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.

The aim of this study is to describe how a theme about vitamins and analytical chemistry can be planed and implemented in a summer research school managed by AstraZeneca. The description of the theme is intended to be used as an instructor?s guide to upcoming summers-research-schools with the same theme. The students, which participated in the summer school of 2007, went to upper secondary school. During the summer school they were going to investigate the content of vitamin C in different fruits and vegetables.

The Swedish construction industry is dominated by men; however this is starting to change. The average age of Construction Engineers is high and approximately 40 per cent of the employees will retire by the year 2015. Currently, female engineers dominate the graduating classes of Swedish Universities but this is not reflected in the Swedish Construction industry.With so many female engineers available, why is this? Does it require a change in company culture and their condition of work to attract them? Is it the attitude towards women in the industry among the employees that has to be changed? Or is it a woman?s thoughts and prejudices of the industry that creates obstacles?The purpose of this final thesis is to describe how contracting firms in the construction industry can make themselves more attractive for female engineers. To reach the purpose, a study among salaried employees and craftsmen was conducted.

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.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to increase the knowledge of which strategies students with reading and writing disabilities or dyslexia use to learn in secondary school. The study aims to examine the following questions:Which coping strategies do students with reading and writing disabilities use in their studies?How can remedial teachers support students with reading and writing disabilities in their learning process?The study consists of two interviews with a total of three hours recorded material made with a secondary school teacher who teaches Swedish and English. The teacher has experiences of reading and writing disabilities herself but also from teaching students with dyslexia. The interviews are constructed into a lifestory describing experiences of reading and writing disabilities in school, during teacher training and as a teacher.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to investigate if elementary school pupils? attitudes towards mathematics, from a teacher?s perspective, have changed since 2001-2002. I also intend to investigate if the whys and wherefores among the pupils attitude are the same and what influences pupils? attitude to mathematics. The reason why I chose to deepen myself into elementary school pupils? attitude to mathematics, and things that relate, is that I find it very interesting.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate if the reading habits of teacher students are influenced by merit and descent. The empiric material consists of six questionnaires answered by students at the teacher training with Swedish at the upper secondary school as their first topic. The questionnaire comprised questions about reading habits in the childhood and today and information concerning merits and descent.Pierre Bourdieu?s sociological ideas about cultural capital transmitted from parent to child and the concept of habitus are used as a theoretical framework regarding descent.

Huvudsyftet med denna studie är att kartlägga vilka faktorer som påverkar i gymnasievalet. Frågeställningar som belyses är vilka faktorer som påverkar eleverna och vilka personer som är betydelsefulla. I studien diskuteras också skillnader mellan olika grupper som exempelvis kön. Metoden som valdes var enkätundersökning med elever i årskurs 9 som stod inför sitt gymnasieval. Resultatet visar att intresse och att programmet ska förbereda för högre studier är de faktorer som påverkar mest.

The aim of this study is to look at the way four teachers in, and five workbooks for, the course Svenska 1/A+B in upper-secondary schools include language varieties in their content. The research is based on qualitative and quantitative analyzes of the workbooks, where words and content are examined, and also interviews with the teachers who presents how they work with language varieties in their education. The results show that language varieties are accepted in school-education at the same time as they are, and have been, alienated in a way. The results also show that language varieties are less prioritized than other areas of education in the same subject..

The study aims to examine how three books written for teenagers and young adults address topics that are generally considered as deviant to social norms in order to conclude if they can contribute to a norm critical pedagogy in school. Norm critical pedagogy is foremost based on gender- and queer theory and tends to discuss how social norms and power structures are constructed and reproduced in different social contexts. To work in a norm critical fashion the teacher must be aware of the present norms and work to make the pupils conscious of them. Thereby the focus is on existing norms, rather on the deviances. To use norm critical pedagogy correct it must be incorporated in all subjects in school.The books that have been analysed in this essay are Syskonkärlek by Katarina von Bredow, Henrietta är min hemlighet by Maja Hjertzell and Tusen gånger starkare by Christina Herrström.

The purpose of this essay has been to identify a couple of different factors that matter when a teacher chooses method and raw material for teaching his students. The person interviewed is a man, whose lesson I also observed. The result shows that there are several factors of great importance for his choice. My conclusion of this is that this teacher?s choice depends on the school as institution with all the people that operate there, the composition of the students and the school?s curriculum, but this teacher?s pedagogical basic view also has a great importance for his teaching..

The overall aim with this essay was to study how counsellors at upper secondary school work with mental illness among youths and compare this with what research and theories advocate. This because there has been a rise in the number of people, especially in the age-group 16-24 years, suffering from different degrees of mental illnesses. The school can in some aspect contribute to cause mental illness but it also consists of good opportunities to offer counselling and work to prevent mental illness among the students. This study consists of five qualitative interviews and two short telephone interviews with school counsellors. During the interviews they expressed their thoughts concerning factors that causes mental illness among youths and gave an account of how they work with prevention, counselling and collaboration.

In this paper, I have conducted a study of what perspectives educational drama has in theory and practice. The study aims to show an example of how and out of what perspectives educational drama is a part of the school?s activity at a geographically distinct school, from kindergarten on to primary and secondary school years. The general attitude of the faculty and their arguments for and against drama constitute the major aspects of this study, which has been carried out through qualitative interviews at a school in Skåne. The results were that pre-school focuses on teaching drama to develop communicative abilities amongst the students (art educational perspective) while secondary school seemingly abandoned this approach and focuses more on using it for personal development, increasing empathy and understanding of other people by taking it to a more emotional level in order to affect for example moral values of the students.

The purpose of this study is to explore how teachers at Swedish upper secondary schools perceive the so-called value words and knowledge requirements of religious studies 1 as defined by the present curriculum for upper secondary school 2011 (Gy11) how they consider themselves to apply these value words in their teaching, and whether they consider the knowledge requirements as alegitimate basis for equivalentassessment. My studyis based oninterviewswithfour teachers in religious studies at four different upper swcondary schools in the municipalityof Jönköping, Sweden. The results of my study show that the interviewed teachers perceive the value words in the knowledge requirements of religious studies 1,as defined by the present curriculum Gy11, aredifficult to interpret and that the value wordsare not definitive, but interpretable. All teachers use the knowledge requirements in theirplanning of teaching,but also in teaching where they are to concretize the knowledge requirements and value wordsthrough their own examples. Half of the teachers, however, experienced a lack of interest in the knowledge requirements by the pupils, which make it even more important to discuss knowledge requirementswith them, while the teachers?assessment has to rely on these knowledge requirements.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate if the reading habits of teacher students are influenced by merit and descent. The empiric material consists of six questionnaires answered by students at the teacher training with Swedish at the upper secondary school as their first topic. The questionnaire comprised questions about reading habits in the childhood and today and information concerning merits and descent.Pierre Bourdieu?s sociological ideas about cultural capital transmitted from parent to child and the concept of habitus are used as a theoretical framework regarding descent.