Beyond the riverbank: the opportunities of adopting a strengths-based approach to health within Norwegian PETE

In this article, I adopt a strengths-based salutogenic approach to explore Norwegian physical education teacher educators’ language-use, with the dual aim to acquire insights into their construal of PE as a subject supporting pupils living good lives and point out how these discursive currents enable the young individuals of PE access to the discourse of being healthy. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s notion of epistemic and deontic modality as analytical tools, four discourses of PE are described, interpreted and discussed. The discourses display PE as a space where the pupils are (1) to be acknowledged as bodily subjects, (2) to feel safe and good, (3) to interact socially, and (4) to participate in valuable movement experiences. In the discussion, I point to how the teacher educator’s construals by denoting subjective and varied processes of learning and growth, free PE from engaging with health as a singular noun. On the contrary, PE is rather construed as an educational space sensitive to the pupils lived experiences and social surroundings – a view that captures the depth of Antonovsky’s metaphor of the river of life. The study thus illustrates how asking salutogenic questions in PETE, could take us beyond the riverbank and help shift the focus from the pupil’s ability to swim towards acknowledging them as learners already being in the water, engaging in what Quennerstedt describes as diverse processes of healthying. I close the article by suggesting that adopting a strengths-based approach to health within PETE, could help teacher educators, academics, and future PE teachers to navigate the ambiguous and often complex nature of health by recognising sociocultural realities in which the pupils are immersed in.