The Swedish PEH context

In Sweden, PEH is mandatory from elementary to upper secondary school and centres around three main areas: movement, health and life habits, and friluftsliv Footnote ³ and outdoor activities. In public debate, PEH is often legitimised in terms of instrumental values for humans (e.g., preventing obesity, increasing physical activity, enhancing children’s concentration) rather than having (educational) values of its own (Capel & Blair, Reference Capel and Blair2020). This favouring of the human body can be traced back to Swedish PEH’s origin in the Ling-gymnastics and later evolvement in close connection to (natural) science subjects such as sports physiology and sports medicine (Kirk, Reference Kirk2010). Friluftsliv has a strong position in the Swedish PEH curricula (SNAE, 2011b, 2022), although it is weakly implemented in teaching practices (Backman, Reference Backman, Becker, Humberstone, Loynes and Schirp2018).

The PEH policy documents

In Table 1, we account for the policy documents included in our inquiry. We list their Swedish names, our translations into English, and the codes used to refer to them in the next section. Gy11 and Lgr22 are general for the Swedish school system, while the remaining documents are PEH-specific.

Table 1.

Selected physical education and health policy documents

Previous research

In many countries, including Sweden, environmental education (EE) is expected to take place in PEH through the acknowledged key learning area of outdoor education. However, teacher habituses, student expectations and dominating logics of performance are limiting factors for expressions of EE in PEH (Backman, Reference Backman, Becker, Humberstone, Loynes and Schirp2018). In this account, we treat EE and PEH as entangled by presenting a selection of literature that has explored them through relational perspectives. However, we begin with one difference between the wider fields of EE and PEH emerging as important in relation to the focus of our inquiry.

While posthumanist research focusing on the human/nature divide can be found in the field of PEH, it is more common in EE, where a reimagination of relationships between multiple bodies and a rethinking of how to do research are two prominent themes. Jukes (Reference Jukes2021) argued that thinking with a landscape and its different bodies might challenge human-centred knowledge. This could pose ethical questions around the values behind different choices and highlight possible implications for all bodies. Similarly, Jukes et al. (Reference Jukes, Stewart and Morse2022b) argued that a diffractive reading of landscapes and places could offer possibilities to analyse entanglements of a multitude of species, thereby decentring humans. Further, Mcphie and Clarke (Reference Mcphie and Clarke2015) and Morse (Reference Morse2021) explored imaginative walks through landscapes to create embodied experiences that challenge dominant narratives of colonialism and humanism.

In Sweden, Quennerstedt et al. (Reference Quennerstedt, Backman and Mikaels2024) investigated the relation between health and outdoor activities. By using Antonovsky’s metaphor of the swimmer in the river, they argued for a shift from a human-centred to a relational conception of health. Isaksson and Weldemariam (Reference Isaksson and Weldemariam2024) explored material-discursive entanglements of humans and nature in Swedish friluftsliv education. They concluded that learning with material-discursive phenomena, such as fire, water and sun, in unexpected encounters could serve as a foundation for troubling human-centredness in education, thereby fostering a humble approach to multiple bodies.

Regarding posthuman perspectives on environmental issues in policy studies, Blyth and Meiring (Reference Blyth and Meiring2018) explored the South African environmental curriculum in search for spaces where learning with others could be introduced. They argued that a posthumanist take on curriculum could attend to injustices and increase accountability for human doings now and in the future. Further, Clarke and Mcphie (Reference Clarke and Mcphie2016) applied a philosophy of becoming to curricula developments in Scotland and argued that this ontology could be useful in overcoming a disconnection to nature by promoting animistic ways of being. Similarly, Ross and Mannion (Reference Ross and Mannion2012) explored how the concept of dwelling could help understand curriculum making as a place-based lived experience. They argued that a dwelling perspective could point to how we “live in and through the world” (p. 311).

