Browsing by Author "Routakorpi, Liisa"

The conceptions of acceptable ways to be and live as a sexual person have changed in the last decades. This can be seen in the legislative amendments, public discourses, FINSEX- research results and changes in the Finnish National Core Curriculums. The heteronormativity of Finnish textbooks has been researched before, but the studies have focused on textbooks released prior to the Finnish National Core Curriculum 2014, which this study focuses on. Hence the previous studies haven’t reached all the normativities that this study brings to light. The objective of this study was to show, analyze and interpret the construction of normativi-ties related to gender and sexuality in environmental studies, biology and health education textbooks. In addition to analyzing, ways to dismantle these normativities were pondered. The study was positioned in the feminist education research in the field of educational science. The study was carried out as a qualitative research and the research method was content analysis with aspects of critical discourse analysis.The data of this study was gathe-red from 5th and 6th grade environmental studies textbooks and upper level biology and health education textbooks released after the implementation of the Finnish National Core Curriculum 2014.The data was delimited to contain only the chapters concerning puberty, reproduction and interpersonal relationships. It was detected in the analysis that the normativities are focused on heteronormativity, nor-mative heterosexuality, homonormativity, questions on intersectionality and dichotomic con-cept of gender. The study shows that the conception of acceptable and valued sexuality is very delimited, although there appeared to be some aspirations to deconstruct these norma-tive conceptions. The results of this study can be possibly utilized in the development of futu-re textbooks. Paying attention to the inconsistencies in texts, wider visibility of diversity both in text and imagery and close re reading that brings the normativities to attention are ways to deconstruct the normativities of textbooks.