Representation and diversity within educational material such as school textbooks can be defined as multidimensional as they involve the presence of different characteristics of individuals and societies. Hence, school subjects have great potential to teach about diversity in a multidimensional way by also showing inactive diversity (Dörfel, 2023). Especially, in an era of continuous global flows and entanglement, in which information and capital transgress previous borders. However, in school textbooks – as well as subjects – this is not always the case. Disciplinary changes in different school subjects occur over time (Johnston, 2006). For example, in the science-based school subject of psychology in Sweden, several extensive disciplinary shifts have been identified in recent decades (Blåvarg, 2018; 2023). In this paper we explore these disciplinary changes in school subjects through geographical mapping of scientific representation. By using a combination of geo-based network methods, we trace patterns of change and scientific struggles throughout the past 70 years in Swedish school subject of psychology. To be more concrete, we use all textbooks within the school subject psychology and map references to specific scholars, their academic whereabouts (Universities, disciplines and research centers) as well as their intra-disciplinary perspective/tradition. This enables us – not only – to get an understanding on from where and whom different perspectives adhere, but also sites of dominance.    The diverse reality of different scientific disciplines needs to be adequately reflected in education and we propose this method to analyze scientific representation in textbooks.

References

Blåvarg, E. C. (2018). Psychology in the Swedish Curriculum: Theory, Introspection or Preparation for the Adult, Occupational Life. In Teaching Psychology Around the World (4th ed., pp. 380–391).

Blåvarg, E. C. (2023). Psykologi på schemat: Formeringen av ett skolämne, 1960–2015. Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, Stockholms universitet.

Dörfel, L., Ammoneit, R., & Peter, C. (2023). Diversity in Geography – an Analysis of Textbooks. Erdkunde, 77(3), 195–212.

Johnston, R. (2006). The politics of changing human geography’s agenda: textbooks and the representation of increasing diversity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(3), 286–303.