Recent PEH studies have critically explored human-centredness. Riley and Proctor (Reference Riley and Proctor2023) offered alternative stories of movement in PEH through a diffractive reading of physical literacy and poems. They challenged normalised standards for movement learning by arguing that “movement does relationships (…) opening the individual to a myriad of possibilities” (p. 663). Similarly, Larsson (Reference Larsson2023) argued that taking an agential realist perspective can enable movement pedagogies that go beyond the nature/culture divide. Taylor et al. (Reference Taylor, Wright and O’Flynn2019) studied PEH teachers’ experiences of the relationship between the environment and health, and found that “plants, water, ecosystems, bodies, objects and forces – all became significant in understanding how beliefs are formed around human and more-than human relationships” (p. 916).

Regarding policy studies in PEH, Olive and Enright (Reference Olive and Enright2021) challenged human/nature binaries in the Australian PEH curriculum through oceanic spatial conceptions (surfaces, depths, flows and currents). They concluded that thinking with human and environmental health as interconnected could open new possibilities to relate to formulations in the policy documents. Further, Riley and Proctor (Reference Riley and Proctor2022) mapped how they troubled the idea of emotional safety guidelines in Canadian PEH by taking up “sense-making with the world” (p. 269) and arguing that policy making is entangled in worldmaking. In a Swedish study, Mikaels (Reference Mikaels2019) showed that, throughout the PEH curriculum documents, nature was othered by being conceptualised as either an “‘outdoor gym’, ‘arena’, ’ resource’ or ‘location’” (p. 87).

This brief review notwithstanding, human-centredness is still rarely problematised in the intersection between PEH and EE, and especially in educational policy studies. This paper contributes to that research gap.

Theoretical framework

The basic premise of Karen Barad’s account of agential realism is that “existence is not an individual affair” (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. ix). Instead, what can be perceived as individuals, i.e. bounded entities (including humans), become meaningful as momentary materialisations within specific material arrangements, so called phenomena. These phenomena, or material-discursive practices, are constantly being reworked, and throughout Barad’s scholarship, attending to what exclusions and inclusions are enacted within the phenomena of which we are a part is central to questions of ethics and justice (Barad & Gandorfer, Reference Barad and Gandorfer2021).

Agential realism stresses performativity and how all doings enact certain materialisations, even activities we think of as representational, such as theorising, thinking, or talking (Barad, Reference Barad2007). This has ethical implications not only for research practices but also for education. Murris (Reference Murris2022) notes that teaching as a “world-making practice plays a role in constituting who and what comes to matter” (p. 29), and she stresses the need to do education differently to trouble the power-producing binaries that uphold an unjust relationship between humans and others. Brown et al. (Reference Brown, Siegel and Blom2020) also state that environmental education practices “need new and creative ways of relating with others (…) to promote socio-ecological justice” (p. 221). Other educational scholars have found agential realism useful for opening an explorative approach to teaching practices (Larsson, Reference Larsson2023), and for deconstructing boundaries between the fixed categories of research in the quest for socioecological justice (Riley, Reference Riley2023).

Since agential realism has been elaborated on for decades by Barad and other scholars, it is impossible to do justice to all its complexity within the scope of this paper. Therefore, we focus on two concepts that are central to our inquiry: agential cuts and diffraction.

Agential cuts

Agential cuts work to momentarily stabilise certain materialisations and make them distinguishable from others (Barad, Reference Barad2007). In other words, they enact boundaries within the relationality of phenomena, shaping bodies that emerge as meaningful (Bozalek, Reference Bozalek2022). Importantly though, agential cuts do not enact absolute separation, since the materiality on the other side of the cut is still encompassed in the same phenomenon (Barad, Reference Barad2014). Hence, bodies are entangled through the material-discursive practice from which they emerge, while at the same time distinguishable as bounded entities through agential cuts. This is how parts of the world make themselves intelligible to others, and as such there is no way to avoid agential cuts; they are embedded in the world’s becoming (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Moreover, there is no need for an intentional human in the enactment of agential cuts since they emerge within specific material arrangements of which humans can be a part or not (Murris, Reference Murris2022).

