Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

Taking on a narrative analysis of social studies teaching carried out in Swedish upper secondary schools (Blennow & Olson, in press), the aim of the presentation is revealed: to stress the need to pay (increased) attention to the contextual and situated limits and openings of the conceivable repertoire of legitimate stories of social studies in the Swedish context and its related research. In focusing on students' unique situated and collective interweaving of their 'own' experiences with established cultural and political knowledge repertoires, we wish to make a case for the potential involved in this storytelling: a renewal of society and of students’ ways of acting and being in society. If meagre attention is provided to this interweaving, we argue that there is a danger that this renewal of society as well as of social studies education will get lost, or at least disturbed, in an undesirable way. The narrative analysis on which the presentation is based was based on is a) field notes from classroom observations of every social science lesson for approximately six weeks in each class, in a medium-sized city in southern Sweden, and b) 36 transcribed interviews with social studies teachers and students. The theoretical-analytical grid in the analysis was the sociologist Czarniawska’s (2004) narrative theory, where the students’ storytelling attempts at sense making and action in encounters with the subject matter content was approached in terms of emplotments. In the analysis, Frank's (2015) ethnographic advice, to be widely inclusive at this stage, ‘cultivating reflexive uncertainty about which stories will eventually be most useful’ (2015, p. 39), was followed. Through the analysis, the 'repertoire of legitimate stories' about society in social studies teaching and students' attempts at sense making and action through their own social studies storytelling was rendered visible. The analysis rendered visible to what extent and in what ways the students insert cultural narratives into the subject matter teaching repertoire through their own subject storytelling. Out of the analysis, the transformational potential of these encounters, i.e., the emplotments, concerning society and students' ways of acting and being in society. Furthermore, it indicates the limits and openings of social studies teaching itself as a matter of predetermined ‘truth telling’, that is, as already-established socio-political knowledge repertoires.