Compulsory Physical Education: a contribution to pupils’ individual physical self-identity or a channel for social reproduction?

2008-2011

The Norwegian National Curriculum for Physical Education (PE) claims that physical activity and sport are important features of Norwegian culture, and are particularly important for individuals’ self-identities, not least with regard to one’s health (KD, 2005). 

 

Differentiated learning tasks in school PE lessons, which acknowledge the individual pupil’s ‘ability’ and ‘rate of learning’ (KFD, 1996), aim accordingly to nurture pupils’ physical competencies and identities in order to enable them to lead a physically active and healthy lifestyle.   Whilst many would agree that these are legitimate objectives for the subject (Dowling Næss, 1998; Green, 2000), this project nevertheless intends to problematise these goals because the policy fails to acknowledge the socio-cultural dimensions of ‘ability’ and ‘learning rates’, as well the socio-cultural dimensions of ‘physical activity’ and ‘sport’.   It will ask whether all pupils have equal access to achieve a positive sense of embodied self and become active participants in physical culture, or whether the ‘interchangeable pupil of school policy’ whose social class, gender and ethnic backgrounds are seemingly overlooked, is exposed to a discriminatory practice of embodied social reproduction?  Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu (1984), it will ask how is physical capital and status distributed within the practice of schools’ PE classes?