games CK as: (1) understanding of games as a cultural phenomenon, (2) tactical understanding of games, and (3) embodied understanding of how to play ball games. The PETE educators defined ball games PCK as: (1) using ball games to meet different curricular goals, (2) focusing on tactical understanding with a small number of concepts, (3) adapting teaching so that all pupils are included, and (4) managing competition.

Conclusions: Four issues related to the legitimacy of this knowledge are raised. The issues concern the ways in which: (1) a complementary sport discourse is permeated by educational discourse to achieve legitimacy; (2) CK and PCK are designed to achieve legitimacy with different stakeholders; (3) public health discourse is not used to develop legitimacy for ball games knowledge, and (4) historical factors continue to affect experts' understandings of ball games. The central conclusion drawn from the investigation is that ball games experts engage in a complex process of discursive negotiation when defining the knowledge with which they work.

Scholars have long questioned the impact of teacher education programmes. Persistent claims are that pre-service teachers have fixed ideas about pedagogy when they enter training and that they become enculturated once in the profession. Within physical education (PE), similar concerns have been raised with respect to ball games. Research suggests that pre-service PE teachers typically have substantial experience of ball sports and find it difficult to implement non-traditional ball games pedagogies when they enter schools. Against this background, the aim of the study is to explore how pre-service teachers recontextualise ball games as pedagogic discourse in their transitions from university to school placement. Bernstein's pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse are employed as the theoretical framework. The investigation focuses on a Swedish PETE programme and the participants are six pre-service teachers. The empirical material consists of written assessments, observations of the pre-service teachers' lessons during school placements, and individual interviews. Findings suggest that the pedagogic discourse of ball games at the university was aligned with course learning outcomes and included the need to communicate goals, adapt and modify teaching, and combine different approaches. The pedagogic discourse at school placement involved traditional ball games, minimal curriculum references, progression in two or three lessons, and inclusive, enjoyable lessons. Factors that regulated the discourse were: familiarity with the pupils; the conceptualizing of inclusive teaching; norms regarding ball games in PE; expectations of the pre-service teachers; and the framing of ball games education in PETE. Recontextualising rules highlight challenges in transitions related to ball games.