Multiculturalism in Swedish childrens literature?

The purpose of our master thesis was to investigate how a multicultural society is reflected in childrens books picture books, books for children and young people, published in 2002. We found this issue interesting since children of today experience a change in society, where people of many ethnicities, cultures and religions live together to a greater extent than before. Since children in their everyday life are exposed to these different cultures, we think they also should be exposed to them in the books they read. In order to enhance an understanding of why such books are important to children, especially immigrant children, we have in our thesis included a passage with childrens linguistic development, identification and stereotypes. Other passages concern libraries and their roles in a multicultural society. We also give a brief background to how Sweden has become a multicultural society and how this society looks today. While reading the books we sorted them according to a schedule in order to see what aspects of the books made them multicultural. We found that 60 of the books reflected a multicultural society but there was a large difference between multicultural picture books only two and books for young people as many as 47. Moreover, the multicultural books mostly represented more than one ethnicity. The results of our investigation emphasises the importance, for libraries, to marketing these kinds of books. In general, multicultural childrens books need to be more noticed.Uppsatsnivå: