‘I’m not a horse girl’. Social divisions in students’ narratives and the implications for inclusive physical education

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the complexity of post-modern societies has gained increasing attention. In terms of education, the attention involves focusing on how students experience inclusion and meaningful learning, regardless of their ethnic and/or socioeconomic background. These matters are particularly relevant in health and physical education (PE), where research has illuminated that some students experience exclusion and/or marginalisation due to these social divisions. Nonetheless, further research is warranted to investigate the complex interplay between family, socioeconomic background and inclusion in the PE context. An intersectional perspective that considers social divisions and narratives of location as proposed by Anthias underpins the study. Two questions are addressed: 1) How are differences in the students’ ethnic, gendered, and social class background relevant to the narratives they bring to PE? and 2) How does the students’ narratives influence their meaning-making of PE? The setting of the study was two multi-ethnic co-ed PE classes at a public school located in Oslo, Norway. Data was generated from semi-structured interviews with 17 of the students. The analysis highlighted important differences concerning the number and types of activities the students were involved in during leisure, including the role sports and physical activity played in their families. Ethnic and cultural background seemed to be the most influential social divisions, however, further analysis revealed how divisions such as class and gender intersected in the students’ narratives. With regard to meaning-making of PE, the students, regardless of background, positioned themselves as potential young bodies at risk, placing PE within pathological health discourses. Moreover, the narratives suggested that a taken for grantedness regarding content and knowledge taught in PE might prevent some students from making meaningful links between PE and their everyday life. In conclusion, this study reflects on the implications of the insights concerning PE practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• health discourses
• sports
• physical activity
• ethnicity
• socioeconomic background
• intersectionality
• social divisions

Introduction

In recent years, the complexity of post-modern societies, marked by migration, ethnic diversity and growing social inequality, has gained increasing attention (Azzarito et al., 2017). In Norway, approximately 10% of children live in families experiencing prolonged poverty, and the majority of these children are from ethnic minority families (Bufdir, 2018). As public schools are the main provider of education in Norway¹, they are considered important arenas both for integration and for neutralising social differences (Imsen, 2006). Research suggests, however, that children’s backgrounds at the intersection of family, ethnicity and social class remain the most significant determinant of social exclusion in schools (Bakken & Elstad, 2012).

The interplay between family background, socioeconomic status and inclusion in education is particularly relevant in health and physical education (PE). Research demonstrates how Western health discourses contain homogenous images of healthiness that exclude ‘non-normative’ ways of being (Azzarito, 2010; Azzarito et al., 2017). Several scholars emphasise that discourses related to ‘health and fitness’ and ‘sport and performance’ in PE appear to favour Whiteness, middle ‘classness’, ableism and certain kinds of masculinity and femininity (Azzarito, 2010; Azzarito et al., 2017; Evans & Davies, 2010; Hay & lisahunter, 2006; Hill, 2015; Hunter, 2004; Walseth et al., 2017). These biases affect teachers’ and students’ views on who is considered a good or able student in PE (Aasland et al., 2020; Hunter, 2004; Wright & Burrows, 2006).

Scholars also highlight how prevailing health discourses in many Western societies construct health and healthy lifestyle choices as individual responsibilities (Dagkas & Quarmby, 2012; Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014; Vincent & Ball, 2007; Wiltshire, et al., 2019; Wright & Burrows, 2004). In such contexts, children’s development of their physical capital may become largely dependent on their family’s resources and investments in leisure time activities (Dagkas & Quarmby, 2012). Most Norwegian children are active in sports clubs, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Recent studies, however, show that the influence of socioeconomic background is increasing (Andersen & Bakken, 2018) and that these patterns are reproduced in school PE (Dowling, 2016).

There is a tendency that research into youths’ experiences of sport, physical activity and PE remains focused on only one aspect of difference (Dowling, 2015; Evans, 2014; Strandbu et al., 2019; Stride & Flintoff, 2017). The current article adds to a growing body of research drawing on intersectional scholarship, investigating how social divisions, such as ethnicity, social class and gender, intersect to affect students’ PE experiences (e.g. Hill, 2015; Stride & Flintoff, 2017; Thorjussen & Sisjord, 2020; Walseth, 2015; With-Nielsen & Pfister, 2011). Though studies indicate that youths’ participation in physical culture is socially patterned, there are still few studies that trace these patterns between different contexts. This article, therefore, aims to consider the dynamics between families, leisure and school PE and the implications they might have for inclusive practice in the subject. Two questions are addressed: 1) How are differences in the students’ ethnic, gendered and social class backgrounds relevant to the narratives that they bring to PE; and 2) How do the students’ narratives influence their meaning-making in PE? An intersectional perspective that considers social divisions and narratives of location as proposed by Anthias (2005, 2006) underpins the study.