Agential cuts enact what Barad (Reference Barad2007) calls marks on bodies, which means that “bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world” (p. 176). These marks make it possible to trace the boundary-making practices through which bodies become meaningful (Barad, Reference Barad2012). As no entities exist independently of the phenomenon within which they are enacted, ethically responsible knowledge-making practices need to be “asking the prior questions” (Barad & Gandorfer, Reference Barad and Gandorfer2021, p. 18); that is, tracing how the investigated concepts or entities emerge. Importantly though, the subject asking these questions is also part of the specific material arrangements within which the tracing is carried out. Hence, there is no outside from which to conduct research (or education), and no isolated subject that can be solely accountable for ethical concerns. Instead, Barad (Reference Barad2012) suggests we rethink ethics as entangled, emerging within phenomena. In this ethics of entanglements, we must account for and respond to the marks that are enacted by agential cuts within the apparatus of which we are a part (Murris, Reference Murris2022).

Diffraction

The physical phenomenon of diffraction occurs when waves overlap to create intensities or cancel one another out. None of the waves are held still as a reference point for the others to be reflected against. Rather, all waves involved change as they break through one another. While reflection deals with mirroring and sameness, diffraction draws attention to patterns of difference and the effects of those patterns, i.e., the marks they leave on bodies (Barad, Reference Barad2007).

In a world that is iteratively becoming, the phenomenon of diffraction allows us to think with conceptualisations as they unfold. Building on the ideas of Donna Haraway, Barad (Reference Barad2007, Reference Barad2014) calls this a diffractive analysis, in which insights such as texts, events, or concepts are read through one another, rather than comparing or interpreting them, while attending to how they both affect and are affected. A diffractive analysis attends to patterns of differences that “…come to matter, how they matter and for whom” (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 90). These diffractive patterns enact agential cuts that include some bodies at the expense of others. Hence, a diffractive analysis is about responding to the agential cuts which we are a part of enacting, and it is thereby crucial for an ethics of entanglements since it traces the marks on bodies within a research apparatus or educational practice (Barad, Reference Barad2014).

The researchers

As researchers, we are entangled with that which we are exploring (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Riley (Reference Riley2023) notes that “stories of the past are never undone or erased but expanded upon through other stories that generate different trajectories of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling” (p. 40). Therefore, it matters that we brought into the research apparatus our embedded (and embodied) experiences of Swedish schooling, lives of outdoor and movement activities, research interests in PEH (Erik) and agential realism (Karin), middle-class Swedish childhoods in the late 20^th century, and much more. Importantly, we were already entangled with the Swedish school system as pupils, student teachers, teachers and now researchers. At the same time, our different research interests, and the fact that Erik trained as a PEH teacher while Karin did not, brought different questions to the research process and a sensitivity to different patterns. Ultimately, our entangled historicities were part of constituting what fragments had the possibility to glow (See below).

Doing the diffractive analysis

In agential realism, words are material-discursive phenomena, which troubles the way in which they are assumed to function as mediators between human minds and an external world (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Rather, language is performing, i.e., leaving marks on bodies through agential cuts, and a diffractive analysis aims at tracing those marks instead of establishing an accurate account of what words mean. Hence, we did not interpret the PEH policy documents to represent them, as would a discourse analysis or a thematic analysis. Rather, we explored what emerged in the material-discursive practice where policy documents, previous research and two researchers met. As with other postfoundational approaches to (post-)qualitative research, the intention underpinning our diffractive analysis was to decentre ourselves as active knowledge makers in favour of becoming with the research process (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Mazzei & Jackson, Reference Mazzei and Jackson2024).

In contrast to reflection as metaphorically returning to something frozen in time and space, our diffractive analysis worked in terms of re-turning, “as in turning it over and over again” (Barad, Reference Barad2014, p. 168). During three workshops, we read policy documents and fragments from previous research, discussed and noted the insights that were most prominent. For several months, we then iteratively re-turned (to) and re-read these texts, as well as a growing number of personal notes, each time attending to new insights that emerged. We were informed by MacLure’s (Reference McLure2013) notion of glow, in which the material begins to vibrate around certain points and “agency feels distributed and undecidable, as if we have chosen something that has chosen us” (p. 661). This glow made itself intelligible through for example emotional or bodily sensations, heightened energy in the room, or a phrase or event that persistently demanded our attention by leaving marks (such as underlined sentences, exclamation marks, or smileys) on the printed documents and in our notebooks. The points of glowing not only emerged in the encounter between us and the policy documents we read. Bodies such as paper tags, post-it notes and pencils were important, as were tables, Bosse the dog and door frames. In addition, buses, cars and buildings enabled us to meet, while computers, printers and internet connections aided access to previous research, PEH policy documents and the working files for this text. Due to the scope of this paper, we will stop our account of the research apparatus here, acknowledging that the material-discursive phenomena that made our inquiry possible could be traced through an infinite number of connections.Footnote ⁴

