This study examines how gender is at work in four series of teaching material of Swedish in the years 7-9 of the Swedish primary school. Analyzing eight books in total, and also their respective teacher?s manuals, the study focuses on the following aspects in both texts and pictures within the books: heteronormativity, marginalization, stereotypes, equality, and also general gender related issues. Doing so, this study approaches the analyzed material with the eyes of a feminist critic. Moreover, this study applies both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis as its method of approach. Initially, the theoretical background and scientific method for this study is presented.

This Master?s Thesis aims to examine the attitudes concerning gender issues among children?s librarians. The main purpose is to examine what their views on the subject are, and if they consider gender issues when acquiring and mediating books. We are also interested in their opinions about gender stereotyping in children?s books.

This thesis is based on two different parts. First a presentation and a brief insight of the most comprehensive picture educational structures/theories and their various branches in Sweden from the post war period. Secondly a presentation of my artistic masters project Fantasy World, where I together with a group of children aged 7-12 freely created an artwork in the form of a world of its own, in sculptural expression. The idea behind the thesis has been to study how the perception of picture education and children?s creation has been in the recent decades and how different picture educational theories looks like and then to compare with the idea behind my project and how it may look in practice..

The study aimed to evaluate picture communication during clinical as-sessment and intervention procedures in paediatric care. As part of the project KomHIT (Augmentative communication in paediatric health care settings) care professionals at different care units were provided with education and designed pictorial supports. These consisted of appointment letters with pictorial support, visual schedules and communication boards with both general and specific vocabulary. Care professionals and parents to children with and without communication disabilities participated. Survey data from care professionals and parents at five care units was supplemented with qualitative data from an interview with a multiprofessional group at one of the care units.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

Libraries exist around us and for most of us they are a part of our every day life. But how often do we stop and think about their meaning?Libraries in fiction are usually not the center of the narrative, they play a role quietly in the background and offer a backcloth to the story. Yet they are a vital part of the story. Without them a big part of the magic in the stories would be lost.And what is their role in our lives? What do the libraries mean to the books they harbor, the readers who seek them out and society in which they have their axiomatic role?This essay?s focus is my story ?Between the shelves?, which is about the young girl Julia and the mysterious passageway she discovers in her local library.

This paper is intended to provide a picture of which associations water can wake in the human mind from the perspectives of garden history as well as from that of environmental psychology. I hope to paint a fairly broad picture of our perception of water that can serve as a basis for discussion and as a starting point for different forms of design work in landscape architecture. The historical perspective emphasizes the importance of water as a condition for the emergence of gardens and in a wider perspective the importance of water in early cultures. Also, I describe a picture of how water has been used throughout the history of gardens from early Egypt to the baroque era. The garden history analyzed from an art historical perspective gives a picture of human associations to water, and the history behind these associations is presented. As a compliment to the art history approach, I have chosen to highlight our associations with water from the perspectives of environmental psychology and evolutionary science.

The purpose with this thesis is to analyse the image of the Chinese that was constructed and maintained in the materials published in association to the Swedish Mission Covenant Church (SMF) missionary work in China between the years of 1890 to 1914.The analysed material is mainly from the periodical Missionsförbundet, the analyse also include various books, biographies and anthologies. Inspired by Michel Foucault I found my methodological starting point in his discourse term. Frome there, by the help of the texts of Torjer A. Olsen, I constructed a discourse analyses, by which I analysed my materials.The survey showed that the material associated to SMF foremost constructed a negative pictureof the Chinese as unclean, conservative, arrogant, liars, greedy, loud, bad singers and that the woman situation was seen as untenable. A more appreciative picture also emerged and the Chinese was described as polite and strong.

In the early 1860´s, the author and opinion former Fredrika Bremer made a large donation of books to Högre lärarinneseminariet, which is the first governmental institute for higher education of women in Sweden. The aim of this thesis is to describe the collection of donated books as well as to extract information regarding Bremer's international network of contacts, her views on women's education and her relation to Högre lärarinneseminariet. Furthermore, the aim is to highlight the unique relationship between Fredrika Bremer's private collection of the books and the library of Högre lärarinneseminariet from a gender perspective. A handwritten list of the 321 titles constitutin the donation has been preserved in the seminar archive and three quarters of the books have been re-discovered in a bookcase at Årsta castle. The donation is characterized by its double origin as stamps and personal dedications remain as permanent traces in the books.

The aim of this two years master´s thesis is to examine discourses about electronic books in relation to libraries that occur in the Swedish library journal Biblioteksbladet by using critical discourse analysis (CDA). The thesis also aims to discuss changes in the discourse practice, and discuss the relationship between discourse practice and social practice in the field of library and information science (LIS). A main point of CDA is that language is a form of social practice that helps shape social reality. Furthermore the concept of ideology, as understood with-in CDA, brings understanding to the way discursive events help reproduce and transform social relations of pow-er. The text samples span from 2005 up to and including 2011 and were examined by using Norman Fairclough´s three-dimensional conception of discourse, which allows for interpretation of text on a linguistic, discursive and social level.The result of the analysis showed that there are several different discourses about electronic books and li-braries, none of which can be said to be particularly representative.

This essay examines how age, power and agency is represented and reproduced in contemporary Swedish picture books.This is done through a combination of discourse analysis and literary analysis.It uses theoretical perspectives from sociology, and views childhood as a social construct. It sees discourse and language use as both representing and constructing social reality in the tradition of Norman Fairclough and critical discourse analysis. The main results is that the discourses of childhood in the material construct children as a separate group in society, and childhood as a special time in life. Children is portrayed as both social actors and in need of protection from adult themes and worries..

The purpose of this study is to investigate and describe the role of course books for teaching English to children at intermediate level of primary school in Sweden. The essay is based on a descriptive, qualitative method and interviews have been conducted with seven teachers in different schools, teaching English in year 4, 5 and 6.The result of the study shows that course books have considerably influence on the teaching of English in the schools who took part in this investigation. The participating teachers use a course book as main teaching material and almost everybody follows the traditional routine working with Textbook and complementary tasks in Workbook every week. They base their lessons on course books and use alternative teaching material mainly for fun activities, speaking practice and individualization. Even though all teachers rank speaking and listening as most important for new learners, it is reading which has the largest impact on their teaching.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the habits of borrowing books among third-grade pupils. My aim is also to study what significance their teacher and the librarian have on the pupils? borrowing habits. Based on the results from an experiment, two observations, interviews and by compiling a list of short summaries of literature relevant to my thesis. I wanted to compare earlier research with my own results and also reflect on remarks made by librarians and teachers concerning the children?s reading and use of the library.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

Dagens film och spelkoncept inom genrerna science fiction och fantasy börjar likna varandra mer och mer och för oss känns inget längre annorlunda. Genom att basera dem på historiska samhällen och kulturer hoppas vi på att bryta normen. Vi hoppas att med detta som grund kunna skapa realistiska och trovärdiga folkslag som skiljer sig från det som funnits tidigare. Detta examensarbete handlar om konceptutveckling av en fiktiv värld och tre fiktiva folkslag. Konceptet skall kunna appliceras på både film och spel men även litteratur eller andra medietekniska områden.