Lately, there has been much debate within Swedish physical education teacher education (PETE) about ‘what a physical education teacher should know' (Backman and Larsson, 2014), or put differently, what content knowledge is useful to teachers in the school subject physical education and health (PEH). This debate is related to a discussion about the purpose of PEH in schools and, importantly, what the role of movement is in PEH. In particular, this discussion has revolved around what students are supposed to learn from participating in PEH (Nyberg and Larsson, 2014).
Recent research has shown that the dominating PEH cultures do not emphasize systematic work with specific learning objects such as for example learning movements (Larsson and Karlefors, 2015). One possible reason for this is that PEH teachers lack the necessary content knowledge. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explore PEH teachers' content knowledge of students' capability to move. This issue will be explored through analyzing what teachers have to say about moving students in interviews, in part while viewing video recorded PEH lessons.
The empirical data of this study are interviews of eight PEH teachers taken from a larger research project of which the overarching purpose was to explore action in the school subject PEH in Sweden, in particular in relation to issues of knowledge, teaching and learning.
Shulman's (2004) theorizing on content knowledge was used to encompass the focus of analysis, namely PEH teachers' subject matter content knowledge regarding the capability to move. Further, a phenomenographic analysis was conducted in order to investigate the teachers' different ways of knowing (or conceptualizing or experiencing) capability to move.
The findings show that among the teachers there were five different ways of knowing capability to move which provide a picture of the teachers' total subject matter content knowledge. Additionally, this multifaceted picture of what capability to move can mean for the teachers contributes, we will argue, to a deeper and differentiated understanding of the phenomenon capability to move in the context of education. Further, we will be able to discuss how teachers' different ways of knowing capability to move may influence the teaching and learning movements and capability to move in PEH.
2015.