The marks from our re-turnings eventually materialised on post-it notes that were arranged and re-arranged in emergent patterns in response to the research questions (See Figure 1). These patterns then shifted through iterative collaboration in shared online files. Thus, we were responding to the agency of the research apparatus by “making new patterns of understanding-becoming” (Barad, Reference Barad2014, p. 187, ftn 63). The shifting of the patterns continued throughout the whole review process, and they were not sedimented until this paper was published.

Figure 1.

Emerging diffraction patterns. Photo: Karin Isaksson.

Pattern one: (human) bodies moving

This pattern evolved around movement, a core area of Swedish PEH. It first emerged as exclamation marks and comments around the following fragment from the printed policy documents:

In the encounter with this fragment, the human body emerged as a bounded entity in which movement capability was situated. We traced this to Ling gymnastics, where human bodies were technically drilled through calculated practices (Kirk, Reference Kirk2010), as well as to the subsequent physiological and biological focus in early research on movement, which has influenced PEH (Larsson, Reference Larsson, Bolling and Yttergren2013), effectively conceptualising the human body as a (moving) entity. Then, during the first workshop, something happened that troubled this notion:

In the ordinary event of fetching a glass of water, Erik’s body was entangled with a multitude of other bodies in the trajectory of the movement. In other words, the materiality of Erik’s body, Karin’s bag, Bosse the dog, tables, doors, a cupboard, a glass and a tap all emerged as meaningful to one another through agential cuts within the phenomenon of movement. Reading this through the policy fragment above intensified a tension between, on the one hand, conceptualising the human body as harbouring movement capabilities, and on the other hand, seeing movement as emergent from the relationality of different bodies. This tension was further diffracted through a fragment from Larsson’s (Reference Larsson2023) analysis of French hurdler Guy Drut:

After reading this, we re-turned (to) the policy documents and found that other fragments had begun to glow. For example:

These two fragments intensified the troubling of movement as situated in the human body. If the human body was indeed a bounded entity harbouring the capacity to move, then movement capabilities need not be contingent on situational factors. Moreover, certain places would not offer possibilities for more varied movements than elsewhere. In other words, the last two fragments would not make sense if the human body could move in isolation, regardless of any other materiality. Hence, by reading fragments from different parts of the policy documents through one another, and through insights from previous research, their meaning changed, and an opening was enacted to think with movement as a material-discursive phenomenon in which multiple bodies would be entangled. This insight intensified through more fragments from previous research:

The diffractive analysis now troubled pre-given boundaries, such that bodies emerged out of movement instead of movement being inherent in (human) bodies. In thinking with this insight, another fragment from the policy documents made itself intelligible:

Even though the concept of reflection in the fragment above could enact a distance between pupils and their environment, we suggest that thinking with the word relate through an “open, explorative and experimenting approach” can allow PEH practice to be enacted in ways where different materialities would be “open and always in the state of becoming” (Larsson, Reference Larsson2023, p. 12). This could open for questioning the separation of human bodies from other materialities and inspire pupils and teachers to become aware of the many ways in which bodies are entangled, movement being one of them.

Throughout this first diffraction pattern, the bounded human body became troubled when attention was directed towards the entanglements of bodies, and how they emerge through movement rather than to do movement. In the next pattern, two concepts from another core area of Swedish PEH, health and well-being, appear in a similar account.

Pattern two — Providing health?

