Pedagogization of elite sport in the school system: vested interests and dominant discourses

The Norwegian 2006 national curriculum reform introduced elite sport as an upper secondary school subject. The purpose of this innovation was twofold. Firstly, it was a political move to oppose the national growth of private elite sport schools. Secondly, the new elite sport curriculum formalizes opportunities for students taking academic programs in the school system to combine athletic ambitions and schooling. Acknowledging the multi-layered contexts of neoliberal education policy, the paper illuminates how vested interests in elite sport have strongly affected the elite sport pedagogic discourses in local comprehensive schools. The paper problematizes how the introduction of the elite sport national curriculum might have created some fundamental pedagogical and educational dilemmas rather than merely challenge the growth of private sports schools in the marketplace. The paper presents analyses of data collected from a purposeful sample of 3 local upper secondary schools’ website home pages. These schools are of particular interest as they have established partnerships with the national Olympic Committee’s High Performance Center (Olympiatoppen). By using the principle of decontextualization (Bernstein, 1990), my analyses reveal substantial transformations of the national curriculum texts. In contrast to the national curriculum with its emphasis on promoting knowledge, the schools discursively communicate how they provide elite sport opportunities that follow the national Olympic Committee High Performance Center’s philosophy for the development of young athletes.The paper problematizes how collaborations and partnerships with local schools have positioned the prestigious national Olympic Committee's High Performance Center as a recontextualizer of curricular knowledge (Bernstein, 1990. The structuring of pedagogic discourse. Volume IV. Class, codes and control. London: Routledge; 2000. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique (Rev. ed.). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield), and thus, affects the schools’ pedagogization (Singh, 2002. Pedagogising knowledge: Bernstein’s theory and pedagogic device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(4), 571–582) of elite sport. Underpinned by the principle of school choice in the neoliberal reform policy, the paper also highlights how vested national elite sport interests and discourses form part of current marketization processes in the school system.