Taiwan's recent democratization seem to have rallied a wider support of the notion of a national identity amongst its citizens which in the year 2000 led to the election of the pro-independence party DPP and President Chen Shui-bian. Meanwhile, China insists on the "one country, two systems" formula, regarding Taiwan as merely a Chinese province, and continues to fight any Taiwanese initiative towards sovereignty. Through a narrative perspective, this essay analyzes the self-conscious national identity-building quest embarked upon by DPP and President Chen Shui-bian. The analysis consists of three parts. Firstly, a text-analysis of President Chen Shui-bian's speeches is conducted to examine in what way he enforces and legitimizes the identity-building-process through narratives.

According to the national legislation concerning discrimination within labour law, it is prohibited to discriminate on the grounds of sex, ethnic belonging, religion or other religious belief, functional disability, sexual nature and part-time work or time-limited employment. The EC-law goes further and also prohibits discrimination on the ground of age. According to an EC-directive the member states must incorporate a national provision against age discrimination by the 2nd of December 2006 and the Swedish legislator is now in the progress to implement this into Swedish law.Even though national legislation does not contain any provision on the area, the EC-law directive has a certain influence at national law. Measures that are in breach of the purpose of the directive can for example not be taken. When the time for implementation has expired, the directive has direct effect and can be referred to within the member states.

Introduction and background: The 1990s crisis and the global financial crisis year 2008 shows the same indications that the property market was affected negative. The Swedish Property companies had a difficult time on the market when the crisis led to decreased property trade and financing problems for the Property companies. The Swedish property companies became less attractive on the market and contributed to a drop in prices on investment property.Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to examine if there is any relation between the Swedish Property companies impairments on their investment property and the global financial crisis year 2008.Method: The essay is based on a quantitative study where we examined Swedish Property companies? annual reports. We answered our questions and our purpose from the empirical data that we collected from the annual reports.Conclusions: The study resulted in that we found a correlation between the Swedish Property companies? impairments on their investment properties and the global financial crisis year 2008.

Today, digital technologies (DT) can be said to play an important role in the Swedish school system. The goal of this essay was to describe DT use by school leaders, in relation to their views on schools? goals and visions, and teachers? and students? use of DTs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five school leaders of secondary schools in Umeå municipality, Sweden. The results show that school leaders? use of DTs center on three key tasks: communication, information and administration.

Biological diversity is one out of four dimensions, characterizing the subject of Biology ac-cording to the school curriculum. As a concept, biological diversity had its break through at the UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the convention about bio-logical diversity, named CBD, was signed. According to the convention, almost all the na-tions of the world have engaged themselves to preserve the national diversity of species, in-cluding the diversity of genetics and ecological systems.This thesis focuses the biological diversity from the perspective of school books. The aim is to find out how the biological diversity is presented in biology books for students aged 12-15 years.In 1994, the current Swedish secondary and high school curriculum called LPO-94 was pre-sented. The biology books used in this study were published between 1994 and 2007, all of them exist in many editions and are published by three different publishers.The conclusion of the study is that all the biology books that were examined have reached different levels of the development in the field of biological diversity..

The aim of the study was, through qualitative interviews with school counsellors in Swedish primary schools, to study what the counsellors are experiencing condition their ability to work proactively according to the Swedish Education Act provisions on student health. During the study, six interviews with school counsellors who worked in the same suburbs, was conducted. The theoretical approach that was used is Michael Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucrats and the term discretion. The overall outcome of the study was that the interviewed school counsellors felt that they did not have good opportunities to work preventively as the Education Act requires. The main reason for this was the school counsellor?s heavy workload.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the tendencies among pupils concerning their attitudes towards History and some of the stated goals in the present and in the proposed course plan of History, since there is, probably, a change coming in 2011. The study is built on questionnaires answered by one hundred pupils at a Swedish upper-secondary-school. The results point to the fact that most of these pupils like history, but still they do not wish to make it an obligatory subject, which is a government proposal at the moment. Furthermore, the answers about sources, democracy, the use of History and the consciousness about History, have a clear tendency; there have been too little education about these areas during the pupils former nine years in school, still the pupils think that these are important areas to work with. Moreover, this study shows a disheartening picture when it comes to pupils knowledge of their cultural heritage. Only half of the pupils know which century Gustav Vasa lived in and just a third know what year universal suffrage was introduced in Sweden, two facts that ought to be set in most Swedes? mind..

