THESIS ABSTRACT Maria Emilia Escobedo Resano The first chapter will consist of a detailed description of the Cooperation Agreement, contextualizing it with the EU-Mexico former relations and the troubles both countries encountered before signing it, especially the Democratic Clause which presented a big issue for the Mexican government. The second chapter will go through Mexico's indigenous education status and the laws that improved the coverage, quality, and access to schooling. I will also present some national statistics comparing the non-indigenous with indigenous children's access to education, quality of public schools, and academic achievement . The third chapter will be about the EU's education guidelines for Mexico, explaining both projects, in which budgetary line they fall in, the funding process, and the actors involved: Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Ministry of Education; and the way these projects work. All of this is in order to understand EU-Mexico's cooperation on indigenous childrens' education, how it is carried out, and the participation of different level actors. The fourth chapter will deal with the assessment of the projects; this is a crucial point for evaluating the impact on the population, the spill-over effect and the accuracy of these very specific projects for the...

Sweden is a member of the European Union and Sweden’s turn-out in the elections to the European Parliament is low compared to its own national elections. Earlier research in the field of didactics in civics regarding the EU have mostly focused on aspects of civic education such as which subject content teachers teach and what knowledge they test their students on. Even today, textbooks are an important part of shaping education. This study has focused on how the EU is presented in textbooks for civics in Swedish upper secondary school, specifically the course “Samhällskunskap 1b”. The aim was to research the political knowledge about the EU presented in textbooks and research how the presented political knowledge can contribute to political participation.  The study utilizes two different theories, the first is Maria Jarl’s definition of the participatory democratic process and the second is a categorical instrument constructed by Peter Wall used to analyze political knowledge. The method used is both a qualitative content analysis and a comparative analysis. The categorical instrument used stipulates that political knowledge contains three dimensions, polity, policy, and politics. Each dimension has several variable categories attached.  In the study, four textbooks written for the civics course “Samhällskunskap 1b” were analyzed, in accordance with the developed methodological framework. The results of the study found that each of the textbooks contained all three dimensions of political knowledge. However, the dimensions were not equally present in the content with an imbalance favoring the polity dimension which encompassed more than half of the observed variable categories in each of the textbooks. The politics dimension was also found to be relatively non-existent in each of the textbooks with coverage as low as 2% in one of the textbooks. Thus, the conclusion is that the political knowledge regarding the EU in the textbooks is far too one-sided to provide a satisfactory contribution to political participation. We also confirm that a similar focus on the polity dimension regarding the EU exists in textbooks which can also be found in the content teachers teach. This might have several implications for future political participants in Sweden and thus also Swedish democracy.

Trots att kunskapsområdet EU har en större plats i både grundskolans och gymnasieskolans styrdokument idag har brister i EU- undervisningen uppdagats. Eleverna ges inte tillräckliga kunskaper och går ur gymnasiet med bristande förståelse för EU och sin egen roll som EU- medborgare. Detta väcker frågor kring hur undervisningen om EU ser ut på högstadiet och gymnasiet samt om en kunskapsprogression möjliggörs.Syftet med denna studie är att belysa högstadielärares och gymnasielärares tankar och beskrivning av sin undervisning om EU, för att analysera om deras undervisning möjliggör en progression för elevernas EU-kunskaper. För att möjliggöra en sådan studie har undersökningen genomförts genom kvalitativa intervjuer av fyra högstadielärare och fyra gymnasielärare som alla undervisar i ämnet Samhällskunskap.Studien har utgått från antagandet att undervisningen om EU och kunskapsprogressionen inte är tillräcklig, vilket till viss del bekräftas av studiens resultat. Resultatet visade aspekter som tyder på en likartad undervisning på bägge skolstadier och som därför inte anses leda till en progression. Samtidigt uppmärksammas delar i undervisningen på gymnasiet som tyder på en fördjupning av tidigare tillägnade kunskaper och som därför gynnar en kunskapsprogression, och även faktorer som kan vara anledningar till att kunskapsprogressionen försvåras; så som tidsbrist, stoffträngsel och ointresse hos elever och lärare. Studien visar att antagandet om brister i EU- undervisningen och ett visst missgynnande av kunskapsprogression stämmer men att det också finns möjliga förklaringar till detta. / Despite the fact that knowledge regarding EU plays a larger role today in both steering documents for secondary school and high school has imperfections been identified. The students are not given enough knowledge and finish high school with a lack of understanding of EU and their own role as citizens in EU. This raises questions regarding how the education of the subject is managed in secondary and high school and also if a knowledge progression is made possible.The purpose of this study is to put a light on the thoughts of teachers in secondary- and high schools about their EU education to be able to analyze if their teaching makes a progression of the students’ knowledge possible regarding their knowledge of EU. To make such a study possible the survey was conducted through qualitative interviews of four social science teachers in secondary school and four social science teachers in high school have been made.The study was been based on the assumption that education about EU is lacking and that knowledge progression is not adequate which to a part is proved by the result of the study. The result showed a similar education in both stages which therefore doesn’t point to a knowledge progression. At the same time parts of the education in high school indicates a deepened study of different knowledge areas studied in secondary school which therefore favors knowledge progression, but at the same time progression can be reduced by identified factors like lack of time, “overcrowded” subject areas and lack of interest from both students and teachers. The study shows that the assumption that imperfections exists in EU education and that a degree of limited knowledge progression is true, but it also shows that there are possible explanations to why this may be.