Patterns of socialisation into physical culture

To understand how social inequality might be (re)produced in or through PE, it is important to view PE as part of physical culture in societies at large. In the following sections, I elaborate on three areas of research² relevant to the current study: 1) how social determinants relate to physical activity and sports participation; 2) socialisation and the role of the family; and 3) cultural aspects of sports and leisure.

Several studies have focused on how socioeconomic and/or ethnic background can influence students’ involvement in sports, physical activity and school PE (Andersen & Bakken, 2018; Griffiths et al., 2020; Strandbu et al., 2019; Vandermeerschen et al., 2016; Wells et al., 2017). ‘Sport for All’ policies now exist in many countries, and participation in sport clubs is viewed by politicians as important for children and young people to develop healthy habits, build friendships or as a form of education (Andersen & Bakken, 2018; Vandermeerschen et al., 2016). Despite the good intentions of governments throughout Europe and elsewhere, studies have shown that cultural and economic barriers exist to sports participation. Children growing up in economically disadvantaged (often ethnically mixed) environments or in low-income families participate less in organised sport/club sport than children growing up in families with more resources (Griffiths et al., 2020; Martins et al., 2018; Strandbu et al., 2019). Concerning PE, these disparities are significant as there appear to be positive correlation between sport participation, and enjoyment and learning in PE (Erdvik, 2020; Martins et al., 2018; Säfvenbom et al., 2015).

Many studies illuminating the relationship between social determinants and youth participation in sport and physical activity use quantitative design. They do not provide sufficient insight on the mechanism behind the relationships (Griffiths et al., 2020). To gain a deeper and more complex understanding of how social class and ethnicity might influence young people’s experiences in sports and physical activity, many studies have considered the role of the family (Dagkas & Quarmby, 2012; Dowling, 2015; Eriksen & Stefansen, 2021; Ferry & Lund, 2018; Haycock & Smith, 2014; Pang et al., 2015; Pot et al., 2016; Stefansen et al., 2018; Strandbu et al., 2019; Strandbu et al., 2020; Stride & Flintoff, 2017; Stuij, 2015; Wheeler & Green, 2019). They have considered, for example, how families shape and influence their children’s healthy habits (Pot et al., 2016; Strandbu et al., 2020), how parents invest in their children’s physical capital (Dowling, 2015; Lareau, 2011; Stefansen et al., 2018; Vincent & Ball, 2007; Wheeler & Green, 2019) and how families reproduce power relations dependent on ethnicity, social class and gender (Pang et al., 2015; Stride et al., 2018; Stride & Flintoff, 2017). Focusing on how social class is associated with socialisation in(to) sport and physical culture, Stuij (2015) showed that higher-class parents played a more important part in developing (and controlling) their children’s exercise behaviours than lower-class parents, whose children were more influenced by extended family members, peers and PE teachers. Dowling (2015, 2016) investigated the interplay between family, social class and PE among adolescents and their parents in Norway, demonstrating that PE was perceived as a subject for which students were rewarded for physical capital gained outside the school setting. Hence, to acquire the skills needed to perform well in PE, the students depended on parental support and investment in their leisure activities (Dowling, 2015). With Dowling’s study as an exception, there are few studies looking at how family background and sport participation outside of school is of relevance for students’ meaning-making in PE.

A final area of research relevant to how social inequality can be (re)produced in or through PE is the cultural aspects of sports and physical activity. Bourdieu’s investigation of cultural reproduction has inspired numerous studies (e.g. Schmitt et al., 2020; Stempel, 2020; Wiltshire et al., 2019). In the Norwegian context, PE is strongly connected to the national culture of outdoor life. Dowling and Flintoff (2018, 2019) argue that the Norwegian PE curriculum constructs Norwegian physical culture as an unarticulated neutral background and that teachers’ pedagogy tends to centre on activities that are taken for granted and positioned unproblematically as part of ‘our’ shared knowledge (Flintoff & Dowling, 2019, p. 10). While outdoor education may constitute an important part of a curriculum, such as by teaching students about safety in nature and including relatively gender-neutral activities, children do not participate in PE in uniform ways due to differences in cultural and/or economic capital and previous experiences and knowledge (Broch, 2018; Gurholt et al., 2020).

As this review of previous research illuminates, children and young people’s background is of importance for their access to, as well as for the meanings constructed when taking part in physical culture. More in-depth studies are however needed to explore the complex interplay between social class, ethnicity and other markers of differences in young peoples’ lives (Strandbu et al., 2019). I will now elaborate on the study’s theoretical perspective, which provides insights into how to investigate these aspects taking an intersectional approach.

