The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to an understanding of the subject content in Physical Education (PE) foremost from a health perspective. By using an approach deriving from John Dewey’s transactional perspective on meaningmaking (Bentley & Dewey 1949), and a discourse theoretical position, the discourses identified in the dissertation’s studies are consequently regarded as participants in pupils’ meaning-making. This makes it possible to discuss the results of the studies in terms of the institutional content and conditions of meaning-making in PE. The thesis consists of three different discourse analyses, where the institutionalised aspect of meaning-making in PE is examined by analysing local curriculum documents from 72 Swedish compulsory schools. The results of the dissertation show that in the study of subject content in PE a dominance of an activity discourse can be identified, although a social development discourse is also identified as being important in the documents. The results, thus, suggest that the subject content of PE can be characterised by a wide variety of activities, where pupils are expected to be active participants in the sense of being physically active. The content is also characterised by actions promoting good relationships, co-operation and consideration for others. Actions privileged within the discourses in PE are movement, physical activity, trying many different activities together, active participation, good relations and enjoyment. The results also show that health is explicitly constituted as fitness training, life-long physical activity and knowledge about physical training based on scientific facts from physiology and anatomy. Learning health in PE thus mainly consists of a pathogenic health discourse. But from a salutogenic perspective, health is also constituted as the possibility to participate in movement, physical leisure activities and social relations, and enjoy a life-long engagement in different movement and sport activities. The analysis also shows, however, that within the frame of the subject content of PE, it is also possible to regard health in terms of a commitment to health- and environmental issues, a sense of well-being in ongoing activities and an active involvement in subject content matters within PE. Health can therefore be constituted in different ways within PE, although this is not always made explicit in the local curriculum documents.

In this study a phenomenographic theoretical perspective is taken as departure for research on manifested critical thinking in civics among Swedish ninth-grade compulsory school students. According to the phenomenographic perspective students’ manifestations of critical thinking are linked to the way of experiencing the phenomena inducing a manifestation of critical thinking. Thus differences between students’ manifestations of critical thinking are linked to differences in the way of experiencing the phenomena inducing a manifestation of critical thinking. The empirical investigation in this study revolves around how 19 ninth-grade students experience four different tasks designed to induce manifestations of critical thinking. In broad terms the main aim of the study is to describe the students’ different ways of experiencing each specific task and furthermore, to link each specific way of experiencing a specific task to a specific type of manifested critical thinking in relation to that task. A more overarching aim is to offer and test the phenomenographic theoretical perspective as a way of conducting research on manifested critical thinking. The empirical results show how the way of experiencing a specific task plays a decisive roll for the type of manifested critical thinking, made possible in relation to the specific task. A more complex way of experiencing the task can be linked to a more complex manifestation of critical thinking in relation to the task. A less complex way of experiencing the task can be linked to a less complex manifestation of critical thinking in relation to the task. The study also suggests how these empirical results can be used in a pedagogical situation in order to enhance students manifested critical thinking in civics. Concerning the more overarching aim the study strongly points to a further use of the phenomenographic perspective when conducting research on students manifested critical thinking.

The diploma thesis deals with the mediation of a preview of the development of adaptation during the beginning of school attendance in pupils of the first class by the view of children, parents and teacher. The diploma thesis is divided into the theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part is divided into two chapters. The first chapter deals with the current concept of the first level of basic education and describes the important curricular documents that constitute the White Book and the Framework Educational Program of Basic Education. The second chapter deals with a child initiating school attendance and this breakthrough event is framed in the subchapters describing school maturity and school readiness, school as an impersonal institution, classmates and friends, evaluation and school success, teacher and his / her work, motivation of the pupil, adaptation to the beginning of school attendance, a change of the daily regime, and the family as the inseparable emotional support of the child. The practical part is devoted to qualitative research, which was attended by seven children who have just started their compulsory schooling, their parents and the teacher. In-depth interviewing and qualitative questionnaires are used.

Resumen El presente estudio se centra en el horario como factor marco en la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera (ELE) en la escuela secundaria obligatoria. El punto de partida es que hay diferentes condiciones en las instituciones escolares para la enseñanza de ELE. La hipótesis es que un aspecto que puede influir y afectar el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje es la ubicación del horario de la clase y la intensidad horaria en la planificación administrativa de los horarios en las escuelas. Para comprobar si este es el caso se realiza una encuesta en las redes sociales dirigida a profesores de español en la secundaria obligatoria. El resultado del estudio indica que existen problemas del horario asociados con la dificultad de conseguir profesores, que no tengan que ir de una escuela a otra. Este factor a veces limita las posibilidades de influir o hacer cambios del horario. A su vez, esto implica que las clases de ELE se colocan en algunos días limitados de la semana o en posiciones por ejemplo al principio o al final del día, no por cuestiones didácticas y pedagógicas sino para resolver problemas del personal. / Abstract The present study focuses on the schedule as a frame factor in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (FL) in the Swedish compulsory school. The study takes a starting point in the assumption that there is a difference in conditions in the schools for the education of Spanish as FL. The hypothesis is that a factor that may influence and affect the education process and learning are the positions of the classes on the schedule and the length of classes due to the administrative schedule planning in the schools. In order to investigate this, a survey is carried out on a social network, addressing teachers of Spanish in the compulsory school. The results indicate that there are problems in the scheduling associated to the difficulty of finding teachers of FL that do not necessarily have to work in more than one school which occasionally limits the possibilities to implement changes in the schedule. This also implies that it is therefore required to put the positions of foreign languages on a limited amount of days and in the beginning or the end of the day, not due to didactic and pedagogical questions but to resolve the organization and secure that there are teachers on the courses.

