Browsing by Author "Varetto-Schnitter, Melissa"

The understanding of gender and its diversity has expanded in recent decades while the status and rights of gender minorities have been actively featured in public debate. Expanding knowledge of and understanding gender diversity is one of the objectives of basic education in Finland and teachers are obliged to take gender diversity into account in their professional work. Literature for children and young adults can be used as a tool to address diversity in a school context. Reading fiction provides opportunities to understand both ourselves and the world we live in. Every child and adolescent should have the opportunity to read books in which they identify at least some characters of the fiction as well as their family and their living environment in. Even though a wide range of topics are covered in the current literature for children and young adults, gender diversity still appears to be a relatively rare theme. The purpose of this study was to analyse how gender diversity is portrayed in books for children and young adults published in the turn of the 2020s. The study was carried out as a qualitative study. The research method used was data-oriented content analysis, which was used to analyse four literary works that cover gender diversity: two children’s picture books and two youth novels. The aim is to examine how books about gender diversity could be used as a part of basic education. In children’s picture books, gender diversity was portrayed in a way that is understandable for children and the message of the stories was that everyone should be accepted, valued, and respected just the way they are. The stories also brought up the idea of everyone's equality despite our differences. In the youth novels the identity of the teenage protagonist was closely examined. In both youth novels the theme of gender diversity was addressed through the reflection of the protagonist’s own gender identity and the description of family conflicts and misunderstanding occurring in our society.