Social divisions and narratives of location

The concept of social class remains a subject of considerable debate within sociological thought. On the one hand, social class is understood in terms of material inequality, with individuals categorised in relation to their access to and possession of capital (economic resources, property or qualification/education) (Dahlgren & Lundgren, 2010). On the other hand, theories illuminate how class divisions are shaped by cultural and symbolic resources. According to Anthias (2005), neither of these approaches fully grasps how social inequality in postmodern societies is shaped by complex, contextual and often contradictory processes. Some attempts have been made to reframe an understanding of social inequality in ways that do not simply add social categories, such as gender, ethnicity or race, to that of social class; one such attempt is the framework of translocational positionality proposed by Anthias (2005, 2006).

Central in Anthias’ approach to studying and understanding social inequality is the term social division. Social divisions include all dimensions of social life in which people are classified according to (collective) attributions, such as gender, ethnicity and class, and treated differently based on these attributes. These social divisions should not be treated as social groups with fixed characteristics but as ‘emergent features of social relations’ (Anthias, 2005, p. 27) and outcomes of group-making processes. They can, therefore, be considered in terms of both hierarchies and boundaries, creating belonging and otherness.

Rather than presuming which categories are important within different contexts, it is important to turn our foci towards factors that may lead to exclusion or marginalisation in certain situations, practices and processes. Inclusion in PE or physical culture in society more generally must be viewed in light of how people position themselves concerning these practices. Relevant here is the narrative of location, which Anthias (2005) understands as the stories (albeit fragmented and at times contradictory) about one’s identity and which groups one is associated with and/or participates in, as well as which stories one can tell and to which audience. Anthias (2005) argues that stories of belonging are triggered precisely by people experiencing places, spaces or identities as unavailable.

Social divisions should be considered as analytically distinct from yet constitutive of each other. This urges us to consider both what unites and differentiates people within a social division. One way of investigating differences within is to consider interconnecting divisions, such as how ‘classes are always gendered and racialised or how gender is always classed and racialised and so on’ (Anthias, 2005, p. 33). For instance, in PE, studies have shown that social hierarchies among girls or boys are (re)produced at the intersection of gender and religion or ethnicity (Hill, 2015; Walseth, 2015; With-Nielsen & Pfister, 2011).

Viewing social divisions, such as social class, in a relational manner reveals them to be practices rather than positions (Levine-Rasky, 2011). While engaging in leisure activities can create belonging, some activities require capital for participation, and participation can in itself generate capital. To understand the complex matter of how resources are unequally distributed within a context, Anthias (2006) draws on Bourdieu’s concept of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. Bourdieu (1984) presented material/financial resources, as well as cultural goods, such as education and social resources, in terms of beneficial networks. He also referred to a fifth form of capital, physical capital, which emphasises his view of the body as a possessor of power and status (Bourdieu, 1978). The body can also be stigmatised according to gender, skin colour or disabilities (Anthias, 2005). The concept of positionality involves recognising how people perform identification in practice as well as paying attention to the conditions that enable these practices (Anthias, 2008). In this article, I investigate the students’ narratives of location by examining which physical practices they engage in and their positionality within these practices.

Methodology

The data in this article are drawn from a larger study sample that aimed to explore secondary school (grades 8–10) students’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion in PE in a multi-ethnic school context. The study was based on fieldwork that involved participant observation of 56 PE lessons in two classes, and semi-structured interviews with 17 students (ages 14–16 years old) in a public school in Oslo, Norway. In this article, I mainly draw on findings generated from the interviews. Students were selected for interviews according to a generic purposive sampling technique (Bryman, 2016). The interviews were conducted during school hours in a separate room in the school building. They lasted for 50–80 min and were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The author conducted both the interviews and the fieldwork.

About one-third of the students were bilingual, with South Asian, Middle Eastern, West and East African or North American backgrounds. All students except one were born and raised in Norway. Two students had one ethnic Norwegian parent and one from an immigrant background (mixed). Their narratives aligned closely with the students from ethnic minority backgrounds. The residential area around the school consists of mixed housing, indicating socioeconomic differences among the students. Indicators of social class were based on interview questions concerning the parents’ education and (un)employment, as well as the family’s housing situation and holiday and leisure habits, as shown in Table 1. Other questions relevant to this article centred on learning and reflections regarding the purpose and content of PE, such as ‘What do you think is the reason for having PE at school?’, ‘What do you think your teacher wants you to learn in PE?’ and ‘Is there anything that you have learned in PE that you’ve made use of or think you will make use of later in life?’

