Since the 1980s, research advocacy for inclusion and social justice in school PEH and physical education teacher education (PETE) has continued to thrive in many countries including the United States (Bain, 1990), Canada (Robinson & Randall, 2016), Australia (Tinning, 2012), New Zealand (Ovens & Tinning, 2009) and also in Sweden (Larsson, et al, 2018). Unfortunately, the increased advocacy for inclusion and social justice in PEH related to issues such as gender, ethnicity and (dis)ability has not been matched with examples of how PEH teachers could actually teach for inclusion and social justice, that is, what teachers could do in their classrooms, and for whom social justice is sought (Gerdin et al., 2018). Amongst the extant literature base of advocacy for social justice pedagogies in PEH, there is far less literature that specifically addresses the ways in which teachers enact social justice pedagogies in their own practice (Tinning, 2016). In one of the few PEH classroom accounts, Oliver and Kirk (2015) identified four critical elements that they believe need to be present in order to assist girls to identify, name and negotiate barriers to their engagements with PEH and participation in physically active lifestyles. They suggest that the development of a pedagogical model for working with girls in PEH built on the four critical elements of activist research as a way of breaking the reproduction cycle and improve the current situation for girls in PEH. One other example is Fitzpatrick’s (2013) study of life at a high school in South Auckland, New Zealand. Using critical ethnography as an analytic, she shadowed one of the participating PE teachers, Dan, who was ‘passionate about critical pedagogy’ (p. 80). Dan’s “classes provided a rare example of critical pedagogy in practice” (p. 99). Fitzpatrick (2013) described the key tenets of Dan’s critical approach and success as; “building the environment, deconstructing power, playfulness, studying critical topics, and embodying criticality” (pp. 193-206). Finally, the findings and outcomes of an international research project on social justice in PEH across New Zealand, Sweden and Norway named EDUHEALTH that called on PEH teacher observations and post observation critical incident interviews, identified how broader curricular and school policy interact to facilitate the enactment of social justice pedagogies in PEH. These pedagogies include building good relationships, teaching for social cohesion and explicitly teaching about and acting on social inequities (Gerdin et al., 2021). Notwithstanding the importance of these research findings, there still exists a paucity of studies that focuses on the pupils’ perspectives of these issues. This study therefore aims to explore the pupils’ experiences of inclusion and social justice in Swedish PEH by addressing the following research questions: (i) How do PEH practices address inclusion and social justice? (ii) How may PEH practices contribute to greater inclusion and social justice for all pupils? Knowledge generated through this study can help assist PEH teachers in Sweden and beyond to refine and develop their practices to become more inclusive and engaging for all pupils, thus helping contribute to social justice outcomes and more pupils maintaining sport and physical activity as an important part of well-being and health for the rest of their lives. This paper will present some findings from the pilot study carried out in 2021 and initial findings from the main data collection conducted so far in 2022.

The data collection is based on critical incident technique (CIT) methodology (Tripp, 2012). ‘Critical incidents’ in the context of this study will focus on PEH practices that foregrounded issues of inclusion and social justice.  Observations: The CIT classroom observations will focus on identifying critical incidents that appear to be addressing issues of social justice based on an observational template generated from previous research on teaching for social justice. Although this observational template help guide the observation, the template focuses on rich descriptions of practice rather than having observations being overly dictated by observational categories (Tripp, 2012). Interviews: The interviews are semi-structured (Bryman, 2016) and also guided by principles of CIT methodology (Tripp, 2012) as well as stimulated-recall interviews (Lyle, 2003). To interrogate the pupils’ experiences of the critical incidents identified during the observations individual interviews are also conducted using an interview guide which involves a combination of open-ended questions designed to enable the pupils to suggest incidents for inclusion and social justice and specific questions designed to afford the pupils an opportunity to explicate their experiences of inclusive and socially just PEH practice. Reflective texts: The reflective texts consist of an open, written questionnaire that has been designed to encourage pupils to reflect on their experiences of inclusion (exclusion) and (in) equality during PEH lessons. The reflective texts are used to explore critical incidents that pupils perceived as significant in their PEH lessons and to examine their perceptions of inclusion and socially just teaching methods. The participants include pupils from three different upper-secondary schools (age 16-19) located in the south of Sweden with diversity when it comes geographical location, school demographics and socio-economic status. In total, data in the form of observations and reflective texts is currently being collected from three different PEH classes at each school (total of nine PEH classes). Furthermore, it is estimated that 5-6 pupils from each class will participate in the individual interviews (total of 30-36 pupils) later in the year. In order to analyse the data generated from the observations, interviews and reflective texts, a six-phase thematic analysis approach (Braun and Clarke, 2013) consisting of familiarisation with the data, initial and advanced coding, identifying and naming themes and reporting findings will be used to seek out central themes that are important to the research questions. The analysis will draw on theories of pedagogies for social justice (Freire, 1970) and transformative pedagogy (Tinning, 2016).

The initial findings will report on the participating pupils’ experiences of pedagogies for social justice in HPE as generated through questionnaires, observations, interviews and reflective texts. Tentative themes suggest that the pupils perceive pedagogies for social justice as related to: the use of non-traditional spaces and content; a focus on building relationships, and lessons that are framed by clear aims and purposes. In addition, some pupils talk about the positive aspects of online / Zoom teaching caused by effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic where either themselves and/or other pupils are more engaged and participating in the lessons than before. They believe that this is because they can participate in PEH in / from their “own places” and that teachers seem to be clearer about the purpose and learning objectives of these online / Zoom lessons compared to regular lessons in the gym or on the sports field.