Textbooks’ prominent role in education makes their content and how they present it interesting to investigate. The purpose of this essay is therefore to investigate how non-European cultures and countries are presented in four history textbooks that are currently used in the Swedish upper secondary school. This is investigated in order to discuss the books’ contribution to the students’ understanding of non-European cultures, with the help of Amartya Sen’s theory concerning identities and the steering documents for the Swedish upper secondary school. The investigation was carried out through both a quantitative content analysis and a qualitative content analysis of the four textbooks. The results of the investigation show that the textbooks contain relatively few non-European cultures and that they do not get enough space. The results also show that the non-European cultures often are presented in European contexts and in negative contexts and often with a European perspective on events. Additionally, the investigation shows that the non-European cultures are portrayed with only a few, recurrent qualities and occupations. With Sen’s theory and the steering documents in mind, the conclusion becomes that the four textbooks most often portrays and presents the non-European cultures in a unilateral and simplified way. Thereby, they do not contribute to the students’ understanding of the non-European cultures, to a great extent. Sometimes they even create a conception of “We-and-them”.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-57579 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Magnusson, Jennie |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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