Table 1. Overview of participants.

	Socioeconomic background	Minority/majority background	Family structure	Parental occupation	Housing	Gender
Mohammed	Middle class	Minority	Two parents	Salesman/saleswoman, self-employed	Row house	M
Azam	Middle class	Minority	Divorced/ shared parental responsibility	Engineers	Flat	M
Simon	Middle class	Minority	Two parents	Nurse (mother)/health personnel (father)	Row house	M
Daniel	Middle class	Minority	Two parents	Nurses	Row house	M
Nathan	Middle class	Mixed	Divorced/ shared parental responsibility	Webdesigner (mother)/activity leader (father)	Row house	M
Jorge	Upper middle class	Mixed	Two parents	Teacher (mother)/media business (father)	Villa	M
Sondre	Upper middle class	Majority	Two parents	Academics/researchers	Villa	M
Hans	Upper middle class	Majority	Two parents	Researcher (mother)/teacher (father)	Villa	M
Layla	Working class	Minority	Single parent	Taxi owner (father)	Flat	F
Eimaan	Working class/middle class	Minority	Two parents	Accountatnt (mother)/chef (canteen) (father)	Row house	F
Hana	Working class	Minority	Single parent	Unemplyed (mother)	Flat	F
Chun	Working class/middle class	Minority (3 years in Norway)	Two parents	Restaurant owners	Flat	F
Anna	Working class	Majority	Two parents	Office worker (mother)/crane operator (father)	Flat	F
Birgit	Working class	Majority	Single parent	Electrician (father)	Flat	F
Tonje	Middle class	Majority	Two parents	Assistant doctor (mother)/technical position (father)	Flat	F
Randi	Working class	Majority	Two parents	Incapacitated for work (mother)/electrician (father)	Flat	F
Guri	Middle class/upper middle class	Majority	Two parents	Unknown position (mother)/leadership position (father)	Villa	F

M, male; F, female

In line with the national curriculum, the PE lessons contained a broad spectrum of activities, with an emphasis on football, field hockey, volleyball and basketball, as well as track and field, orienteering, gymnastics, dance and strength and endurance training. The students received 60 min of PE each week. An additional 30 min of theoretical PE lessons per week were provided in some periods of the school year.

This project is approved by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (project 35845). Permission to conduct research was granted by the school management. Written informed consent was obtained from the teachers and parents, and oral consent was obtained from the students interviewed. The consent statement specified that all data would be handled with confidentiality and informed the parties of the possibility of withdrawing from the study at any time. All names of persons are pseudonyms.

Analysis

A thematic narrative analysis was applied to the data (Riessman, 2008). Each interview was analysed to develop detailed biographical accounts of each student. The accounts served as the basis for understanding each students’ positioning in terms of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender and other divisions that appeared relevant in the students’ narratives. Particular attention was paid to the use of pronouns (e.g. I, we, us, they and them) and how students made distinctions between groups of students/people, reflecting social categories. The analysis of the accounts led to the development of Table 1 and to the narratives of four students, presented in the ‘findings and discussion’ section. The four students – Anna, Sondre, Layla and Azam – were selected as they represented different ethnic, gendered and class positions. Moreover, their narratives articulated well the (power) relations between the students concerning these differences regarding sport and physical activity.

During the analysis, I combined Anthias’s concept of narratives with the concept of linkage (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). According to Gubrium and Holstein (2009), people are narrative agents that creates meaning through linking different items of experience in their stories, e.g. how students made sense of PE (purpose and learning), considering their different backgrounds. According to Gubrium and Holstein (2009), while the narrator puts the linkages into place, the particulars can be ‘linked together in different ways’ (p. 57). The selection of narratives as well as the way that the narratives have been analysed and presented in the current article highlights certain lines of difference between ethnic Norwegian students and students from ethnic minority backgrounds. Hence, there is a danger of (re)producing unequal power relations, such as by depicting students with ethnic minority or majority backgrounds as homogenous groups (Thorjussen & Wilhelmsen, 2020). Aware of the ethical entanglements, I believe that this study through an intersectional lens sheds light on some aspects that need to be addressed to better meet the needs of diverse groups of learners.

Findings and discussion

To provide insight into the students’ complex narratives of location, this section starts with the narratives of four students: Anna, Sondre, Layla and Azam. The narratives are followed by a discussion of how the students’ diverse backgrounds are embedded in their experiences of participating in physical culture. The second part investigates how the students’ backgrounds influence their meaning-making in PE. Finally, I reflect on the implications of the insights concerning an inclusive PE practice.

