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.