As a compulsory school subject, Health and Physical Education (HPE) has a mandate, responsibility, and potential to contribute to lifelong physical activity, health and well-being. The World Summit on HPE (1999) proposed that HPE is potentially the most effective educative forum for providing the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and understanding for lifelong health and well-being (Doll-Tepper & Scoretz, 2001). However, we need to go beyond assuming that educating individuals to take responsibility for their own health is sufficient. Complex and layered forces have an impact on the health and well-being of individuals and we must address these forces at societal level. In a world of increasing diversity, with many established democracies consumed by capitalist individualism and protectionist ideals, a focus on equity and social justice is relevant (Azzarito et al., 2017). Increasing levels of ethnic, religious, cultural and sexual diversity, require us in the teaching profession to develop responses to inequality and injustice. For instance, with the recent increase in immigrants and refugees the EU is currently facing one of its biggest challenges. Conflicts in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have meant that in 2015 160,000 people applied for asylum in Sweden, of which 70,000 were children (in Norway, 32,000 people including 5,000 children). A key concern for Sweden, Norway and the EU is how best to promote and ensure positive health outcomes for its increasingly multi-cultural population. The pandemic of Covid-19 is also a shared global concern, and highlights the urgency for a solid knowledge base among citizens, a well-equipped health care system, reduced socio-economic differences and thereby increased social justice, better to meet similar future threats.EDUHEALTH 2.0 is a collaborative research project that will examine the role school HPE can play in contributing to better and more equitable health outcomes for the people of the EU and beyond. To facilitate this process, the project will build on the solid foundation of the recently completed project on social justice teaching practices in HPE across Sweden, Norway and New Zealand, EDUHEALTH (Gerdin et al., 2019, 2020; Linnér et al., 2020; Mordal Moen et al., 2019; Philpot et al., 2020, 2021; Schenker et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2020) which will inform the theoretical and methodological base underpinning this new iteration of the project. However, this new project will expand on the previous project by including two new contexts (South Africa and Australia) and added data collection methods: analysis of HPE curriculum documents; students’ experiences of inclusion and social justice; and doing action research with teachers on further developing teaching practices for social justice. In this paper will outline and discuss these new contexts and data collection methods as well as present some initial findings.

For long, there has been extensive advocacy for social justice pedagogies in HPE but few articulations and concrete examples of the enactment of such pedagogies in HPE teaching practice. The EDUHEALTH 2.0 project will therefore employ an innovative ‘bottom-up’ approach to understand how HPE teachers teach for equity and social justice in their classrooms and how the students experience and perceive such teaching practices. Data collected from HPE teaching practices and teachers’ and students’ experiences/perceptions of these will draw on the principles of Critical Incident Technique (CIT) methodology (Tripp, 2012).However, an important part of understanding these practices involves an analysis of broader political and societal factors that shape those practices, and in particular how the HPE curriculum, as being the product of those political and societal agendas, dictates what HPE teaching practice should involve. Thus, this proposed project will also conduct an analysis of HPE curricula in each country. Analysis of the HPE curriculum documents will consist of two parts. The first part is to analyse and understand the framing and potential HPE practice; characteristics of the HPE concepts are defined, the semantic relations between the concepts are sorted out, and systems of concepts are created (Zimmermann & Sternefeld 2013).  The second part is to analyse the curricula documents by using linguistic tools from systemic-functional grammar (Butt et al 2012). Findings from the linguistic and grammar analysis will be framed by the broader political and societal factors in each country.Our ‘three-pronged’ approach in this project will additionally involve doing action-research with HPE teachers to better our understanding of how social justice pedagogies can be further developed and implemented in practice across different contexts. The action-research with the HPE teachers will involve us as researchers actively working with the participant teachers in further developing and refining social justice pedagogies in HPE practice. To do so, we will draw on ‘Participatory Action-Research’ (PAR) (Alfrey & O’Connor, 2020).The knowledge generated through this action-research will, together with the data collected from the teachers and students as well as the HPE curriculum analyses, provide a form of triangulation of the data and hence not only represents different sets of data but also strengthens the validity, credibility, trustworthiness and generalisability of the findings (Bryman, 2016). Data from HPE curriculum analyses, CIT observations and interviews and action-research will be analysed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013).

The findings and outcomes of this research project will inform educational policy, curriculum makers and the creation of intervention strategies intended to assist HPE teachers in the EU and beyond to further refine and develop their practices to become more inclusive and engaging, thus helping to contribute to healthier citizens and societies.