Anna

I am busy during my leisure time. I play handball four times a week, including matches. I’ve played since first grade, and I really enjoy it. I also coach second and third graders. What more should I say? I ride a horse in my spare time. There is an equestrian centre nearby where I look after a horse once or twice a week. I stay active as much as I can; it’s important to me. I don’t want to just lie down on the sofa all day. If I’m bored, I might ask Mum and Dad if they want to join me for a run. If they are not busy, we go together, but you know my dad’s working night shift and my mum sometimes work late, and I also have two younger siblings that need to be accompanied to their training.

In PE, you can develop further in sports. For instance, I think it’s very fun having tests. Like me, who plays handball, I like to challenge myself. I think PE is mostly for those who don’t do any other sport alongside school, to keep the students active during the week. Like I do have a very tight schedule, so then PE becomes like a lot to me, but I do give everything, despite this.

Sondre

When I get home, I eat, do schoolwork, then I go to the activities. I do have activities every afternoon. I do orienteering three to four times a week and some running and scouting. Before starting middle school, I used to go cross-country skiing a lot as well, together with my little brother. In the weekends, I often go hiking with the scout group. I think we are a pretty active family; my father has come along as coach several times, both in orienteering and skiing. At home, we talk a lot about what kind of food we eat and such, exercising, stuff like that around the dinner table. In holidays, we go hiking in the mountains, and every year, we go on biking holidays abroad.

I think having PE is quite enjoyable; you get to learn new sports, and you get to move a bit compared to the rest of the school day. We’ve also had orienteering in PE; it was easy, and I served as kind of an assistant coach, showing the others in my class how to do it. I think learning how to stay healthy through an active lifestyle is one of the reasons we have PE, like the government wants us to be active, so we get better public health. I think that is also what our teacher’s concern is: learning how to exercise and that we’re still active when we’re like 20 years old. For those that haven’t learned it from their parents, it’s probably okay that they do teach this stuff in school then since it’s sort of a little like general knowledge.

Layla

I came new to this school in the eighth grade. You know, there are horses in the area, so I had to walk down that hill [to the school], and then I saw a lot of horses. I think I started crying on the way down. I was just like ‘What school am I attending? I’m not like that … like such a horse girl!’ During leisure time, I dance at a studio, some ballet, but mostly jazz dance. In primary, I used to do hip hop a lot. I did try cheerleading for one year but quit because I got injured, and then I could not do stunts or a cartwheel. I tried to start again when I had recovered, but the sport didn’t really suit me. I got bored and started exercising at a fitness studio instead. A friend of mine helped me create an exercise programme. My brother is studying to be a Personal Trainer; he wants to be like a body builder or something. He exercises all the time. If we exercise together? Ha ha, no, he doesn’t really want to exercise with me.

In PE, the teacher wants us to learn ball games and techniques that might be useful. We’ve had jazz ballet once in PE. It was great fun, but we had a dance instructor, and the teacher only got to see a video of us afterwards. I think the grading was really unfair. I think we should learn more in PE, like how to exercise outside of PE, too. Maybe you need to have such recovery days; maybe the teacher should say something like ‘Since you’ve had a very hard PE class now, you should not go training afterwards’. We do not get to know anything about what we should do or not, how it can affect the body; it cannot always be positive to exercise. Why we have PE? I think to ensure we’re in good shape and to motivate those that are not active so that they start exercising beyond school since it’s good for one’s health. It’s not good being lazy, just lying at home.

Azam

I play football. I just quit playing for a team some months ago, but I still play for fun with friends occasionally, and I plan to start exercising at a fitness studio. I have realised eventually that most of my friends are not real Norwegians. I do feel that I match them better, the environment or what they like to do during leisure time. Like most of those at school with another background [than Norwegian] play football. There are many Norwegians playing football too, but they might do other stuff as well, like skiing or swimming. But like amongst us or like those not having an ethnic Norwegian background, then it is almost only Norwegian football they do, and if they don’t play football, it’s hardly ever anything else. My parents got a bit upset when I quit club football, and they do not like the idea of me going to the gym because they consider football to be more social. But if there are no other sports I want to do, they will let me start because it is better than sitting at home.

I enjoy PE because I like to be active. I think we have a good PE teacher. He is always well prepared, and he wants us to learn different sport techniques. I particularly like when we play football in PE. Although the others in my class are at a lower level than me, it doesn’t matter as long as they are keen on playing. I do not like when its volleyball or dance or long jump. I’m not that good in those activities. If I don’t like what we are doing, I am not always concentrated and would rather joke a bit with my friend. I’d like if we could learn martial arts in PE, how to protect oneself. I think Sondre knows that; he has attended a course. Sometimes we have theoretical PE lessons, learning about diet, for instance, what contains vitamins A and B and what those vitamins do to your body. I think that’s nice to learn.

