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

Our project, funded by the Kone Foundation, examines and compares how school textbooks in Finland and Sweden have portrayed the forests of each country throughout the comprehensive school era (1972 to the present). We place particular emphasis on the meanings these books assign to forests: do they depict forests primarily in terms of economy and productivity, cultural recreation, ecology, or climate change mitigation (e.g., as carbon sinks)?

The use and management of forests—both state-owned and private—is a topic of ongoing debate within each country, at the EU level, and in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. What schoolchildren in Finland and Sweden are taught to think about forests matters, because:

1. Education is one of the primary tools governments use to shape and inform citizens.

2. All Finnish and Swedish citizens are forest owners—either individually or as a collective owner group of the large state-owned forests.

The project examines how school textbooks portray forests and forestry as integral to the national histories and self-understanding of Sweden and Finland. It also explores how Nordic forests and forestry are depicted in contrast to those in the Global South, and how the textbooks address both human and non-human timescales related to forests.

While some research exists on the cultural meanings of forests in Finland and Sweden, no studies have specifically addressed the role school textbooks have played in shaping public perceptions of forests, both historically and today.

The project also includes an environmental education component focused on archipelago forests, conducted in collaboration with the SOS Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science and the Archipelago Sea Biosphere Reserve.

Novel and ground-breaking, our project will reshape academic and societal understanding of how forests have been represented in education—and how these representations influence the way we think about forests in Finland and Sweden.