The subject of religion in Swedish schools is the single most talked about topic in the curriculum. One explanation could be that it is the oldest subject in Swedish schools and the topic has undergone the biggest change through time. This process of change has been anything but undebated. The subject of religion within schools has met debates through almost its entire history, partly from the state and from the church, but also from the teachers and the students. Debates concerning the existence of Christianity in Swedish schools as well as the Swedish traditions constantly reoccur in today?s government debates and various media but in different versions.

The role of religion, of religious individuals and organizations, is currently discussed within both a private and public sector of development. I have viewed documents from the World Bank and DFID where the religious presence is a growing fact and previous theories that religion would disappear with economic development have been abandoned. As a result DFID conducted a large study on the importance of religion for development work, RaD 2005-2011, under the directions of Professor Carole Rakodi. Rakodi (2011) concluded that religion was highly related to the success or failure of developmental projects, and to understand the values people had religion needed to be understood within its specific cultural context. She developed an analysis model to conduct this work.

The Swedish state and educational system are secular, so to say they do not depend on the former protestant state church anymore. Many people in Sweden are also secular. Even so, in school teachers meet students with a religious faith. The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers without a religious belonging experience the encounter with religious students. The method used was semistructured interviews with five teachers in a upper secondary school in a multicultural suburb of Stockholm.

People have used forest resources in northern Sweden for different purposes. Before the 20th century the forest was used for many different reasons, but during the past 200 years it has become an industrial raw material. The presence of people in the forest has left different kinds of traces in the forests. One example is culturally modified trees (CMT´s). The aim of this study was to study and document how people have used the forest resources during the last centuries in Brännlidens nature reserve, and what kind of traces this land use has left.

In this report listed buildings, according to the Swedish Heritage Conservation Act, have been studied with a focus on cases where economical compensation has been given to the owner of the building and cases where the listing of the building has been appealed by the owner. In order for a building to become listed it needs to be particularly valuable from a cultural and historical standpoint. The listed buildings are protected through a list of regulations that determines which parts of the building can or cannot be changed, what methods and materials should be used for changes and repairs, and how the building should be maintained. These regulations should as far as possible be formulated in agreement with the owner, but a building can become listed against the owners will. To decrease the damage this causes the owner he can in some cases have the right to economical compensation. There is also a possibility for the owner to appeal the listing of the building.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and to analyse didactic considerations and decisions made by pre-school teachers in the context of a multi-cultural pedagogical environment.The basic theoretical perspective is social constructivism, but notions from Donald A. Schön and John Dewey's theories of thinking and reflection have also informed the study; even Hans Lorentz' definition of a multi-cultural pedagogical environment has been employed as an analytic tool.The empirical study consists of a qualitative field study at a pre-school, where participatory observation and a group interview have been used in order to collect data. Those who participated were teachers at the pre-school.The results of the study, when analysed in accordance with the method, shows mainly three things. First of all that the teachers at the pre-school, in their didactic considerations, make use of the following methods of knowledge formation: knowledge-in-practice, reflection-in-practice, reflection on practice, reflection on knowledge-in-practice, and reflection on reflection-in-practice. Secondly, that no reflection particularly on the learning conditions in a multi-cultural pedagogical environment takes place.

During our teacher training, focusing on history and Swedish at further education level, we have noticed a discrepancy in the way history is portrayed in further education and higher education literature. Accounts of historical ideas, events and developments have often wrongly been depicted as non-gender specific, that is, of equal relevance to both men and women. To what extent is it made clear in further education textbooks that Rousseau?s treatise on education was exclusively aimed at the male gender, and how are the gender-specific aspects of his ideas described? What role and space are set aside for women in the accounts of the struggle for the universal right to vote in Sweden at the turn of the century in 1900, and how is the unions? initial exclusion of female workers portrayed? Focusing on the above historical events and developments, this study aimes to examine whether or not gender-specific issues are described as gender neutral in a selection of history textbooks for further education published in Sweden between 1982 and 2003..