Narratives of location

I do have a very tight schedule … 

The narratives highlighted that ethnicity and culture were perhaps the most important division in the students’ narratives with regard to their engagement in physical culture. This is figuratively captured in how Azam makes sense of how students of ethnic minority and majority backgrounds are positioned differently with respect to sports and physical activities (Anthias, 2005). In line with his description, these differences were evinced in Sondre’s and Anna’s busy schedules of organised activities, as well as in other ethnic Norwegian students’ accounts of their everyday lives (Lareau, 2011; Quarmby & Dagkas, 2015). Moreover, in the ethnic Norwegian students’ narratives, outdoor life, sports and physical activities frequently appeared to be a joint ‘family affair’ (Dowling, 2015; Haycock & Smith, 2014). Like Sondre, some had parents involved in coaching, others exercised together with family members, as Anna did. Thus, indicating emergent patterns of parents’ sports involvement in Western societies (Stefansen et al., 2018; Wheeler & Green, 2019). Asked what they do on weekends and holidays, many students described a physically active family-centred leisure, frequently related to outdoor-life activities (Dowling, 2015; Haycock & Smith, 2014; Stefansen et al., 2018; Strandbu et al., 2020).

The students from ethnic minority backgrounds were also physically active in their leisure time, as the cases of Azam and Layla show. However, the data indicated that the students from minority backgrounds participated in fewer activities and exercised more on their own or with their peers than the students from majority backgrounds. While their parents encourage them, they are not actively involved in their children’s activities through coaching or exercising together. Layla’s narrative also exemplifies a tendency for students from minority backgrounds to be involved in sports less common in the Norwegian context, such as cheerleading or cricket (Stride & Flintoff, 2017). Outdoor-life activities, in the sense of being something the students’ practiced independently from school, were almost absent in the narratives of students from minority backgrounds.

In Annette Lareau’s renowned book Unequal childhoods (2011), the middle-class logic of child rearing is captured in the concept of concerted cultivation. The author reveals a pattern of middle-class parents fostering their children through organised activities and monitored experiences. She argues that although differences exist within classes at the intersection of race or gender, the largest gaps were across classes. In the current study, a parallel argument could be made regarding the overall importance of ethnicity and culture. This finding is significant and has implications for how to better facilitate inclusive PE, as I shall return to. However, this kind of analysis is what Choo and Ferree (2010) describe as a search for which division has the ‘biggest effect’, in which one ends up describing static locations and misses considering the processes involved. Departing from the complexity of the four students’ narratives, the following sections provide a more in-depth discussion of the different ways social divisions intersected in in the students’ lives (Strandbu et al., 2019).

 … those at school with another background [than Norwegian] play football … 

Azam’s narrative highlights an ethnic dimension of socialisation in sports and physical activity, as well as how this dimension constructs social divisions between an ‘us’ and ‘the ethnic other’ within the peer group. Azam illustrates how belonging to different ethnic groups is articulated through ideas about culture – that is, through people’s everyday practices and lifestyles (Anthias, 2005, p. 28). In his narrative, ethnicity intersects with gender and to some extent class, constructing and performing a youth cultural location distinguished from how he perceives his peers of majority background to be. While Azam and many other students from minority backgrounds pointed to the importance of peer relations regarding engagement in physical culture, students from majority backgrounds seemed to be more influenced by their families. This finding contrasts with previous studies that indicate that the influence of an extended network of peers, coaches and PE teachers versus the influence of family is associated with class background (Stuij, 2015). Azam’s wish to join a fitness studio and learn martial arts could also be interpreted as gender-related, as both activities can be seen to allow for the development of certain kinds of masculinities (Hill, 2015). In terms of social class, his reason for not being involved in more sports does not seem to stem from a lack of opportunities, as his parents seemed to encourage him to be involved in organised sport. This could be understood as his parents’ performing a kind of cultivation through monitoring his sport related experiences (Lareau, 2011; Wheeler & Green, 2019). They do not allow him to train at a fitness studio nor, apparently, to learn martial arts; rather, they encourage him to continue to play for a club to secure a certain, perhaps more ‘Norwegian’, social network (Eriksen & Stefansen, 2021). On this point, Azam’s narrative differed significantly from those of many other students from minority background. In other narratives, social class seemed to intersect with ethnicity more in line with previous research, whereby physical activity was encouraged in the family due to the perceived health benefits (e.g. ‘not get fat’ or ‘to stay in shape’) ‘rather than for the intrinsic enjoyment of sport’ (Haycock & Smith, 2014, p. 296) and only to the extent that it did not conflict with schoolwork (Pang et al., 2015).

