This thesis deals with idioms taken from contemporary newspapers. The purpose is to find out which idioms are known and used by native speakers of different ages and also to what extent the entries in the dictionaries offer accurate descriptions to the meaning of these idioms. We already know that idioms which have been modified, as often is the case in newspapers, are often more difficult to understand than others. The study has been conducted by means of questionnaires answered by native speakers in Germany. In order to assess the ability that German native speakers have to understand and use these idioms, I have chosen informants from three age groups; the first two groups of informants are grammar school students at a German Gymnasium, in the 7 and the 10 form respectively and the last group consists of adult speakers in Germany with university education. This last group conforms to the final phase of language acquisition. The results clearly show that younger generations - and to a certain extent older students and indeed educated adults - are less likely to understand idioms which have complex explanations in the dictionaries and/or whose meanings have been modified. Similarly, all age groups are more likely to understand idioms with simple explanations, those which appear frequently on the Internet and those whose meanings have not been modified, though there is a higher degree of “tolerance” when it comes to complex idioms among the adults. It is also clear that the meaning of an idiom cannot always be fully explained out of context. In most cases dictionaries offer an explanation that functions in most contexts, yet it is not uncommon for the meaning of an idiom to be complex and to vary more or less depending on the context. As a way to find out how frequent the idioms are, I have compared their frequency in www.Google.de and found that there is a clear correlation between high frequency in Google and the knowledge displayed by the informants.

The child who starts school soon becomes aware that it is important to learn to read and write. When it is educated in written literacy, pictures are used in reading textbooks and other school materials. The child is also asked to draw and talk about pictures in other contexts. Against this background, the aim of the study is to investigate the importance of pictures for children’s learning to read and write. The aim includes a description and analysis of the existing reading and writing discourse. The study problemises relational aspects of school practice, research and teacher education. This problemisation visualises a need for both a change and a development of the field of reading and writing. The thesis starts with a knowledge survey of the field of reading and writing. The survey provides the basis of a text study in which 11 Swedish theses, published between 1996 and 2003, are discussed and related to report materials published by The Swedish National Agency for School Improvement and the Board of Education. The text study is followed by an analysis of pictures, where the empirical material consists both of pictures taken from reading textbooks and reading diagnoses and pictures produced by children. The total result shows that there is consensus about the importance of different methods being applied through balanced reading programmes. At the same time it seems as if the field includes two discourses, a reading and a writing discourse. The dominant reading discourse is characterised by a strong emphasis on the teacher’s competence in terms of being able to see, create progression, arrange in order, settle up and correct for the purpose of providing good preconditions for learning. Pictures are given here a clearly subordinate role. As for the writing discourse, there is a clear shift from the teacher to the child as a meaning carrying and meaning creating subject. To some extent pictures are then recognised as a complementary form of mediation in connection with writing. In the reading discourse it is clear that pictures are traditionally used as illustrations of texts for the purpose of proficiency training. In that case pictures are given a complex role. On the one hand they are criticised for being ambiguous. This ambiguity can lead the child away from effective decoding. On the other hand it is presupposed, paradoxically enough, that there is a one-to-one relationship between picture and text. In contrast, children themselves seem to be able to apply a well-integrated use of picture and text where the intention is superordinate to the convention. The picture-text relation is then expansive: through the child’s involvement the interplay between words and pictures is functional and creates meaning. The thesis shows that a widened text concept, and consideration for the forms of production and presentation that characterise our culture, may yield knowledge contributing to developing the field of reading and writing. In order for this development to be possible, a complementary description of what characterises the respective discourse is required. In this description the concepts of communication and language, society and context and understanding and action function as an active intertriad for handling the teaching of reading and writing not as two separate fields but as a broadened, and at the same genuinely inclusive, field of knowledge.

