ABSTRACTSince Robert D. Putnam first wrote about the causes behind the regional differences in economic and political development in Italy, the theory of social capital has truly flourished in the fields of social science. This days you constantly hear politicians and scholars stressing the important role of the quality of the social fabric to a society?s wellbeing. There all looking at ways to construct policies and institutions that help the spread of social capital.

This study draws upon the framework for analyzing the discourse of a science classroom introduced by Mortimer and Scott (2003). It has been used for many studies before on high school youths, but never on adults. Therefore, this study focuses on the interaction between teacher and students in an adult education on high school level in physics, and how students can change the classroom discourse. Observations took place in two different schools for adults, in four different teaching groups. The result was analyzed by pattern of interactions, communicative approach, teaching purpose, type of student questions and their effect on the classroom discourse.

Individual lessons in singing and different instruments are a big part of music education. The teacher and the pupil are meeting each other face-to-face in this kind of lessons. The interaction between these two individuals, in singing lessons, is the main subject of this thesis. The identity and acting of the singing teacher has a central part and advises are given for successful teaching.The study is based on literature on the subject and interviews with teachers and pupils..

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on to what extent the process of making reality of Inclusion, as stated in International Declarations and in Government policies, has reached the actual educational activities in the school system. My chosen method is a case study, in which I have combined a survey with interviews in order to retrieve enough data for my analysis. I have also studied a number of policy documents and relevant literature. My analysis concludes, for the school that I have chosen to study, that there is still a lot to be done before inclusion becomes a reality. There are many obstacles to overcome, for instance; a constant struggle to obtain enough resources and to reach relevant levels of competence within the personnel.

In this work we?ve been focusing on how to adjust educational computer games in order to make them suited for the educational context of upper secondary school. Our opinion and entrance to the study is that the related developers of the subject, in some ways, have failed to successfully combine and find the balance between the entertaining and pedagogical aspects in the games. Our main questions is which aspects in the games game developers need to take in consideration to satisfy the pupils, but also what qualities that is needed for them to function in their educational context. In order to do that we had to investigate the people of the target groups own perspective on what technological and social aspects in the computer games they assess as important.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent municipalities in Sweden use democratic innovations to include citizens in the decision making process. Along there are three research questions:? What different forms of democracy innovations are Swedish municipalities applying in order to increase the civic participation between elections and what forms are dominant?? What potential influence in decision-making are citizens getting through these democratic innovations based on the results?? Based on the results ? in what ways is the democracy innovations used in municipalities challenging representative democracy? The method used to fulfill the purpose and answer the research questions is a web survey including 287 of 290 (in total) municipal websites. The theoretic framework includes a model which is called ?Smith?s ladder of participation? and is influenced by the research of Graham Smith and Sherry Arnstein.

Title: Creating meetings - a study in interactionism and creating music. In this study I had my focus on teenagers in a school class. My aim was to explore how pupils experience the processes of creating music together and how they choose to organize their interactions during these creative processes. As analytical tools I used sociological and sociopedagogical concepts and theories. Interactionism provided models toward individualization as well as socialization, related to learning, knowledge and creativity.

In this study we have explored and investigated how journalist experience the relationship with politicians/press secretaries in the making of political news. The study examines how journalists see the balance of power between them and their political sources in the setting of the news agenda. To do this we have used a qualitative interview analysis. Our theoretical starting points have been based on the social exchange model. The social exchange model has a social psychological and sociological perspective that explains the interaction, social exchange and stability as a process of negotiation exchanges between parties and operators.

Issues regarding the environment are commonly discussed in the media. The most common problem that is discussed is how to decrease the emissions of greenhouse gases by human beings. The municipality of Kristianstad has chosen to work with a project named ?Biogas Kristianstad? which purposes are to use all of the produced biogas as motor fuel and to speed up the introduction of biogas on the local market. This is in an effort to decrease the effects on the environment in the municipality of Kristianstad.

Background: Overweight in children has been an increasing problem in recent years and research show that early intervention is important. The parents? diet- and exercise habits are important to lay the foundation for a healthy lifestyle for their children. Aim: To investigate parents? attitudes towards overweight in children.

This thesis is using the theory of participatory democracy to show how one can work to increase the participation in the society, between elections as well as during elections. For a couple of years now many traditional democratic countries have been struggling with low voting rates. Hence this, I find it interesting to study what has been done to cope with this problem. The government in Sweden had a project working on how to make more people involved in the democratic process, especially people that to a lesser extent participate in this process. In this thesis two projects will be studied, Möllevångsgruppen and Unga väljer Miljö i Malmö.

  AbstractHåkan Salomonsson: In i nuet via Darmstadt ? Fylkingen, Stockhausen och 50-talet. Uppsala Universitet: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, C-uppsats 2006.During the 1950s, Swedens musical avantgarde was mainly lead by the concert organisation Fylkingen. Some of the leading members used to belong to the Mondaygroup in the 1940s and brought a will to update and modernise Swedish music with them into Fylkingen. This resulted in a radical change in the concert programs of Fylkingen and a development that lead to the introduction of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Sweden.

The number of blogs, from weblogs, are increasing every day. Blogs are also becoming more visible in the public debate as well as the awareness of their existance is rising among politicians and citizens. The aim of this thesis is to answer the question what democratic potential blogs can have. This question will be answered by initially studying the research that exists today about weblogs and democracy. The second part of the analysis consists of a selection of texts from weblogs that touches this subject.

The aim of this study is to investigate English teachers? communication when teaching English in grade three in Swedish schools. The investigation seeks to find out what language is, and why it is, dominant and how the proportions in the teachers? uses of English and Swedish in time are distributed. The study also describes what attitudes teachers have to the English language and if, if so how, two categories of strategies, namely body language and code switching are used.The study was performed in two steps with different methods for collection of qualitative empirical data.

The subject this thesis will investigate concerns the matter of how political ideologies exist within public libraries with a focus on the democratic ideal. Public libraries are part of the political system and we want to show how political ideologies take their shape in public libraries and the possible consequences of this. With the help of three major political ideologies, liberalism, conservatism and socialism we investigate how the democratic ideals of these ideologies are expressed in documents that describes activities the libraries will and have performed. In order to identify these ideologies we use discourses in cultural policy as a bridge between the investigated documents and the political ideologies. As an analytical tool we have developed a model that describes the relation between text, discourse and ideology which we use in our analysis.