The purpose was to examine how the pre-schools used the public libraries in two Swedishtowns. We also examined if and how the pre-schools and the public libraries were coopera­ting.Literature showed that it is possible to stimulate children's language development and this is a duty for pre-schools and public libraries. We sent an inquiry to all pre-schools divisions in both towns. We interviewed two librarians. Our results showed that the pre-schools did use the libraries to a great extent but they didn't cooperate with the libraries in the sense that they had elaborated agreements.

Popular culture is a phenomenon of growing importance in the society today. Children and teenagers are increasingly using popular culture in their everyday life to reflect and answer questions about their identities and the meaning of life. Swedish primary and upper secondary schools are expected to prepare their students for adulthood and to provide them with tools to explain understand and problematize contemporary society. From this perspective it is relevant to question whether the schools achieve this and whether the instruction given there represents the contemporary society. For the purpose of knowing more about how popular culture is perceived and dealt with in the Swedish education system, this study examines how eight textbooks in Religious Education (RE) and the national curriculum for upper secondary school discuss and treat popular culture.  The study focuses on when and in what ways the textbooks mention popular culture and if the curriculum provides any supportive base for including popular culture in religious education.

This study is based on 26 essays about A Good Book, written by as many participants inSwedish classes in secondary education for adults. The object is to analyse the students'views on fiction and reading: What books they prefer, but also why and how they read.Objectivity and subjectivity in literary criticism is also discussed.Most favoured author both among men and women is Stephen King. The majority of thebooks mentioned are translated from English. The women also read historical and psychological novels while the men prefer fantasy. The question whether a book is goodor not is in the students' opinion only a matter of taste.

The aim of this essay is, firstly, to ? through a text analysis ? compare the curriculum of Waldorf education in Sweden (in the essay referred to as ?WL?) to the Swedish national curriculum ?Lpo 94?, to uncover possible differences and similarities between these documents, and, secondly, to present the roots and educational philosophies that these two curricula, respectively, are based upon. The purpose hereby is to be able to trace, describe and explain the differences between the pedagogical practices of Waldorf education and that of conventional Swedish schools.In the essay, a historical investigation of the main traditions of ideas behind the Swedish national curriculum is briefly carried out, where I swiftly present the educational philosophies of John Dewey (1859-1952) and Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934). Next, an investigation of the worldview and philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is effectuated, where I attempt to bring to light Steiner?s anthroposophical and holistic worldview ? a worldview that throughout the 20th century has developed into an international and wide-ranging anthroposophical movement ? as well as his concepts of knowledge, science and educational philosophy.

The overall aim of this thesis is to examine how Easy-to-Read information, used by governmental agencies, facilitates and limits the field of possibilities for the intended recipient, based on the information.This, in anera of e-government.The theoretical framework is based on two Foucauldian concepts governmentality and discourse analysis. Representatives from five Swedish governmental agencies have been interviewed and the results have been analyzed based on the following questions: (1) How do the representatives construct the category Easy-to-Read? (2) How do these representatives construct the recipients of Easy-to-Read? In order to broaden the understanding of Easy-to-Read, an important national level policy document, containing a summary of strategies and goals for e-government has also been analyzed based on the following questions: (3) How is the e-government constructed in the text? (4) How is the citizen constructed and positioned in the text? The collected material is analyzed using a discourse analysis inspired by Foucault.With the results from the interviews and the analyzis of the policy document, Easy-to-Read information has been discussed and examined as a technology to meet the needs of people with reading difficulties, putin an era of e-government.The findings of the study include the following: (1) The e-government is constructed as a service agency and the citizens are positioned as clients. Furthermore, the citizens are expected to participate digitally and be digitally competent. (2)Some of the representatives does not know, with certainty, to whom the texts are directed or if they are used.

I have in this thesis looked at the reasons for why boys, in upper school classes, read so little fiction. Several surveys show that boys in their teenage years stop reading fiction. If they read fiction it is only as a school assignment and not as leisure. There has been research done in boys attitude towards literature, but there hasn?t been any research done asking them about why they don?t read fictionI have interviewed a group of boys about their reasons, and attitude, for why they don?t choose to read fiction on their spare time after school.

Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Brodsky is a key figure in Soviet Russian literature. Expelled from the USSR in 1972, he became a US citizen in 1977 and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. In this essay, I have sought to examine the state of exile perceived in Brodsky?s poems. Using Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky?s concept of defamiliarization, I have strived to illuminate the formal composition of this state ? its technique.

