Browsing by Author "Nur, Farhia"

The aim of this bachelor thesis was to study multiculturalism in Finnish children´s literature. The study concentrates specially to observe if there are other ethnic- and cultural backgrounds appearing expect what could be perceived as Finnish and how they are represented. The subject for the research surfaced from the information that there is significant amount of people with multiculturalism background in Finland. Through the study was the find if the finish children books reflect the current realities of the population. In the theory section I defined multiculturalism as a term and introduced history of children’s literature and children’s picture books as a device in education of children. The research was carried out by choosing the most popular children’s picture books sold in 2017-2018. The books were chosen if they were written originally in finnish. The reason for this was that the picture books had to portray Finland´s perspective of multiculturalism. The research method used was qualitative. The research was carried out using theory-driven content analysis. The content analysis enabled the analyzing and classification of the data. Theory-driven analysis proceeded with the condition of the data while at the same time bringing terms from the theory. In the study I found out that ethnic- and cultural backgrounds were not apparent in the picture books in any other way than in darker skin color of the character and differing background was not for example referenced in the text. Furthermore, there were no main character of different ethnic and cultural background in the picture books. All the characters with potential multicultural background were minor characters.