Browsing by Author "Clément, Rasmus"

Since the 1990s there are more and more immigrants in Finland and the Finnish social land-scape has changed drastically. At the same time the discussion of multiculturality and ethnicity has become more common because multiculturalism has become a permanent part of Finnish society : defining Finnishness or Finnish culture has become even more difficult now than it al-ready used to be. The purpose of this thesis was to find conscious or unconscious representa-tions of ‘Others’ in Finnish school textbooks based on the data from previous textbook researches. In this thesis the term ‘Othering’ was based on developing prejudices especially due to ‘others’ ethnic background. This thesis was a literature review. Since only a few researches about the representations of ‘Others’ in Finnish textbooks had been made earlier, there was also a need to explain the fol-lowing concepts in this thesis : the concepts of ‘othering’, identity, multiculturalism and racism. The results of this thesis indicated that ‘othering’ is a natural phenomenon for a human being and that it can be found in textbooks. ‘Othering’ helps an individual to make the world a more logical place with the help of different generalisations. Generalisations are often done uncons-ciously, even in tetbooks. To acknowledge generalising representations in textbooks is probably the most important thing to do. If not done, the risk in the worst case scenario it may happen that textbooks make students produce negative prejudices. However, with teacher's guidance generalisations made of a certain ethnic group could be pointed out and as a result students would understand that their prejudices were formed by the simplifying representations of the 'Others'. In a more globalizing world and more multicultural Finland it is good to cherish tole-rance and multicultural values. For that reason, more textbook research about otherness is needed in Finland.