Social class representations and construction of entrepreneurial identities in Swedish ELT textbooks

Abstract: Modern societies across the globe have been deeply transformed by the rise of capitalism and neoliberalism in the last century. This has had a significant impact on education which has been reconfigured to meet the needs of the market rather than the needs of the learner. Language learning in particular becomes instrumental and focuses on preparing individuals for a consumeristic lifestyle or for building successful international business careers. In that sense, from a neoliberal perspective, the social class of the individual is not relevant, and the assumption is that everybody starts on equal footing and with equal possibilities, contrary to reality. Consequently, systematic barriers that lead to social injustice are ignored in neoliberal reasoning. These ideas have been found to be propagated in textbooks for English language learning, which deeply shapes learner perceptions and teacher practices in the classroom. This study focuses on analysing two English textbooks used in Sweden and it aims to identify how social class is represented and the extent to which the texts and the tasks attempt to construct an entrepreneurial identity. The results indicate that an entrepreneurial identity manifests through recurrent narratives which accentuate consumerism, individualism, responsibility etc. Other phenomena identified are social class erasure and a focus on politics of representation rather than distribution. Interviews with 3 teachers were also conducted in order to investigate teacher perceptions and practices concerning social class representations and entrepreneurialism in textbooks. The interviews suggest that teachers are aware and reactive to social class representations in textbooks, but are more concerned about identity representations (gender, racial) rather than socio-economic disparities. Additionally, they show less awareness about content related to entrepreneurialism and adopt a non-critical stance in relation to this neoliberal value.