This thesis contributes to the knowledge about the role of sociocultural resources in students’ learning in Science Education. In the analyses, both individual experiences and situation are taken into account. Different sociocultural resources – the teacher, artefacts and texts – that students encounter in educational settings are focused with the aim to study what role they play for which meaning making is made possible and relevant. To study these encounters, a pragmatist approach called practical epistemology analysis – i.e. an analysis of what students use as relevant information, valid questions and relevant attentiveness – is used and advanced. The empirical material consists of video recordings from Science Education classrooms in Swedish compulsory school. The first paper is an introduction to the line of work subsequently performed. In the second paper, a method for analysing the role of teaching for students’ meaning making – epistemological moves analysis – is developed and illustrated. This method focuses on those actions of the teacher that have a function of influencing what direction students’ learning takes. In the third paper, the practical epistemology approach is applied in order to clarify, within a sociocultural understanding of learning, the role of the interplay between students’ prior experiences and the use of artefacts in students’ meaning making. In the fourth paper, the practical epistemology approach is applied as a method for investigating the role of instructional texts in laboratory settings for students’ meaning making. The thesis shows how individual continuity can be understood and analysed within a sociocultural perspective on learning. The developed methods make it possible to study learning as constituted in action without ascribing teachers, artefacts or texts a pre-determined meaning prior to their use in a practice. The results show that the way sociocultural resources are made intelligible by the students shapes the conditions for further meaning making.

The focus of this dissertation is a group of individuals applying for psychotherapy. They have attended an office that offers psychodynamic psychotherapy, based on a Christian outlook on mankind. My research questions dealt with why they did apply for psychotherapy and what their goals were. I had planned the study and selected my data collection methods considering three domains of hypothetical reasons for their decisions to apply for psychotherapy. These grounds were their object relations, existential/religious orientations, and psychological problems and goals for the treatment. The first part of the dissertation is a survey of concepts, theories and former studies in the mentioned domains. Concerning the object-relations I make use of psychoanalytical thinking on the importance of early experiences in relation to parents and other persons but also its application to a “religious relation”, namely to the relation of the individual to her/his socalled God-representation. Concerning the existential/religious orientations I make use of existential-analytical thinking on satisfaction and meaning of life and death as an existential problem. I also make use of research from the psychology of religion on different dimensions of religiosity and its correlations to mental health. In the second part of the dissertation there is an account of my development of methods to be used in data collection. In this part of the book one can also find data from a reference group of people not applying for psychotherapy. The main part of the dissertation is the third part, describing the data of eight persons applying for psychotherapy. The information, from interviews, projective methods and scales, from each of the study subjects is put together, analysed and interpreted as intensive case studies. Questions in the interview covered religious and existential matters, relations to important persons during childhood and later, the persons’ descriptions of themselves, and the reasons for applying for psychotherapy and their goals for the treatment. Their answers were analysed using a hermeneutic method. The projective methods covered a picture and unfinished sentences. The psychological scales covered religious beliefs and satisfaction and meaning of life and a semantic differential the symbolic meaning of the words Mother, Father and GOD. According to the results the influence of the object-relations on the decision to apply for psychotherapy was sometimes direct. But on the whole the most obvious reason was the persons’ experiences and descriptions of themselves as filled with conflicting feelings and lack of or difficulties in controlling them. The influence of existential themes was not so obvious and the effects of the religious orientations were sometimes direct and sometimes only indirect. Peoples’ mental problems and goals of the psychotherapy influenced directly their decisions to apply. Most individuals had been in therapy before. There was some difference in the description of goals between those individuals who finished recently and those applying for the first time or long time after an earlier therapy. The latter having more well-defined goals. Theoretically it is possible to classify goals into treatment and life goals, but in real life they often stick together. One important conclusion was that, when the persons experience themselves as filled with contradictory feelings or conflicting strivings and having lack of feelings or difficulties in controlling them, they also experience themselves as responsible to this and as a consequence they also apply for psychotherapy.

