Paper short abstract:

This study analyzes the contents of moral education in Finnish primary school Lutheran Religious Education textbooks from the Foucauldian perspective of ethical subjectivation through practices of the self. The aim was to discover what kind of persons the textbooks guide pupils to become and how.

Paper long abstract:

In Finland, Religious Education has historically played an important role in moral and citizenship education, and objectives of Religious Education have reflected the moral and civic virtues of the time. The aim of contemporary Religious Education is to educate globally responsible citizens who construct their values, identities, and worldviews in reflection with different religious and secular worldviews. Previous research has documented the historical change in objectives for Religious Education, but how these ideals translate into teaching practices has not been researched.

This study analyzed the contents of moral education in Finnish primary school Lutheran Religious Education textbooks. As curricular media, textbooks reflect curricular ideals, and their role is to mediate the curriculum into practice. Textbooks have traditionally been influential in Finnish schools and despite digitalization have maintained their status as the dominant learning material.

The method of the study was qualitative content analysis and the data consisted of the two series of contemporary Lutheran Religious Education textbooks. The textbooks were analyzed from the perspective of Foucauldian tradition of anthropological research on ethics. From this perspective, ethics is understood as a reflective process of constructing ethical subjectivity through cultural “practices of the self”.

The textbooks provide pupils a framework of religious and secular perspectives for constructing their ethics, identity, worldview, and character. Pupils are guided to construct their subjectivity primarily through evaluative self-reflection, conceptual reflection, and perspective-taking. The objective is to become good friends, conscientious students, and responsible citizens. Christian moral principles of neighbourly love, Golden Rule, and stewardship ethics are provided as guidelines for ethical reflection alongside with human rights and virtue ethics.

However, significant differences were discovered between the two series of textbooks. This illustrates the lack of established pedagogies for moral education and underlines the need for further research on textbook production and how textbooks influence classroom practices.