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The aim of this study was to explore physical education teacher education students’ meaning-making of participating in lessons – in this case gymnastics and basketball – based on their aesthetic judgements, expressed in written stories. A transactional approach, drawing on the work of John Dewey, was used in the study and the empirical data was generated through observations and collection of students’ written stories. A practical epistemology analysis was used in order to explore the students’ meaning-making in-depth. The purposes that the students ascribed to participating in the lessons were to develop both as athletes and as teachers. When analysing the stories, the importance of being a competent athlete emerged as the main purpose of participating in the lessons, and the majority of the students never included the purpose of developing as a teacher in their stories at all. By making the competent athlete the centre of their participation, other positions of participation were excluded or marginalized. However, even if all the students’ stories contribute to the collective appropriation of the type, the majority did not include the projected, ideal type in all respects. In their stories, it was clear that many of the students expressed a tension between doing gymnastics or basketball within the context of competitive sport and doing the same activities within the context of physical education teacher education. Even if the students did not fulfil this awareness of contrasting ideals by undoing ‘the competent athlete’ completely, many of them did highlight the conflict.

Dance has been a part of the physical education (PE) curriculum in several countries for a long time. In spite of this, studies demonstrate that the position of dance in the subject of PE is contested and that little time is devoted to dance. The overall aim of this article is to examine the position of dance as a pedagogical discourse in Swedish steering documents over time. The empirical material consists of five Swedish curricula for PE over a period of 50 years . Discourse analysis is used to identify organised systems of meaning, including privileged and prioritised values. Our theoretical frame of reference draws on Bernstein's concept of codes. Three different knowledge areas within dance are found in the text material: 'dance as cultural preserver', 'dance as bodily exercise' and 'dance as expression'. Three pedagogical discourses emerge from these knowledge areas: an identity formation discourse, a public health discourse and an aesthetic discourse. The identity formation discourse in earlier curricula focuses on the perpetuation of Swedish and Nordic cultural traditions, while in later curricula, it emphasises the construction of a broader multicultural identity formation related to the understanding of different cultures. The public health discourse constitutes a prioritised understanding of dance as physical training related to a healthy lifestyle. The aesthetic discourse, which has the weakest position over time, represents the valuing of embodied experiences and feelings expressed through movements. This discourse is closely linked to the construction of gender. Over time, a new performance code came to surpass the former competence code in the steering documents. The performance code positions dance in PE as mainly a physical activity with little artistic or aesthetic value. The pedagogical discourse of dance remains within a highly disciplinary framework of social control.

Many young people in Sweden stop participating in club sports during their teens, but some continue. Drawing on a longitudinal study, the aim of this article is to highlight some of the characteristics of teenagers who continue with club sports and to discuss the relation between club-sport participation and social and cultural conditions, with the help of Bourdieu's theoretical framework. This is done by studying the characteristics of teenagers who do club sports at 13 and 16 years of age and comparing them with non-participants at the age of 16. In focus are girls and boys (n ¼ 289) who participated in both 2004 and 2007 by answering self-reported questionnaires on sporting activity in their leisure time, their academic success and the social position of their families. The conclusion is that young people who possess specific dispositions and certain assets in terms of a habitus with a taste for sport and a cultural capital remain more often in club sports.