In this dissertation the complex, dynamic, contextual and multi-dimensional practice of teachers’ use of digital technologies in their everyday work has been illustrated and presented. The research draws upon the experience of teachers and school leaders from two compulsory schools as well as representatives from the municipal Department of Education and IT-unit within a municipality in the south of Sweden. A focused ethnographic approach has been undertaken and applied observations and interviews. Systems Thinking, specifically Soft Systems Methodology in combination with Cognitive Mapping have been applied to analyze the empirical material. The theoretical foundation builds upon teachers’ worldview towards digital technologies, because it is noted that teachers more easily adopt and use innovations that are in accordance with their personal thoughts and beliefs about teaching and learning. Further, teachers’ attitude and perception towards use of digital technologies are addressed as well as the role of school leadership. Additionally, importance of context, teachers’ knowledge and pedagogics have been discussed referring to various frameworks. The dissertation aims to illuminate the complex nature of teachers’ everyday practice. To gain understanding of the situation as a whole, there is also need to shed light on various aspects and underlying perspectives. Thus, this research aims to illuminate and advance the understanding of the complexity of compulsory school teachers’ everyday work practices using digital technologies. The outcome of this dissertation illustrates the complexity of teachers’ everyday practices as well as additional issues adding to the complexity, and shows that these complex issues are worthy of further study. Among the issues emerged from this dissertation are differences in regard to how the complex situation is understood because different actors have multiple and sometimes conflicting worldviews. Ambiguities in core objectives and relevant concepts were found. Additionally, a pervasive lack of understanding about the realities of daily education and teaching practices, including variances in worldviews and mindsets was found adding to the complexity of teachers’ everyday practice using digital technologies.

The overall aim of this study is to analyze how the body is understood in the compulsory school subject physical education during the period 1976-2002. With pragmatism as the point of departure the texts of curricula, syllabi and articles from the physical education teacher's specialist press are analyzed. The analytical tools used are two perspectives of the body and human movement, one based on dualistic ideas and the other on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body. The analysis shows that there are differences in how the embodied person is understood in three different types of text. In the curricula the dualistic ideas where the individual is seperated into body and soul prevail. The picture is more complex in the syllabi whilst in the articles from the specialist press the lived body is found more often. In the articles from the specialist press there is a pattern that shows change over time where phenomenological ideas are more prominent towards the end of the period studied. The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part there is an introduction to the study and theoretical perspectives are introduced, the second part consists of the analysis of the texts and in the third part these are discussed and possible didactic consequences presented.

The possibilities and problems of minority children and adolescents in a multicultural school are subjects of growing interest today. In this dissertation a new perspective on the subject is founded on the basis of the minority students' existential conditions in their school life. The idea and method of the dissertation is based on the experiences of a preschool study which led me to the purpose of illustrating social and pedagogical living conditions, as they are expressed in the minority students' narratives on how they experience their situation in the compulsory school [7-16 age group] and how they are treated and judged by their teachers. In three studies of the work and living conditions of minority students, I examine how minority students in the compulsory school experience and handle the pedagogical attitudes they encounter. Students in grades 2, 5 and 9 relate frankly about their experiences of the attitudes of parents, teachers and schoolmates and about their own linguistic qualifications. Based on the material of a national evaluation of the teaching of mathematics, I also study how the students experience the acquisition of skills. The complete set of data is interpreted with the aim and direction of reaching an understanding of the students' situation, i.e. in a hermeneutic perspective. The contents of the students' narratives and the results of the questionnaire from the national evaluation are the themes of the empirical section of the dissertation, and these main themes are summarized in the final chapter. An expressed ideal of a democratic school contrasts with another and more subtle message, which is transferred through a covert "immanent pedagogics." The idea is that the minority students stand outside democracy at school, i.e. their situations and identities are not recognized. The discussion deals with how "a school for everyone" rather functions as "a school for others" from the minority students' perspectives. My ambition is to spread knowledge on these fundamental existential conditions, which characterize the school environment of the minority students.

