Games, Physical Activities, and Outdoor Excursions as Powerful Knowledge in Swedish School-Age Educare

The aim of this collaborative project with Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) teachers was to understand and develop teaching, focusing on games, physical activities, and outdoor excursions. Children's insufficient physical activity is a societal problem, and because most Swedish students age 6 to 9 are enrolled in SAEC, this can be a critical educational arena. The concept of powerful knowledge is used to emphasize knowledge that can help students handle contemporary and future challenges, operationalized here by using a typology of roles students are invited to enter by doing activities. The findings show that some roles are more frequent than others, often connected to voluntariness, free time, and teachers' relational approach. The findings also show that in the transformation of teaching, the how question seem more of a dilemma to the SAEC teachers than the what and why questions. We argue that SAEC teaching offers great possibilities to combine different student roles in a way that is more likely to connect knowledge about games, physical activities, and outdoor excursions to their own or others' lives and society. At the same time, teachers experience great challenges in how to teach in a way that meets the specific goals of SAEC education.