The purpose of this study was to investigate whether students? previous musical knowledge affected the rating achieved in the subject of music. My empirical material consists of interviews with three professional music teachers in local secondary schools. Two of the three teachers felt that they were not able to devote time for the students who had previous musical knowledge. Students from all schools said that teachers addressed more to help those students who found it more difficult to learn.

Hip-hop music has long been an expressive medium used by individuals from marginalized areas in Sweden to address social issues and shape their identities. Through interviews with Swedish hip-hop artists and analysis of lyrics, this bachelor thesis explores the self-expression of the artists and how they express their views of society. It focuses on how social problems are expressed and understood, as well as on how the artists view the depiction of contemporary Swedish hip-hop music in media. Additionally, the study investigates how hip-hop artists themselves perceive the significance of their music lyrics. Furthermore, I explore the impact of music on the identity of hip-hop artists from marginalized areas, as perceived by the artists themselves. To gain a comprehensive understanding, the ethnographic study employs semi-structured interviews and participant observation with four non-ethnically Swedish hiphop artists who live or have grown up in disadvantaged areas in Sweden.

The purpose of this essay is to present research-based literature and in that find basic practics that benefit the process of reading comprehension in the further reading. To get a broader perspective and a practical school related, we also held a small empirical study in the form of interviews with six active teachers. We discussed among other things, what reading means, the use of textbooks, how the reading process is conducted and so on. The results were correlated against the reported literature and the curriculum. It revealed a gap between theory and practice.

Abstract Svanvik, Robin (2013). Läs: spela! En jämförande studie av elevers uppfattningar om datorspel, skönlitteratur och lärande. Svanvik, Robin (2013). It Reads: Play! A comparative study of students' beliefs about computer games, fiction reading and learning. This essay is part of a masters degree of pedagogy and investigates the experiences of 10 high-school students concerning playing computer-games-off-the-shelf (COTS) on the one hand, and reading fictional, printed novels on the other. The aim of this study was to learn more about the students' thoughts about playing COTS and reading novels; also, what differences and similarities there might be between these activities. Furthermore, I wanted to know what they thought they might learn from these activities. The theoretical point of departure for the study is twofold: Firstly, a theory of learning as expressed by Illeris (2007) and, secondly, a sociocultural perspective on learning, represented by Säljö (2000, 2005/2010) which includes the educational benifit of both playing COTS, represented by Gee (2007), and reading fiction, represented by Probst (1990) and Langer (1995). The method used in this study is mainly qualitative by nature.

This two years master's thesis examines the experience of children who read to a dog. The theoretical framework is inspired by sociocultural theory developed by Roger Säljö and the concept carnival inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin. The sociocultural theory has been chosen because it emphasizes the role of practice, instruments and communication in learning and the concept carnival has been chosen to analyze the experience of reading to a dog.The method used is qualitative interview and observation. A total of eight interviews and two observations when children read to a dog have been collected. One interview is with a teacher and seven interviews are with the children (six children participated and one child was interviewed twice).

The purpose of my study is to investigate teacher?s perceptions of their mission in the preschool class, and how they work to promote children?s written language development. What methods and working methods they use to awaken curiosity and motivate children to read and write. I am using the qualitative research method to get answers to my questions. I have made four qualitative interviews with four teachers in preschool classes from different schools.My questions are:What conceptions does teachers have about their mission in a preschool class?What different methods and approaches does teachers use to stimulate and wake children?s curiosity for reading and writing development?The theoretical basis for my study is the socio-cultural perspective, where learning occurs in interaction.

The purpose in this Bachelor degree project has been to create a visual identity and to design a compilation cassette for the small music distributor Kyrkvägen Kassett. My way of approaching the task has been to draw parallells between the cassette as an obsolete music format and more or less abandoned or anachronistic formats, materials and printing methods in the graphic design area. The result is a visual identity that is built upon materials and methods of production rather than specific visual elements. The work is to be seen as a tribute to the small non-profit producers of music and graphic design. As often done in the DIY movement, I chose to consider my lack of practical knowledge in these fields not as an encumbrance but as an asset and an incentive.

