The Manifold Meanings of Forests in Comprehensive Education in the Nordics 1972–2023

Our project, funded by the Kone foundation, studies and compares the ways school textbooks in Finland and Sweden have portrayed the forests of each country during the comprehensive school period (1972 -today). We place a special focus on the meanings these books give to forests: do they portray forests primarily in terms of e.g., economy and productivity, cultural recreation, ecology, or climate change mitigation (carbon sinks)?
The way forests (both state-owned and private) are and should be used is a subject debated within the countries, on EU level, and in connection to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. What school children in Finland and Sweden are taught to think about forests matters, for two reasons:
1. Education is one of the primary ways for governments to develop and educate citizens
2. All Finnish and Swedish citizens are forest-owners either as individual forest owners or as a collective owner group of the large state-owned forests.
There is some research about forests’ cultural meanings in Finland and Sweden, but no research on the specific role that school textbooks have played in forming how we think about forests historically and today. The project also includes an environmental education part carried out in cooperation with a professional photographer. Novel and ground-breaking, our project will change and update our academic and societal understanding of how we have been taught to think about forests in Finland and Sweden.