Music has a role to play in every country and every culture. Sweden today is a country whith many different cultures, religions and music genres. The purpose of this investigation is to study how immigrants youths profit from music education on the basis of music teachers' perspectives. Questions at issue are: are there immigrant children/ youths who can not take part in music education? Have the students' religions any importance? Do the parents question the offered education? Is there more opposition to some specific kind of music? Are teachers avoiding to present some music? Can music education help the immigrant youths to form their identities? I have used questionnaires and I have made five interviews.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how diversity takes shape in children?s picture books published in Sweden. Twelve picture books, which touch the aspect of diversity in the categories of gender, ages, culture, nation, ethnicities, language, class, sexuality and functional disorder, were chosen from the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs catalogue for youth and children?s books 2006. They have been analysed with the conception of ikonotext and with the theory of Pierre Macherey?s image in the mirror, of how literature reflects the reality of society.

This thesis has the purpose that through a text analysis examine how four schoolbooks for high school treats the religions Judaism and Hinduism. The schoolbooks are from the years 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2009. The perspectives are from a religious viewing point, that means that the women are religious, Jewish feminists and Hindu feminists. The theories used are written by these women and are academic litterature.  The questions are how are women represented in the schoolbooks, is the feminist critique present or are the two religions represented and described in an invariable way, and is the description of Judaism and Hinduism consistent with the curriculum?The text analysis used in this examination means that reality is organized through and by the language used by the actors in that reality.

This article is about Abrahams Children foundation and its teaching method called IE- method. It?s about how a teacher can use the IE- method in the religion lesson. There were some questions in this article that had to be answered and the questions are:- How is the form of the religion classes when a teacher uses the IE- method?- What happens in the class when you study the interaction and the communication?- Does the student?s participation increase when they work with the IE- method?- What are the advantage and the disadvantage with the IE- method?- Can the teacher use the IE- method in other classes?To get to the ?correct? answer I used many methods like, observation in the class, qualitative interview with the teacher (Lisa Andersson) and with four students (Kim, Erik, Amanda, Patrik) and I also used questionnaire.

Directive 2006/54/EG from the European Union concerns the equal rights between men and woman and the principle of equal rights. The purpose of the directive is that the member states provide the equal rights between men and woman. Affirmative action is one exception from the principle of equal rights which is settled in directive 2006/54/EG, article 3. The purpose for the affirmative action must be to encourage the equal rights between men and women.EU has specific criteria to use affirmative action, which is created by praxis of the Court of Justice of the European Union. These criteria are that the affirmative action must involve an objective assessment, there must be equal qualifications between the person which is affirmative action and the person who is not, the positive action cannot be automatically decisive and this special treatment should be proportionate to the purpose.

This article is about Abrahams Children foundation and its teaching method called IE- method. It?s about how a teacher can use the IE- method in the religion lesson. There were some questions in this article that had to be answered and the questions are:- How is the form of the religion classes when a teacher uses the IE- method?- What happens in the class when you study the interaction and the communication?- Does the student?s participation increase when they work with the IE- method?- What are the advantage and the disadvantage with the IE- method?- Can the teacher use the IE- method in other classes?To get to the ?correct? answer I used many methods like, observation in the class, qualitative interview with the teacher (Lisa Andersson) and with four students (Kim, Erik, Amanda, Patrik) and I also used questionnaire.

Abstract This essay has grown out of an interest for the subject of religion and religious education for upper secondary pupils in Sweden. Our society is characterized by cultural, religious and secular diversity, which also reflects in the classroom where individuals with different religious preferences share space and participate in discussions. One of my aims is that this essay can be a contribution for future studies in the religious field. Previous research has shown that Swedish pupils increasingly lose interest in the subject of religion (on a personal level but also more in general). There is a possibility that this picture might have changed since these studies where done, and that is what I want to investigate in this essay.

Critique regarding religious practices has become more and more apparent in today's society.Sans magazine has become a voice in the Swedish debate regarding religions undertakings and have received opposition from various directions. As Sans magazine, issue no.1, is accused of being islamophobic, the critique is focused on the internal discourse within the atheist and agnostic society. As Sans issue no.2 came out, it did not focus on Islam or any of the abrahamic religions but instead it discussed New age and the nature of pseudoscience.I sought to evolve the didactic discource regarding ?truth? and ?reality? by finding if thediscourse within Sans is apparent and if so, what it is based upon. The analysis also focuses onthe terms used to describe new age and pseudoscience.

