Browsing by Subject "tyttötutkimus"

The ways of gender production are strongly culture specific. The school and school's textbooks reflect our cultural values and norms. Cultural gender biases and stereotypical representations of gender can be observed on the textbooks with ease – the books portray a very traditional and one-sided vision of feminine and masculine genders. There has been a growing attention to cultural gender biases in school's textbooks especially due to the most recent national curriculum. I approach the gender bias in this thesis from the viewpoint of girls' studies and therefore the research subjects are girls and girlhood. Science education textbooks based on the National Core Curriculum (2014) form the research material used in this study. Science education covers themes that are influential in shaping students gender identity. The goal of this study is to answer a question how and what kind of a girlhood are the science textbooks, based on the most recent curriculum, producing? My research questions are how and what kind of girl's agency is produced and how in the most recent textbooks have the ways of producing girlhood changed. My master's thesis consists of a theoretical literature review section of girlhood and production of girlhood in basic education textbooks and of a research section. I focus especially on Finnish research literature even though there is only a limited amount of research on the topic conducted. In the research section I study both qualitative and quantitative production of girlhood. In the quantitative part of the study I quantify the research material i.e. I calculate representation of gender in the textbooks. The qualitative section focuses on girl's agency and on the changes in the production of girlhood. In the light of the research I have conducted I can state that there has been a progress in the gender equality: quantitative inequality does not exist in the new textbooks. However, there was still a very traditional representation of the gender and its agency. There was development in the variety of girl's agency but there were still major deficiencies in especially intersectionality; the girls were still all but white, middle class, and heterosexual.