This was a project of creating an animated music video for Anna vonHausswolffs song Something is missing. By working with animation Iwanted to broaden my expertise in visual communications. This hasbeen an exploratory work in how I could translate my illustrations tomoving images in the program Adobe Aftereffects. I have formed myown narrative by creating a storyboard. I worked with illustrated setdesign, created an atmosphere in the film and experimented with howto tell a subtle story.

English Title: "The unquestionable tuition of music theory". During my years as a musician and a musical student, I have encountered many prejudices when it comes to views on music played by ear and the routines and discourses belonging to its creation and performance. I have experienced that there is a concealed hierarchical view on different styles of music, particularly amongst those educators and musicians who are highly educated in musicology. The Afro-American tradition, has historically been a part of the musical education at university level for much shorter a period than that of the classical tradition. In my opinion, the formulation of the music theory lessons is still strongly influenced by the classical tradition.

This is a study in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) concerning classification of musicgenre. The study uses a music listening experiment and machine learning methods to determinewhether or not the drum sounds from different songs contain sufficient information to classifygenre.MIR methods are used to extract data from the audio signals. The data is used together with theclassification results of the listening experiment to train different machine learning algorithms toclassify the songs in different genres.The results indicate that using only drum sounds for genre classifications works well, both forlisteners and for machine learning methods..

My curiosity concerning what pupils read and write during leisure time led me to gather information using a quantative method. The study's aim is to investigate which reading and writing habits they have during their time outside school. A comparison was done of pupils at school year level 3 and level 4 in two different schools with the intention of investigating the influence of social background on reading and writing habits. 137 pupils filled in survey forms and thereafter the MYSTAT statistic program was used to process the information. The results point towards that the pupils read story books both more often and for a longer time than any other type of literature and that they read them often or very seldom.

Music production software has a strong tradition of two-dimensional graphical user interface (GUI), in which the time line is represented as a flat composition either horizontally (from left to right) or vertically (from top to bottom). In my degree work titled Sequi, I approach music composition from a different angle. Instead of a two-dimensional time line with only two possibly ways of progression (forward or backward) I constructed a three-dimensional GUI with the maximum of four different ways of progression from any given point in a composition. The height axis is used to describe time-intervals (the time between downbeats) and the wide and depth axes are used to describe progression from one sound to another..

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the conception of creativity. Observation and interview illustrate teachers´ views of the concept, as well as the use there of. Classes in ensemble and aestethics have been observed. The reason for choosing these two classes is to give the investigator the oppurtunity to observe several students at the same time and it also makes possible for the investigator to observe several instrumentalists´ use of their instruments. Interviews have been conducted with teachers in the observed classes.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how the identity of the public librarianwith regard to reading is manifested in the library field. The approaches thatare taken to reading and readers are examined as well as the consequencesdifferent approaches might have. The empirical material is based on 93articles published in Swedish library journals. The theoretical andmethodological starting point is discourse analysis. The application ofdiscourse analysis according to Michel Foucault?s hypotheses reveals threediscursive formations regarding the professional identity of public librarianswithin the framework of reading promotion: The public librarian asguarantor of democracy is related to the public library's original mission offostering, cultivating and educating citizens.

This thesis presents and evaluates a project, undertaken in 2001 by a librarian the writer of this thesis and a teacher. We met with a number of adults with reading and writing disabilities, and presented and discussed books and experiences of reading, with the aim to increase their joy of reading, as well as finding out more about our own ways of co-operating with each other across our professional borders. The documentation and evaluation emphasizes on the process and the results of the project, and on our own participation, by asking the following questions: How did we carry out the project? What obstacles did we meet? What went well/wrong? What did we achieve related to our goals? In order to illuminate the project from different angles, consequences of reading and writing disabilities for adults are discussed, as well as the specific nature of adult education and projects more or less related to ours. Action research is chosen as a method, because it allows the process of the project, and our own learning process, to be exposed.