The main purpose of this study is to analyse how the main themes of alienation and the search for identity is portrayed by Swedish author Inger Edelfeldt. I have applied the theories of Rita Felski concerning feminist novels of self-discovery, in which the development of the female identity is the main question. As Edelfeldt?s writing consists of literature for the young as well as adults, I have included material from both of these genres. I have also taken use of Ulla Lundqvists theories about Swedish juvenile books when examining aspects of the main character?s feelings of alienation and identity searching.The results of my analysis show that the reading of my material as feminist novels of self-discovery has revealed pervading charachteristics of alienation, love, friendship and psychological development.

Title: Festivalernas Intåg ? Korröfestivalen- en bordunstämmas resa genom festivaliseringenThe Korrö festival- The establishment of a Swedish Folk Music Festival.This thesis describes how folk music festivals have been escalating during the past few and how they have influenced Swedish folk music. To reach my results I have been studying one festival in particular which is the Korrö Folk Music Festival. This event started in the mid-eighties as a small happening that attracted almost exclusively musicians that were a part of the bordooon movement. The bordoon movement gathered a couple of days in the summer at what they called the ?Korrö bordunstämma? to build instruments and play folk music.

This master thesis is aiming to find out how school libraries work towards children in school years 1-6. The mainfocus is how the school librarians and teachers work with literature and reading. The theoretical viewpoints aremainly the sociocultural theory and the child perspective.The study was conducted with participants from five different schools in Uppsala, in the form of qualitativesemi-structured interviews. The results show that schools work with literature first and foremost in a pragmaticway, with reading-strategies and activating discussions. Very little time is spent on reading for its own sake.

In this thesis I set out to study how the reading of fictional literature is viewed, legitimatized and operationalized in two educational domains: the recently revised steering documents that all Swedish teachers must relate to, as well as a selection of teaching materials designed for education in the Swedish language for upper secondary school. The teaching material I have studied has been recently updated in order to correspond with the new steering documents. I relate my analysis to previous research about the use of fiction in education, and I also combine my analysis of the two educational domains to see whether the underlying intentions of the steering documents have influenced the revision of the teaching material. The outcome indicates that the steering documents? previous focus on culture has diminished although a certain insecurity as to how to use the concept and deal with the issue of whose culture should be taught can be identified.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att utröna vilka genusnormer som förekommer inom det skoldiskursiva fältet och huruvida skönlitteratur är en del i detta. Utgångspunken i min uppsats är att genuskodat språk inverkar på flickors och pojkars möjliga språkutveckling och identitetsskapande. De frågor som ställdes var: Uppfyller dessa texter de krav som läroplanen ställer på att ge flickor och pojkar stimulans i den språkliga utvecklingen oberoende av kön, vilka beskrivningar av genus återfinns i de skönlitterära böckerna samt har de i böckerna ingående karaktärerna olika handlingsmöjligheter och egenskaper ur ett genusperspektiv? Genom en diskursanalys av sex skönlitterära böcker läst av en år 4 har jag utkristalliserat de meningar som beskriver pojk- respektive flickprotagonister. En intervju med läraren gjordes för att ringa in hur dessa elever valt sin litteratur.

This study examines how the American comic book industry?s output is addressing the issue of Islam and in which manner the portrayal of Islam in the great American comic book universes have changed since 2001. The comic books are examined from the postcolonial perspective as formulated by Chandra Mohanty and the power and resistance-perspective as formulated by Michel Foucault. Examination of the comic books reveals far greater focus on universal values, orthopraxy and inclusive perspectives than it does on dogmatic teachings, orthodoxy and sectarianism while at the same time partly relying on generalizations and archetypes concerning Islam. To change the power balance requires what I call intervention from the objective, that is to say that ambiguity regarding Muslim characters has to be eliminated by the narrative.

My paper deals with SMS and IM language's impact on students' language in school. Text messaging and instant messaging involves several simplifications and abbreviations for the user to be able to write quickly and short but in the same time have made them understood by the recipient. The spelling, punctuation and use of capital letters are also of a secondary importance when writing via the text chat. My purpose with this paper is to investigate the prevalence of SMS and chat language in student texts, using students in the senior level. My respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire and write a text to a picture.

In this essay, I compare ten different depictions of the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. These depictions are all from books published between 1924 and 2000, which deal with a wider context of the history of Ireland or Northern Ireland. I relate the depictions to the point in time when they were written, the geographic focus of the book, and the views that the author expresses about the present and the future, and about the significance of history. The main result of my essay is that the depictions differ in a way that seems connected to whether or not there was an ongoing violent conflict in Ireland at the time the books were written. Texts written when the political violence was present, or close, in time and location, are likely to be written either in a neutral tone with concern about objectivity, or incorporating the Easter Rising events in context of an ongoing socialist struggle.