Gendered Positions in Technology Education: A Discourse Analysis of Images From Swedish and Finnish Upper Secondary Schools

Abstract

Inclusivity in education is one of the fundamental objectives of the Swedish national curriculum for compulsory schooling. The accessibility of STEM education to students of different genders is essential in achieving this objective. This paper studies the images Swedish and Finnish upper secondary schools used to promote their university preparatory educational orientations, applying discourse analysis to the body of images. As the discourses imbue the orientations, certain positions are enabled for pupils. These positions prescribe who and what is seen as natural in the orientations. We find substantial differences in how the discourses are represented in the orientations. In the STEM orientations, pupils are constructed as less social than the other orientations. In the images from the technology programme, female pupils have a higher representation than actual enrolment, but in these images, they are less active than their male peers. Moreover, the female technology pupil is positioned as engaged with more creative technology subfields while their male peers engage with electronic experiments. This positioning of the female technology pupil is rather conditioning her presence than creating an attractive educational trajectory for her to assume.