Organized and voluntary sport and the school subject physical education have historically been tightly interwoven in Norway. In this study, organized and voluntary sport and physical education are considered as two fields as described by Bourdieu, in the search for answering the research question: How can physical education and sport be understood as overlapping and distinctive fields? In order to answer the question, we analysed the two last steering documents in each field; the curriculum in physical education from 2015 and 2020, and the sport policy documents of 2015 and 2019 (the latter referred to as a long-term plan) from The Norwegian Confederation of Sports. The two main findings of the analysis are, first, that the historical relationship where sport is the dominant part is still identifiable in the contemporary steering documents. The overlaps between the fields can be explained by several and interdependent causes: one is that many of the same actors operate in both fields – sports people are physical education teachers and physical education teacher educators; moreover, the establishment of the physical education field was initiated by powerful people in the sport field. In that respect, it has been a mode of doxa that physical education to a large degree has resembled sport. However, second, we identified an emancipation process in the field of physical education; there are formulations in the steering documents supported by other research, indicating heterodoxic discussions within the physical education field, leading to change. All in all, we identified two fields with various levels of maturity.publishedVersio
