Bortom majoritetsrepresentationen – vad blir kvar? : En kritisk granskning av läromedel i historia för gymnasiet

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to understand the representation of women and LGBT in three contemporary history textbooks and two digital learning materials produced for the Swedish upper secondary school (gymnasieskolan). The focal point of the study is to analyze how much room the two groups has been given and how they are portrayed - this in contrast to men. Based on earlier research of the representation between men and women in history textbooks for the Swedish upper secondary school men as a category is viewed as the majority group. Women’s representation has been shown to be very low, almost absent in textbooks and the representation of LGBT has not been noted at all according to most earlier studies. The interest in understanding if there has been a change in representation for these two groups originate from the 2011 reform in Swedish national educational system and the new curriculum for upper secondary school (GY11). The curriculum states that all forms of discrimination are to be hindered, on all levels and that the teacher also shall include an equality perspective in all educational activity. Additional to the national curriculum the specific program for history courses states that pupils are to work with topics as gender and sexuality, women and men’s attempt to change their situations, historically actor perspectives, changing power relations and the importance of history in making of identity. The teacher is also to communicate history from an emancipation view with focus in telling the history of traditionally forgotten and oppressed groups. This means that the teacher shall aim to tell the history of women and of LGBT groups – not only the history of great men. The theoretical framework of this study uses a synthesis based in social constructivism, gender theory and queer theory. The methodological approach of discourse analysis, with influences of Norman Fairclough's CDA, and qualitative text analysis was used approaching the selected material. The result of this study confirms earlier research to a far extent: the majority group that has been portrayed as historical actors and individuals of importance are predominantly men. After initially reviewing the textbook’s registers and counting names the calculation clearly showed male names to be dominant while female names was much lower in occurrence. This pattern was verified throughout the examined material and the numbers are accounted for at the end of chapter 5.4. Due to limitation factors the presented empirical material in this study only features three specific time periods and not the chronological history in whole as existing in the selected school materials that has been studied.