I’m not like that … like such a horse girl!

Engaging in outdoor life was central to Sondre’s narrative, as well as to the narratives of most students from ethnic majority backgrounds. Many spoke of enjoying activities such as swimming, hiking, orienteering, cycling, horse riding and cross-country skiing together with parents and/or siblings. Outdoor life constitutes a significant part of Norwegian cultural heritage and is politically considered an ideal and important arena for integration, as well as for children and young people to develop healthy habits (Broch, 2018; Gurholt et al., 2020). Nonetheless, it is also an arena coded by unwritten cultural rules based on hegemonic Whiteness (Broch, 2018; Dowling & Flintoff, 2018). While both Layla and Azam make references to outdoor-life activities, it is in the sense of what they are not (a horse girl) or what the ‘ethnic others’ are doing (skiing or swimming). According to Anthias (2005, p. 43), narratives of locations are often structured in terms of a refusal of certain attributions rather than a clear articulation of what one is. In such a case, narrative becomes action. Through collective imaginaries of ‘the other’ based on leisure activities, Layla and Azam position themselves in the social order of outdoor life (Anthias, 2005). In Layla’s narrative, this positionality is also highly gendered.

Within-group differences – that is, how ethnic divisions appeared to be classed or gendered (Anthias, 2005) – are illuminated through Anna’s and Sondre’s narratives. Anna’s outdoor life constituted horse care and small trips with her parents in the local environment, which supports previous findings on gendered patterns of outdoor life (Gurholt et al., 2020). Including Anna, three girls from a majority background recounted riding and/or attending riding camps during holidays. Interestingly, despite horse riding being an activity associated with high socioeconomic status (Vaage, 2006), the girls’ involvement crossed class-background boundaries. Sondre’s narrative, however, pointed to how outdoor life can be an arena that requires substantial economic resources through what might be considered enrichment activities (Vincent & Ball, 2007). Both cases illustrated, in one way or another, how outdoor life habits are performed and reproduced within the family (Gurholt et al., 2020).

Meaning-making in PE

It’s not good being lazy, just lying at home … 

Despite the differences in the students’ everyday lives regarding participation in physical activities and the position sport had in their families, some similarities appeared in how the students understood the purpose of PE. As reflected in the four narratives, all the students seemed to place PE within a health and fitness discourse (Aasland et al., 2020; Walseth et al., 2017). Some students explicitly expressed what can be described as a pathological health perspective (Quennerstedt, 2019; Schenker, 2018) and pedagogies oriented towards reducing certain risks (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014; Wright & Burrows, 2004). For instance, ‘so we don’t stuff ourselves on MacDonald’s all day’, ‘that people do not get lazy’ and ‘risk getting diabetes’. The four narratives also reflected a tendency to view PE instrumentally, as a means for academic attainment and a ‘break from a sedentary school day’ (Dowling, 2015, p. 787). Thus, irrespective of background, the students appeared to position themselves as subjects of official health initiatives and policies, placing themselves as potential young bodies at risk (Azzarito, 2010; Macdonald et al., 2009). The predominance of these perspectives on PE can be problematic. For instance, during the interview a few of the girls with ethnic minority background, even if they were active in their spare time, referred to themselves as ‘unathletic’ or ‘not sporty’ in the PE context. This might indicate that these girls considered themselves not fitting dominant perceptions of healthy female bodies that are often racialised in favour of the White body (Azzarito et al., 2017). Contrastingly, Anna, Sondre, Layla and Azam, and a few others performed narrative work by ‘making sense of and articulating their placement’ (Anthias, 2005, p. 43) as not being in the ‘real target group’ of PE. PE was viewed as a subject for those considered lazy or not involved in any sport outside school. Their narratives then might be interpreted as acts of resistance against a rather worrying picture being drawn of youth and sedentary behaviours in contemporary societies (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014; Quarmby & Dagkas, 2015).