Educational restructuring is an international phenomenon, which emphasizes flexibility, local decision-making, self-regulation and innovation in contrast to previous bureaucratic governing and standardised teaching. Current reforms aim at a school adapted to the emerging information- and knowledge intensive society. The aim of the dissertation is to examine current curriculum reforms concerning the governing and organisation of time in compulsory school. In what ways is the temporal order of schools changing in a late modern post-industrial society? What new conditions for teaching are these changes implicating? What kinds of dilemmas emerge for different school actors in conducting these reforms? By using critical discourse analysis, educational reforms are studied as a dynamic discursive practice with different concurring imperatives formatted in tension fields of cultural, social and political changes. Four case studies are used to explore how a current Swedish curriculum reform, Without a National Timetable in Compulsory School, was conducted in an experiment period over five years. The local appropriation of the policy intentions was found to depend on: (i) the preparedness of reform within the particular school, (ii) the dominant school culture, (iii) the local decision-making processes, and (iv) variations in reform mobilisation (identified in the case studies as micro-political struggle, resistance by evasiveness, preservation of consensus and stratification). The results demonstrate that curriculum reform, the ongoing movement of educational restructuring, is not a linear unambiguous process of application. On the contrary, it is a discursive arena, which has a great impact as it involves discourses of efficiency and quality development, increased professionalism, economical cost-reduction, choice and devolution. These discourses involve concurring imperatives for school actors to handle time in the organisation of teaching dependent upon how they are positioned as (i) effective ‘goals makers’ (ii) problem-solvers, who remove obstacles for individual learning projects, (iii) strategists in a more competitive educational landscape, (iv) and moral agents, who in deliberation with others work towards a fair and equal school. It is concluded that for school actors, who work under the crossfire of educational restructuring, these imperatives pose a number of complex dilemmas.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the teaching that is conducted in relation to sustainable development within the community-oriented subjects for grades 1–3. Both qualitative and quantitative collection methods have been selected to provide answers to the study's purpose and research questions. The primary qualitative collection method used in this study was semi-structured interviews with both teachers and pupils. As a quantitative collection method, a web survey was chosen to strengthen the study's reliability and validity. The collected material was processed by using a qualitative content analysis where the results were categorized into different categories and then presented based on the study's research questions. The study's results show that both teachers and pupils have some difficulties regarding the interpretation of the concept of sustainable development. However, there is some knowledge that in one way or another relates to sustainable development. Teachers around the country participated in the web survey, where most of the participants showed a greater understanding of the concept. The teaching described by the teachers from the study is mainly practical, but also very comprehensive with a great focus on things that concern the environment. The result also shows that the teaching that concerns sustainable development is considered to be important for the continued interest and learning among the pupils in the study. In order to create a meaningful teaching, the participants in the study believe that the teaching must be varied and closely anchored with the pupils where participation is highly valued. / Syftet med denna studie är att belysa den undervisning som bedrivs i relation till hållbar utveckling inom de samhällsorienterade ämnena för årskurserna 1–3. Både kvalitativa samt kvantitativa insamlingsmetoder har valts ut för att ge svar åt studiens syfte och forskningsfrågor. Den primära kvalitativa insamlingsmetoden i denna studie var semistrukturerade intervjuer med lärare och elever. Som kvantitativ insamlingsmetod valdes en webbenkätsundersökning för att stärka studiens reliabilitet samt validitet. Det insamlade materialet har bearbetats genom att använda en kvalitativ innehållsanalys där resultatet kategoriserades i olika kategorier för att sedan kunna presenteras utifrån studiens forskningsfrågor. Studiens resultat visar att både lärare och elever har en del svårigheter angående tolkningen av begreppet hållbar utveckling. Däremot finns en del kunskaper som på ett eller annat sätt rör hållbar utveckling. I webbenkätundersökningen deltog lärare runt om i landet, där flertalet av deltagarna visade en större förståelse för begreppet. Den undervisning som beskrivits av lärarna från studien är främst praktisk, men också mycket övergripande med stort fokus på sådant som rör miljön. Resultatet visar också att undervisningen som berör hållbar utveckling anses enligt lärarna i studien som betydelsefull för fortsatt intresse och lärande bland eleverna. För att skapa en betydelsefull undervisning menar deltagarna i studien att undervisningen måste vara varierad samt nära förankrad med eleverna där delaktighet värderas högt.

Denna uppsats avser att besvara frågeställningen om det förekommer någon skillnad i betygsinflation mellan fristående och kommunala grundskolor. Frågan besvaras genom att jämföra resultat på PISA-tester med nationella prov och slutbetyg. Datan är hämtad från OECD:s och Skolverkets databaser och den metod som används för att jämföra informationen från de två databaserna är coarsened exact matching. Resultaten visar att det förekommer ett statistiskt signifikant samband mellan typ av huvudman och avvikelser i betygspoäng i ämnet svenska, där fristående skolor avviker mer än kommunala skolor. Inget signifikant samband råder för matematik. Det går inte att utesluta att avvikelserna beror på andra faktorer än betygsinflation såsom skillnader i vad de olika resultatmåtten avser att fånga. / This thesis aims to answer the question of whether there is a difference in grade inflation between independent and municipal compulsory schools. This is done by comparing results of PISA-tests to the national tests and the final grades. The data is collected from the OECD’s and the Swedish National Agency for Education’s databases and the method used for comparing the information from the two databases is coarsened exact matching. The results show that there is a significant relationship between type of school organiser and deviations in grade points for the subject Swedish where independent deviate more than municipal schools. There is no significant relationship for mathematics. It cannot be ruled out that the deviations arise due to other factors than grade inflation, such as differences in what the performance measures are constructed to reflect.