ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on school textbooks for basic education in Finland. First, people explore gender bias and its manifestations in 59 textbooks. Second, they analyse teacher's observations on and attitudes towards gender ideologies presented in school textbooks, when they make comments about gender in these books. Studies on Finnish teacher's attitudes towards gender consist mostly of ethnographical or discourse analytic studies on the practices of classroom interaction and thus can provide only indirect information on these attitudes. Critical discourse analysts refer to the concept of naturalisation when they describe the power of linguistic and semiotic features that communicate ideologies to the extent that the ideology is considered as the natural state of affairs by the recipients. The contextual information available in the text is used as a basis for categorising the sex of the persons and fantasy characters. Special attention is given to names referring to actual people as opposed to names referring to fictional person and fantasy characters.
