De, nationen och kulturen : Skillnadsskapande i svenska geografiläroböcker 1947–2011

• Main Author: Andersson, Henrik
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Kulturgeografiska institutionen 2015
• Subjects: Difference; diversity; geographical didactics; culture; identity; Skillnad; mångfald; geografididaktik; kultur; identitet
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-257392

Education systems face a number of challenges regarding social justice, diversity, difference, and inclusion and membership for all students in the groups that schools create. This invokes questions of how well these challenges are met in curricula and teaching materials. Through discourse analysis of eight Swedish geographical textbooks, this essay aims to seek out the perspectives surrounding difference within the subject of geography. It concludes that the idea of fixed homogenous cultures as meaningfull in differentiating among people dominates throughout the latter half of the 20th century and during the last decade. In addition, it concludes that the discourse surrounding diversity in Swedish geographical teaching materials mainly has a binary liberal view of plurality focused around tolerance. This view, it is argued, helps to create and maintain both ideas of otherness and swedishness, the latter of which rest upon the notion of the former. The advent of sustainable development applied to social areas may howevever have forced the rigidity of these perspectives to loosen, even if alternatives are lacking. Nonetheless, swedishness remains vaguely defined, mirrored against the Other, something that has given rise to a neo–national discourse seeking to establish the notion of the nation.