Browsing by Author "Suvanto, Petri"

In this master's thesis I analyze the junior high school geography textbooks from the 1970s to the present day. The point of view is Finnish cities and urbanization. The subject is in many ways current. More and more young Finnish people live their lives in urban environment. Therefore, the most of the events of their life are lived, the experiences are experienced, phenomena are observed and the identity is built in urban areas. When this is combined with those numerous studies of teachers bounded to school text books when planning their lessons and the poor status of human geography in Finnish comprehensive school, it is necessary to look at the ways how textbooks have dealt with, and nowadays are dealing with cities. Whole generations acquire their knowledge and attitudes from them. The comparison with the history shows the possible development or lack of development and, therefore, the need for change. The students should be provided with tools to understand current and everyday life phenomena and events. In Finland the peak years of urbanization and establishment of comprehensive school happened at the same period. Another interesting view is to observe how the textbooks have reflected the social reality and changes in academic geography and the comprehensive school curricula. The material consists of 17 junior high school geography textbooks. At least two textbooks were selected for the study to represent each curriculum. Research method was content analysis and light content specification. Urban themes were listed in a table based on school text books, academic books and articles. I marked in this table all the themes that were treated in the school textbooks and the degree of treatment. These were classified further to key urban themes, which have occurred in almost all comprehensive school text books throughout the history. Analysis was complemented by a textual description. The results indicate seven key urban themes. Cities have been discussed in the textbooks from the perspective of these themes: migration, urban livelihoods, center and sphere of influence, land use, counter-urbanization, regional planning and the individual city references. Concepts of 'taajama' and suburban were also often expressed. Textbooks can be said to reflect the social reality of urbanization and changes, but after a delay of years. The key urban themes, in turn, are straight from 1950-1970 Finnish academic urban geography. Current textbooks provide little new for urban treatment. The latest phenomena, events and topics are hardly taken into account in textbooks. The treatment of urban areas is very simple and old-fashioned. The city is not taken into account as a living environment of the young people. Many interesting topics of human geography and urban studies are missing. The treatment of urban areas should be updated. It is appropriate to fly the flag for electronic textbooks, which allow the use of up-to-date and local data. Urban areas should be dealt more comprehensively as the scenes of all the phenomena by adding regional planning and topics of urban research. It can be required more from each party: the quality of the textbook from authors, the activity of searching for information and an open mind to new ideas from teachers and suitable materials to schools from universities. Between the different stakeholders clearly the prevailing gap should be reduced and add cooperation.