Browsing by Subject "kulttuuristaminen"

According to the National core curriculum for basic education (2014) cultural diversity is one of the core values in Finnish education. The purpose of this study was to examine cultural diversity in images of environmental studies textbooks for primary education. As visual representations provoke feelings and thoughts as well as create strong mental images it is important to study them. The aim of this study was to describe how people from different continents are represented in textbook images. Previous studies on cultural diversity in textbooks suggest that Western bias, othering representations and stereotypes are typical in textbooks, especially in images. This thesis is a mixed methods -study. 225 images, from twelve different textbooks of environmental studies for primary education, were used as data. The images were analyzed by using quantitative content analysis. The analysis was completed by qualitative analysis of selected images. The results show that different continents are represented with different kinds of images in textbooks of environmental studies. Differences in the number of images and contents in textbooks from different publishers were also found. Othering representations were found in images, but there were also images that challenged stereotypes. More research on new textbooks and the interest of publishers to use the results in textbook development is needed.