Student texts in Physical Education and Health – a text ethnographic genre analysis

Abstract

The aim of the study is to identify and describe genres in Physical Education and Health in lower secondary school and show how these genres position students. The texts students write are analyzed in terms of what they do as part of the social action which they are a part of. In the study, genre is defined as conventionalized ways of interacting through texts. The data was collected through ethnographic methods, and the material consists of student texts, fieldnotes, video recordings from lessons along with interviews with a teacher and students. Subject didactic interdiscursivity is an important concept applied in the analysis, and so is affordance which is used to analyze to what degree the texts invite to certain types of actions while restricting others. Results show that the most prominent genres identified in the study deal with the measuring and training of the body. The students are mainly positioned physiologically according to their physical abilities, but the hybridity of the genres also allows for the positioning of students in relation to ideas from the humanities and social sciences.