The aim of this three-year collaborative research project at four preschools in a southern Swedish municipality and in collaboration with an education researcher is the development of knowledge about social, environmental, and economic sustainability through participatory processes. Despite the fact that the preschool profession has been scientifically anchored for more than twenty-five years, access to which is granted exclusively through a three-year bachelor's degree, it is nigh on impossible for preschool teachers to meaningfully introduce new, complex and comprehensive areas of knowledge such as social, ecological and economic sustainability into their practice without adequate additional measures. However, one of the many ambiguities built into the Swedish preschool curriculum is the vaguely assumed maintenance and the vaguely anticipated further development of knowledge.

The ontological, epistemological and theoretical framework for this analytical part of the project HållUt2023-2026 draws on a collaborative approach that considers practitioners as knowledgeable experts, in other words, no analyses will be published without all project participants' contributions and consent. Due to problematic knowledge production experiences relating to curricular ambiguities in previous years, collaborative approaches address and resolve knowledge hierarchies from the outset. Ethical considerations are deeply embedded in the very ontology of the project. The academic researcher takes part on a genuinely equal footing, not in the role of an outsider who prescriptively dictates to preschool teachers what to do. The narrative analysis focuses on sense- and meaning-making on the part of the preschool teachers because one of the many curricular ambiguities is sustainability as a learning objective in itself as it cannot be implemented without first creating robust new knowledge and eventually arriving at new insights.

It is expected that this analysis will contribute towards knowledge production as a participatory process.

The aim of our Practice-and-Research project HållUt2023-2026 is to establish what constitutes sustainable leadership in preschool in relation to social, ecological, and economic sustainability according to the Swedish National Curriculum for Preschool (Lpfo2018). While we have been awarded a Sustainable Municipality prize, our knowledge and professional competencies require more effort regarding SDG17 to be able to support our youngest members of society. Acutely aware of the climate crisis and its catastrophic effects on societies, the development of robust pedagogies and sustainable leadership may help strengthen democracy, e.g. by inspiring resilience in children. Theories of professions, lifelong learning and sustainable leadership form part of our participatory action research framework. The Reflection-Action-Reflection-Action model (RARA) also draws on theories and science-based facts in a process-oriented manner. The RARA-model includes dialogue, diaries, videos and ongoing interview studies relating to our evolving understanding of social, ecological and economic development in preschools. Ethics in Participatory Action Research habitually exceed those stipulated by ethics committees and we have put safeguarding mechanisms into place to prevent any ethical shortcomings. We are participants and researching parties and participate as equal members. We strictly observe provisions in law and recommendations by social research ethics bodies, by regularly discussing any issues. The participating academic researcher is tasked with meticulously monitoring that all ethical considerations be taken seriously and swiftly dealt with.

By the end of 2026 we expect to: present a model for sustainable development and sustainable leadership, contribute towards practice-and-research based methods, offer knowledge-based professional development from inside preschools, vocalise clearly the importance of preschool teachers’ professional development relating to sustainable development, better protect children by adequately preparing them for the future.

Power in Education is a strange beast in many guises. As for guidance and leadership, let’s just say it’s complicated. Educational leadership and coaching are necessary though. Only, what type of educational leadership and what kind of coaching might be conducive to society building? Why do we need leadership, in what direction should it take us, and are these the right questions to ask? I want to focus here on concepts which can be assumed to express shared values.

Head teachers are in a position to facilitate disabled pupils’ access to and participation in Education. However, head teachers’ difficulties in creating inclusive schools are considerable. Regarding disabled pupils’ rights, governing bodies sometimes find it too easy to dismiss the Education Act concerning access and participation in relation to disabled pupils, prioritising budgetary concerns over disabled children’s rights. This article discusses the possible role of ethical and educational leadership in disrupting the ableist assumptions that underpin so much of the Swedish education system. This is no small feat in a society that perpetuates a public discourse of disability as an inferior state of being and as a tragedy to be overcome. The authors make a case for school as an integral part of society, hence the need for disability to be understood as a knowledge subject in its own right.

In this chapter, Jane Addams’ thoughts and actions on why ethics matter in a democratic society meet with thoughts and ideas central to critical disability studies, feminism, and feminist pragmatism. Actions as an expression of ethics correspond with critical disability activism’s clarion call “nothing about us without us,” through which disabled people have attempted to gain agency and just representation for decades. The author of this chapter argues that chronically ill and disabled women have been under-theorized, and barely represented and analyzed in most feminist schools of thought. In fact, feminist philosophers, and academics in general, have been reluctant to address the injustices inflicted on ill and disabled women, rendering them more vulnerable and exposed to arbitrarily worded social policy and ensuing unintended negative consequences. This article offers several entry points from which to view social injustices inflicted on ill and disabled women. It opens debate about Addams’ concepts of ethics expressed through Action, Democracy, Social Policy and Reciprocity, and Activism, and their interest for today’s critical disability scholars and other social scientists, practitioners, and activists. Addams considered compassionate action-taking based on sympathetic knowledge as an expression of applied ethics. This chapter argues in favor of collaborative knowledge production as a viable, reciprocal way out of a morally objectionable morass that leaves ill and disabled women to fend for themselves in an unsympathetic world experiencing continual public-health crises.