"One life in two worlds" is a qualitative study of Syriac boys constructs ethnic and religious identity in different social contexts.Based on these three questions: how do the boys describe the importance of the parents' cultural and religious background in relation to their own identity? How do the boys describe their experiences of being categorized in school? Which significance is given to religion and ethnicity when the boys describe their experiences in relation to home and school context?I did reach the aim of this essay which was to investigate by interviewing the Syrian boys how they construct or reconstruct ethnic and / or religious identity in relation to different social contexts with a focus on the home and the school.In this study, I assumed the qualitative method in which I interviewed six Syriac boys who attend grade nine. The starting point of the study was social constructivism. Therefore, knowledge in this study is seen as something that is constructed in language, social and cultural interactions. The reality and perspective of reality is socially constructed, meaning that knowledge is created through the interplay of common action.The results of this study show that all the informants are agreed that their parents' ethnic background has had and has great significance for their identity formation.

This thesis is performed as a case study, and has had the aim to study who has the power over cultural heritage, by studying the digitization selection criteria at KB and what influences there can be on the digitization selection process. The theory of the arm?s length principle, (Mangset, Kunst og makt, 2013) the professional model, (Rothstein, 2010), that digitization re-shape and re-contextualize cultural heritage material, (Dahlström et al. 2013), and different concepts will influence the digitization selection process has been used in this study. A qualitative research with document study and informant interview and e-mail interview has been conducted.

The increased specialisation and complexity in products and services has created the need for Swedish companies to focus more on their core businesses. This has resulted in them opting to buy services and products that lie outside of their core business from consultancy businesses or other types of suppliers. When companies describe their offers in internal and external marketing it is done often in terms of company or service attributes that are not based on customer value or offered value for the customer. The reason for this is that companies have not adapted their services to the different needs of their customers. As a result of this, they run the risk of offering the same services as their competitors and communicate values that the customers either do not understand or experience as value adding.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine the portrayals of class in four Swedish contemporary novels that have been mentioned as working class literature in the literary public sphere. During the 20th century, society has undergone vast changes due to globalization and technology development. The rise in standards of living for most people in the Western societies has led to changed consumption patterns. In consequence, there has been increased emphasis given to cultural rather than materialist explanations of social stratification.

Vi ville undersöka några svenska gymnasielärare i historias attityder till att låta sina elever arbeta kontrafaktiskt. Vilka svårigheter de ser med arbetet, hur de arbetar eller kan tänka sig att arbeta med det och om de såg några specifika för- eller nackdelar jämfört med mer traditionell undervisning? För att ta reda på detta utförde vi kvalitativa intervjuer med yrkesverksamma lärare. Vi hörde inte av oss på förhand om huruvida de arbetat kontrafaktiskt tidigare och vi väntade oss en viss skepsis mot arbetssättet. Men vad vi fann var att även om inte alla medvetet arbetat med det så var alla insatta i, och positiva till, metoden.

This is a study on how a group of ten pupils choose their upper secondary schools (gymnasium). All pupils are ninth graders in a middle school in Husby which is a suburb of Stockholm. Like the big majority of Husby citizens, they all have immigrant backgrounds and their time in Sweden varies; some are born here while others are born abroad and migrated later with their parents. My aim was to understand their upper secondary school choices through own and their parents? "cultural capital".

At the dusk of the Second World War, when the Red Army was approaching Tallinn and the second Soviet occupation of Estonia could be foreseen, almost a tenth of the population left the Estonian coasts to seek refuge in the West. About 30 000 of those ended up in Sweden, among which were some of the most prominent Estonian novelists and poets. Sweden would become the literary center for the worldwide exile Estonian diaspora. However, the fact that a few dozens of Estonian authors published some 2 000 titles in Sweden, where most of the authors as well as the main publishing houses resided, was and has remained unknown to most Swedes as it has gone fairly unnoticed to the field of Swedish Literary Studies. From the perspective that the exile Estonian literature written in Sweden is actually part of our history of literature, this thesis aims to find out what factors have had impact, and how, on the authors? opportunities to gain recognition by the Swedish literary establishment and eventually being included in the Swedish literary historical works.

Coping theory asks what the cognitive and behavioral patterns of individuals dealing with stress are. This essay includes, besides the perspective of the psychology of religion, theories of culture and ritual in exploring two Swedes coping with the natural disaster in Thailand year 2004. The vacation paradise was struck by an enormous flood wave, called a tsunami, causing vast destruction and the death of over 200.000 people. Among these 543 were Swedes on vacation. When a disaster of such measures happens, what kind of stress does it cause? How do you cope? Are religion and ritual important? What is the function of the culture in the copingprocess? Using hermeneutical analysis this essay interprets the material from two books by Swedes, who not only experienced the disaster, but lost two children and husband and wife in the flood wave.