 … he wants us to learn different sport techniques … 

In contrast with previous research (Dowling, 2015; Larsson & Karlefors, 2015), most students in this study associated PE with learning. However, a pattern across the interviews was that the students from ethnic majority backgrounds emphasised learning about healthy behaviour (e.g. how to exercise to stay active outside of school), while many students from minority backgrounds, including Azam and Layla, seemed to think that teaching basic sport techniques was the teacher’s main concern. One interpretation of this difference may relate to students’ narratives beyond PE. As the students from minority backgrounds were involved in fewer sports during leisure periods, PE might stand out as an arena for their introduction to different sports. Anna’s and Sondre’s narratives provide insights that suggest that having the right type of physical capital can, in turn, generate more capital (Dowling, 2015; Hay & lisahunter, 2006; Hunter, 2004), through being a resource for classmates or by drawing on one’s physical surplus for self-development. PE, therefore, becomes a space where some students receive confirmation of their physical narratives or, as indicated by Azam and Layla, encounter activities where they feel disadvantaged or treated unfairly. Arguably, social divisions are (re)produced not only between those who actively engage in sport during leisure time and those who do not (Erdvik, 2020; Säfvenbom et al., 2015) but also between those involved in sports acknowledged in PE, and those involved in sports or activities rarely included in PE lessons (Stride & Flintoff, 2017; Thorjussen & Sisjord, 2020), as well as those involved in a broad spectrum of sports and those ‘only playing football’.

 … it’s sort of a little like general knowledge.

Although outdoor life was central to the narratives of many ethnic Norwegian students and is an important part of the Norwegian PE curriculum, the narratives only evinced a few direct links between the two contexts. One link was Sondre’s experience of being a ‘kind of an assistant coach’ during orienteering in PE. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that outdoor activities, as part of family leisure time, appeared to play an important, informal pedagogical role in many ethnic Norwegian students’ everyday lives (Flintoff & Dowling, 2019; Quarmby & Dagkas, 2015).

A few students from minority backgrounds, including Layla and Azam, expressed a wish to learn about diet and exercise in PE. Paradoxically, while Sondre stresses that PE is for those who do not have parents providing what he considers to be general knowledge, it appears that Layla, who would fit that description, did not find that the PE teachers met her needs on these matters. A similar experience of disconnection between PE and students of low socioeconomic backgrounds’ everyday life was found by Martins and colleagues (2018). Yet, Layla imagines PE differently (Oliver & Kirk, 2017), as a subject that offers more knowledge on how to make sense of one context in light of the other (Anthias, 2005). She also indicates some negative consequences to exercising. In doing so, she breaks significantly with prevailing narratives that regard adolescent girls from ethnic minority backgrounds as lazy or uninterested in sports (Stride et al., 2018; Walseth, 2015; With-Nielsen & Pfister, 2011). She, and others, are active girls who request to be taken seriously and provided with opportunities to learn how to manoeuvre their (already) active physical lifestyles.

Implications

The current study provides insights on how students encounter PE with different narratives regarding engagement in physical culture. Despite considerable variations in the students’ positionalities – that is, how social class, ethnicity and gender intersected and influenced their identification with, as well as conditioning for taking part in, various activities, there were similarities in their meaning-making in PE. All placed the subject within a health and fitness discourse. PE was perceived to be a subject to prevent health-related risks among the students, who had a common understanding of themselves as ‘at risk’ (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014; Wright & Burrows, 2004). Hence, this study emphasises that PE practitioners play an important role in counteracting pathological perspectives (Quennerstedt, 2019; Schenker, 2018).

The narratives also indicated that the students from ethnic minority backgrounds considered PE as an arena for introduction to different sports to a greater extent than majority-background students. This insight must, however, be handled with caution as the data simultaneously suggested that this is a narrative constructed in a subject built on the majority-background students’ premises through tacit knowledge (Dowling & Flintoff, 2018; Thorjussen & Sisjord, 2020). Previous research emphasises how (Norwegian) schools appear to be best suited to White, middle-class students. Hence, it is important to identify how such students’ majority position might mark ‘them out either for distinction (skilled performance [in a broad spectrum of sports]) and/or disposition for participation – the markers of “ability” in PE’ (Evans & Davies, 2010, p. 780). In turn, these biases might create expectations concerning (physical) abilities in the field of sport and PE, causing those not displaying the ‘right’ forms of embodiment to be viewed as ‘lacking’. According to Evans and Davies (2010), this may be part of the reason why PE fails in its mission to influence social inequalities in ‘post-school participation patterns’ (p. 765).

To this latter point, I argue that more critical perspectives are needed to guide PE practice (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014). Teachers need to a larger extent to acknowledge students’ narratives beyond PE and to better assist young people in making meaningful linkages between items of experience related to physical culture in their lives. In this way, PE teachers can encourage more students to imagine how PE could be different while attempting to meet their different needs and desires through practice (Oliver & Kirk, 2017; Thorjussen & Sisjord, 2020).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the students and teachers who participated in the study. I am also grateful for constructive comments from the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Professor Mari Kristin Sisjord for her useful comments on an early version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In Norway, 96.4 percent of students attend public schools (Statistics Norway, 2016).

2 As the paper touches upon several fields of research the word limit do not allow for an exhaustive literature review.