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Social studies education in schools in the Nordic context consists of four subject areas: social science, history, geography 1 and religious education. Which of these subject areas are included in the mandatory social studies subjects varies between the Nordic countries. Each of these subject areas, and all of them together, are aimed at offering children and young people space for subject specific growth of different kinds. Social studies address a historically established group of school subjects in the Nordic educational context that can provide students ground for being and acting with other people, in society and in the world. This special issue of Acta Didactica Norden focuses on the potential of social studies to offer such possibilities, in and outside of school. Inspired by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (2006, 2018), it addresses a specific encounter – that between the student(s) and the social studies subjects in school. Arendt was concerned with the significance of the situated and the experiential for a rich and qualified understanding of the world and society. This concern addresses the potential of social studies to offer a rich understanding of work, culture and the political, the three realms that she pointed out as key for being and acting in the world (2018). Arendt’s concerns are further linked with the importance of gaining insight into the processes, content and aims of any educational situation, from the point of view of students’ possibility for growth, as well as from the point of view of the teachers’ ways of (re)presenting the ‘old world’ to them (2006). Taking on these Arendtian concerns, the special issue highlights the social studies subjects, their teaching and related research. We aim to discern and point out central themes, conditions and concerns related to the question of what kinds of potentials for the students becoming, being and acting in society and the world that are or could be made possible in or through social studies education.

Our goal with this special issue is to make a research-oriented overview of significant ongoing social studies research in the Nordic countries related to the special issues’ concern; that is, research based on various theoretical, empirical and methodological frameworks focusing on the student as a subject in the encounter with the social studies subjects’ varying content matters and types of knowledge. With Deng (2020) and Biesta (2017, 2022), two established edu-cational theorists from contrasting traditions (Anglo-Saxon curriculum tradition and continental philosophical tradition respectively), these differences can be related t o diverse positions regarding the relationship to knowledge and the relationship to education. Regarding the relationship to knowledge, there are three or four different “perceptions of knowledge” to which the articles can be related (see Deng & Luke, 2008; Wahlström, 2020). And these perceptions of knowledge can, in addition, be tentatively put in relation to different “orientations to [social studies, authors’ comm.] education” (Biesta, 2017, 2022). Together, the two con-ceptualisations – perceptions of knowledge and orientations to [social studies] education – may provide a way of rendering visible the inborn field of tension in the social studies didactic research in the special issue. Given the diversity of approaches to social studies education in school, our aim is to contribute to advancing the social studies didactic field of knowledge in a way that enables continued Nordic knowledge accumulation and dialogue in the field.The scientific motives underpinning this aim are several, and stem from various perspectives. Social studies didactic research in the Nordic context has long pointed to the need for deepened and qualified empirical insight about students as knowledgeable, growing persons, critical beings and skilled indi-viduals in and for democracy and citizenship, into how these abilities and opportunities relate to students’ perspectives, and further how they come through in the social studies classroom. There is also a need for empirical as well as theoretical exploration of how agency and existential aspects linked with Nordic social studies teaching, knowledge and understanding contribute to enlarged thinking, agency, student engagement and responsibility, qualified belief, moral, and value-based judgment in society, in their own lives, and in relation to the educational situation of social studies subject teaching. Insight is also needed abouy of the different ways in which these processes can matter in elementary and secondary students’ lives in and outside of school, in society and in the world (Ammert et al., 2022; Bergström & Ekström, 2015; Björkgren et al., 2019; Bladh et al., 2018; Bråten & Skeie, 2020; Børhaug, 2023; Christensen et al., 2017; Christensen & Mathé, in press; Christensen, 2011; Gullberg, 2014; Iversen, 2019; Jägerskog et al., 2022; Larsson & Ledman, 2023; Nordgren, 2023; Osbeck et al., 2023; Sandahl et al., 2022; Skjæveland, 2020; Solhaug et al., 2020).