In the Swedish school curriculum it states that the school must impersonate as well as convey certain founding values for the Swedish society, such as individual freedom and integrity, equality, solidarity and understanding of cultural pluralism. This paper is about an ongoing research project on how social and cultural representations in educational materials contribute to impersonate these commitments with a focus on the use of names. Naming strategies have been highly neglected or treated in a simplified, unsystematic way in previous studies in the field. This project analyses the kinds of names that are used for people and places in educational materials, which kinds of referents are named as well as not named and how the use of names contributes to creating images of social and cultural identities. The data consists of educational materials within three school subjects (Swedish, social studies and mathematics) with a focus on contemporary as well as diachronic patterns. The analytical approach is influenced by critical as well as positive discourse analysis.