This essay attempts to examine the discourse of the Sweden democrats in relation to thevalue system of the Swedish national school.To analyse the political texts I use discourse analysis and especially the method and approachconducted by Judith Lee Bacchi. Bacchi focuses on the construction of a problem in variouspolitical discourses. When performing this kind of analysis the main question is (accordingto Bacchi): ?What is the problem represented to be??I find that the Sweden democrats construct the ?migration politics? and the ?multiculturalpolitics? that is guiding the society as the cause of most problems in our society. To solvethe ?problems? they promote a nationalistic and a cultural racist discourse especiallypinpointing the ?Muslims? as being a problem.Since the Sweden democrats are striving to implement their discourse in the society andschool, and since their discourse already are reproduced by solar students in the classroom,I find it important to examine the essence of their particular discourse and contrast it withthe current value system of the Swedish schools.I don´t find the nationalistic and racist discourse of the Sweden democrats to correspond tothe value system of the Swedish school, mainly due to their strive to create alienation, andby labeling individuals in a reductive manner, instead of using apparent differences as asource for democratic discussions in the classroom.

This essay studied how six girls experienced their reading development during their college education in male-dominated profession programs. The issues assumed were how they experience their literature reading and literature education and what happened with their interest in reading. The theoretical frame included researchers Säljö, Rosenblatt, Gun Malmgren, Olin-Scheller, Ulfgaard and Molloy.The study showed that most of the girls felt their reading had worsened but not because of their male classmates but because of school. They had a lot of homework and participated in so many different school projects which would be completed that there was no time to reading for pleasure. The girls did not like the teachers? literate sample and did not like the methods used in learning literature.

The purpose of this thesis is to systematically describe and map how authorities define the school library and its function based on the current policy documents for the Swedish upper secondary school. The study is guided by the following questions: ? What dimensions does the school library have according to the explicit definitions, descriptions and requirements? ? What implicit arguments, references and unspoken assumptions about the school library and its role, function and significance can be derived? The study is delimited to the national policy documents, which have been divided into two groups ? structural and teaching focused ? corresponding to the two questions above. Further delimitations have been made to avoid noise and to manage a manual content analysis. Each question required its own analysis tool.

The purpose of this study was to find out whether young women´s conceptions on femininity are based on school culture or other possible factors. The theory chosen for this study is the sociological perspective. A theory where sociologists such as Emile Drukheim, Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu are all prominent. The discussion links to Habitus and their theories on social, cultural and collective groups. A qualitative method has been used.

The purpose of this study is to examine the view of Swedish language teachers on the role of fiction and of school libraries within the compulsory school?s teaching of Swedish of form 6-9. The questions to be answered are:? What part do Swedish language teachers (hereafter called teachers) think fiction is playing regarding the pupils inclination to read and reading promotion?? What is the attitude of teachers regarding the function of fiction in the Swedish subject?? What do teachers consider being the role of the school library in education, and can this be related to the local school library resources?To answer the questions a questionnaire was sent out to thirty-five teachers. Four qualitative interviews were also carried out among the fourteen teachers that answered the questionnaire.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine and compare the process of starting a school library at schools which haven't had a school library before, and to examine and compare the experience of this process according to the principals and the persons responsible for the school library.I have examined two Swedish independent primary schools (age 6-15 years). I have made qualitative interviews with the principals and the persons responsible for the new school library. In all, I have made seven interviews. As requested by the new Swedish Educational Act, both schools had recently started creating school libraries. One of the schools had recruited a half-time teacher-librarian and the other had no staffing at all.In the interviews, I have examined the attitudes of the informants towards school libraries, if this attitude has changed during the process of starting the school library, the informants' experiences during this process and the informants' views on the school library as an agent for student achievement.

These days, schools are obliged by the law to prepare an annual plan for the prevention of bullying and degrading treatment. The purpose of my work is to investigate the 2 schools efforts to prevent bullying and abuse and how they live up to legal standards. But I have also examined how students in school are experiencing anti-bullying work in their school. I have also examined how much funding schools put on to prevent bullying I school. In this study, I have done interviews with school principals and students to have a clear picture about the school?s anti-bullying work.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate how some teachers make use of the results of the national tests in mathematics to plan their teaching. The questions are how they plan their teaching in mathematics and if they use the results of the national tests to compare with their own teaching.   Five teachers in mathematics has been interviewed. I have used unstructured interviews with open-ended questions, and I have been able to ask follow-up questions based on their answers. The analysis of the survey is made from a systems theory approach.  The result of the survey shows that teachers make use of student performance to look at their own teaching of the current group of students. However, there is not enough time to rehearse and repair the deficiencies discovered in the national tests, which for some is perceived as a stress factor.