Sweden is a member of the European Union and Sweden’s turn-out in the elections to the European Parliament is low compared to its own national elections. Earlier research in the field of didactics in civics regarding the EU have mostly focused on aspects of civic education such as which subject content teachers teach and what knowledge they test their students on. Even today, textbooks are an important part of shaping education. This study has focused on how the EU is presented in textbooks for civics in Swedish upper secondary school, specifically the course “Samhällskunskap 1b”. The aim was to research the political knowledge about the EU presented in textbooks and research how the presented political knowledge can contribute to political participation. The study utilizes two different theories, the first is Maria Jarl’s definition of the participatory democratic process and the second is a categorical instrument constructed by Peter Wall used to analyze political knowledge. The method used is both a qualitative content analysis and a comparative analysis. The categorical instrument used stipulates that political knowledge contains three dimensions, polity, policy, and politics. Each dimension has several variable categories attached. In the study, four textbooks written for the civics course “Samhällskunskap 1b” were analyzed, in accordance with the developed methodological framework. The results of the study found that each of the textbooks contained all three dimensions of political knowledge. However, the dimensions were not equally present in the content with an imbalance favoring the polity dimension which encompassed more than half of the observed variable categories in each of the textbooks. The politics dimension was also found to be relatively non-existent in each of the textbooks with coverage as low as 2% in one of the textbooks. Thus, the conclusion is that the political knowledge regarding the EU in the textbooks is far too one-sided to provide a satisfactory contribution to political participation. We also confirm that a similar focus on the polity dimension regarding the EU exists in textbooks which can also be found in the content teachers teach. This might have several implications for future political participants in Sweden and thus also Swedish democracy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-495311 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Fessé, Simon, Aslan, Melina |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik, didaktik och utbildningsstudier |
| 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 |
| Relation | Examensarbete vid Institutionen för pedagogik, didaktik och utbildningsstudier |
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