Students’ narrative action in social science teaching in Swedish upper secondary school: Limitations and openings

In this article, we undertake a narrative analysis of social science teaching in Swedish upper secondary school as a case study. In doing so, we want to stress the need to pay attention to the contextual and situated limits and openings of the conceivable repertoire of legitimate stories of social science in the Swedish context and its related research. The students’ attempts at sense making and action in encounters with the subject matter content, approached in terms of emplotments, render visible to what extent and in what ways the students insert cultural narratives into the subject matter teaching repertoire through their own subject storytelling. Furthermore, it indicates the limits and openings of social science teaching as predetermined “truth telling”, that is, as already-established socio-political knowledge repertoires.

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 to renew society and students’ ways of acting and being in this storytelling. If meagre attention is provided to this interweaving, we argue that there is a danger that the renewal of society and of social science education will get lost, or at least disturbed, in an undesirable way.