This pattern did not emerge from an immense glow around one specific fragment; rather, it lingered in our discussions throughout all workshops and eventually materialised on post-it notes forming a pattern. Crucial for this pattern was Erik’s long engagement with PEH and his appreciation of its strong historical focus on human health. The pattern emerged from a fragment in which humans were conceptualised as having (or not having) health:

In contrast, nature emerged as a source of well-being but not as capable of having health or not:

When reading the two fragments above through one another, a conceptualisation of humans as different from other bodies, in terms of health and well-being, emerged. We further diffracted this difference through a fragment that glowed with several exclamation marks and comments:

With this fragment, the pattern further evolved into a conceptualisation of humans as active subjects with a passive world at their disposal. However, alongside this power to shape the world, a responsibility to care for it emerged through the reading of a fragment from Mikaels (Reference Mikaels2019) urging PEH practice to enable the fostering of “… [a]sense of stewardship for the natural world [and] nature caring individuals” (p. 85). We read this insight of care and responsibility through more fragments from the policy documents:

In addition to active subjects that could have health or not, humans were now conceptualised as caring and responsible subjects that could grant health and well-being to other bodies, including nature. However, thinking with this insight in turn opened for a conceptualisation of nature as capable of receiving, i.e., having, health. This insight was intensified through the reading of another fragment from previous research:

In the light of how the pattern had evolved, we re-turned (to) the fragment enacting nature as a source for health and well-being, asking ourselves if this nature could even be conceptualised as the active subject caring for humans by providing health and well-being? While lingering on this provoking question, the pattern still bothered us. The trajectory through which health and well-being were passed from humans to nature, by means of care and responsibility, had been reversed, but humans and nature were kept separate. We had been focused on asking questions about which one could give health to the other, effectively cutting them apart as separate entities. However, relationality made itself intelligible through another fragment from previous research:

This opened for health and well-being to become emergent within relations, thus mattering to all bodies. Instead of enacting human agency, phrases such as act responsibly towards themselves and others, and take into account different places and environments now emerged as openings for PEH practice to respond to Barad’s (Reference Barad2012) call for an ethics of entanglements, i.e., attending to how bodies come to matter and what marks they leave on other bodies through their agential cuts.

In this pattern, humans and nature were initially conceptualised as bounded entities which could have health (or not), but then emerged through relations within phenomena such as health, care and responsibility. In the final pattern, the locality of nature is troubled in a similar sense, resonating with the third key knowledge area in Swedish PEH: friluftsliv and outdoor activities.

Pattern three — Placing nature

This pattern was provoked by two small but glowing words.

When reading the words and and but in the fragments above, a difference between indoors and outdoors emerged, where certain outdoor places were conceptualised as nature and others as not-nature. The two words enacted agential cuts that left marks on a piece of paper (See Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Marks of indoors-outdoors-nature relations.

We read these marks through a note from the workshop preparations:

With this note, a conceptualisation emerged that resonated with nature “objectified as other” (Mikaels, Reference Mikaels2019, p. 87), and “a discrete, and transcendent, ‘nature’” (Clarke & Mcphie, Reference Clarke and Mcphie2016, p. 1005). We recognised this from our own lived experiences within the Scandinavian friluftsliv context, where a certain kind of (“genuine”) nature would be sought for activities such as hiking or canoeing, not settling for an urban park or an indoor paddling arena. This conceptualisation provoked questions:

We read these questions through the first two fragments from the policy documents, and the pattern glowed with Sandell’s (Reference Sandell, Sandell, Arnegård and Backman2011) question “where is nature?” (p. 126). This provoked further thoughts on the matter:

The pattern now materialised as marks on another piece of paper, in which the conceptualisations of places as indoors, outdoors and/or nature would be contingent on two entangled continuums (See Figure 3). Though the marks were still linear, not fully embracing the entangled messiness provoked by the questions above, indoors, outdoors and nature could only emerge as separate through agential cuts in the lines. In Figure 2, the cuts were already assumed, separating the three circles. However, in Figure 3, cuts would need to be made to separate indoors from outdoors and nature from not-nature. The boundary-making practices enacting these cuts could then be traced to trouble what counts as nature in PEH policy and practice. This tracing would potentially trouble the practices of othering, where nature becomes a resource to be exploited by humans (Jukes et al., Reference Jukes, Stewart and Morse2022b; Riley, Reference Riley2023).

Figure 3.

Marks of indoors-outdoors-nature continuum.

In this last pattern, the conceptualisation of nature evolved from mattering only in specific places to becoming entangled with different bodies (human or others) in troubling an exclusively outdoor nature. In the next section, we discuss what possible implications the three patterns of this section hold for PEH practice and research.