Johanna Petrén, a prospective teacher of religion, has examined how a couple of students view Christianity as it is presented in a Religious Education classroom. Furthermore, how this image matches their experience of Christianity outside of school. The key questions of this essay are: How do the students generally describe Christianity and what it means to be a Christian based on the image they have acquired from outside of school, or from Christian friends, confirmation or their own faith? How do the students describe Christianity according to what they learn in Religious education at school? What potential differences do the students perceive between the image of Christianity conveyed by the school and the image they have of Christianity from outside of school? Does the school's teaching influence the credibility and interest in Christianity? The questions have been discussed in focus group interviews, in which the students way of reasoning and talking about religious matters were analysed based on previous research. References used in the analysis includes research on topics such as science of religious history, religion in multicultural and postcolonial rooms, secularism and discourse analysis have.

Mitt examensarbete har varit inriktat på elevinflytandet, och då i synnerhet på elevinflytande inom ämnet religion och livsfrågor. Arbetets syfte har varit att undersöka på vilket sätt elevinflytandet styr val av metod och det didaktiska urvalet i religionsundervisning och lärande i religion och livsfrågor. Om eleverna ansåg att de hade ett sådant inflytande som gav dem möjlighet att påverka och om de upplevde att deras åsikter respekterades i livsfrågediskussioner. Jag har studerat litteratur om elevinflytande och om religions- och livsfrågeundervisning, och dessutom de aktuella styrdokumenten. Som informationshämtande metod har jag använt mig av kvalitativ intervju av åtta elever i årskurs nio i en skola belägen i en småstad i Norrbotten.

Teaching materials are a constant matter of discussion as they represent the school curriculum and what the students are reading in the classroom. Within religious studies in upper secondary school, a new approach emerged since the new curriculum from 2011, which is to interpret religion in relation to gender. This study aimed to see which gender performances two selected teaching materials represented, in both their texts and images. This study was performed using both discourse analysis for the texts and content analysis of the images. The study showed that traditional gender performances appear both in the chapters that touched human identity and also ethics and morals, and also in the chapters that touched the world religions.

Religious education in Swedish schools aims to be as objective and non-confessional as possible. This sort of education can lead to that the different religions are presented in a way which is unfamiliar to the followers of the different religions. This problem is what I have focused on in this essay since I myself was a victim of a similar situation. As a syriac-orthodox youth I felt that my Christianity was not the same as the one presented in school. I felt that it had nothing in common with what I learned in my church, therefore I asked myself the question: Whose Christianity is being represented? Therefore I have focused on the syriac-orthodox church in this research.The purpose of my essay was to enlighten the differences between religious education in syriac-orthodox churches and Swedish community schools.

This study centres on the question of how interfaith dialogue can function as a meeting place for young people from different social and cultural backgrounds. The study is based on qualitative interviews with five young participants in an interfaith project taking place in Sweden in 2013 and 2014. For reading the material through a lens of late modern religiosity, Heelas and Woodheads thesis of a spiritual revolution was used. To be able to conclude whether the religiousness of the participants functions as a social resource, Hammack and Cohlers term narrative engagement is used. Lastly Knitters models of theologies of religions was used in the analysis of how the participants reads and understands their own and the others faiths.The study shows that the participants meet in the common aim of defining a religious identity in a late modern and pluralistic society.

Previous research regarding the European debt crisis has mostly focused on the purely economic aspects of the crisis. However, there is a strong ?Protestant-Catholic? dimension in Europe, where historically Protestant countries are more prosperous than their Catholic and Orthodox counterparts. This has especially been a fact since early 2010, when several countries within the European Union had their credit ratings downgraded. Is this phenomenon merely a coincidence? Or could the roots of the recent troubles in Europe have a basis in historic religions? To tackle this question, Max Webers ?s 110 year old study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is brought back into light and used as a tool for analysis of the crisis.The results show that not only are Protestant countries in general more prosperous, but they also have lower corruption and their citizens have a higher level of trust towards the government.

The purpose of this essay is to describe and analyze the debate surrounding the construction of the 2011 years curriculum of the Swedish schools` religious studies. The debate is concerning whether or not Christianity should have a unique position in the curriculum against other religions. The method is to analyze the arguments by an argument analysis. The purpose is also to analyze the argumentation to see how secularization and pluralism have influenced the debate and the different standpoints. The essays material consists of debate articles from the four largest news sites on the internet.The most common argument for Christianity?s unique position is that Christianity has had an important role in the development of the Swedish society, culture and literature and is therefore important knowledge for understanding the Swedish society.