Challenging dominating ideologies in the classroom: The construction of educational knowledge through educational texts

Education constitutes an arena of intense discussions, conflicts and struggles about what should be conceived as legitimate knowledge in the classroom (Bernstein, 1990). Through curricular documents politicians seek to control what should be selected and appropriated as educational knowledge (ibid.). However, textbooks as well as other educational texts also influence on the construction of educational knowledge, and they may be seen as powerful documents that embody, reinforce or reconstructs discourses (Apple & Christian-Schmidt, 1999; Selander & Skjelbred, 2004). This means that teachers and teacher educators become central agents for making decisions about course content through their selection of educational texts (Devis-Devis, Molina-Alventosa, Peiró-Velert & Kirk, 2011). In that regard, this presentation will focus attention on Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) in Denmark as a case in point (Svendsen & Svendsen, 2014) in order to illustrate how a sector with sporting interests through educational texts contribute to the construction of educational knowledge and the reinforcement of dominating discourses in Danish PETE. On this basis the presentation aims to exemplify the analytical scrutiny of educational texts that should be encouraged among teacher training teachers and teachers in general in order to help them make reflective decisions about course content and thus act as agents for change and challengers of dominating ideologies.