Being affected by a serious or life-threatening illness implies an existentially changed situation that is accompanied by a number of questions about the illness itself, consequences of the illness in an everyday context and implications for the future. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine people’s meaning-making when they are affected by a serious illness and to determine how the illness acquires meaning in the context of their lives. The dissertation thus deals with what can be referred to as existential meaning-making. A hermeneutical approach was adopted, drawing more specifically on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory that emphasises the importance of different dimensions of time and memory in the understanding of narratives. An empirical study was carried out of illness narratives collected in research interviews with six women who had been diagnosed with serious illnesses, such as cancer, stroke and heart attack. The analysis reveals that the discovery of the illness and the period following was characterized by chaos and a lack of time perspective, feelings of lack of freedom and thoughts about death, but also feelings of responsibility towards the family. Experiences of the health services were also important in accounts of this early period, particularly wishes for more empathic encounters with the professionals. In the women’s accounts of the long term living with the illness, death continues to emerge as a back drop to their everyday experiences of the illness, but gradually more as confronting the problem of death rather than giving up life. Over time, relationships to significant others and the importance of everyday life also constitute increasingly important themes. In their expectations for the future, the women account for some experiences that have been important in creating a sense of hope and heightened vitality, and thus a new ‘wholeness’, such as being close to nature as well as their religious or spiritual experiences. These results are discussed in terms of how memories of significant events or places play an important role in existential meaning-making, and also how reflections on these memories can be seen as a process of existential ‘learning’.

Contemporary higher education seems to be moving away from the lecture form and being replaced by student-centered education. This study attempts to ascertain in what ways student teachers experience the lecture as a meaningful educational form. The essay attempts to establish a shared system of meaning which will help determine what types of lectures are meaningful. Finally, the study also attempts to find different aspects of the lecture which are experienced as democratic.   The study is qualitative and began with a pilot study which was followed up by four interviews with student teachers who have recently completed the same AUO teachers’ program.   Different theories on media by Marshal McLuhan, Neil Postman and Walter Ong were utilized together with J.J. Gibson’s theories on affordances as well as Orrin Klapp’s theories on meaning. Using these theories it was determined that meaning is derived from the activities that are afforded by: the utilization of different media, perceiving the value of an event or thing, and the different functions of language. It was also determined from the different theories that the lecture is a type of ecology that requires a balance of meaningful information if the affordances of the environment are to be perceived. These theories were woven together and a model was established which was named “The Didactic Pendulum”. This model was used as a tool for interpreting and categorizing responses and explaining results.   The results indicate that meaningful lectures were to a large degree determined by the lecturer and their enthusiasm for the subject matter. It was also concluded that rhetoric and careful use of electronic media are also important. An important feature of the Teachers’ Education Program is that student teachers learn from observing the actions of the university teachers when they lecture. Concerning democratic aspects of the lecture, lectures are perceived democratic when they afford students with the opportunity to participate, but also when students get to challenge the ideas of the lecturers. One conclusion that was drawn was that a lecture is democratic when it has the potential to lead students to democratic action. A main critique of the lecture is that they are often experienced as isolated from other aspects of the course and students are not afforded the opportunity to question the content and the authority of the teachers. Moreover a balanced educational ecology is one where the lecturer is open to feedback signals of the students and is able to alter the flow of information accordingly.

<p>A strong model of culture should capture both the structured and negotiated elements of cultural meaning, allowing for the fluidity of social action and the agency of social actors. Although cultural meanings often reproduce societal structures, supporting stability and consensus, culture is constitutive of and not merely produced by structural arrangements. It is therefore essential to establish clear mechanisms which guide how individuals interpret social events and apply cultural meanings in making sense of the social world. As such, this dissertation focuses on the model of culture forwarded by affect control theory, a sociological theory linking culturally shared meaning with identity, behavior, and emotion in interpersonal interaction (for reviews, see Heise 2007; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006). </p><p>While many theories have attempted to deal with components of the cultural model separately, affect control theory provides a unifying multi-level framework, which rectifies many shortcomings of earlier models by simultaneously accounting for individual cognition and emotion, situational and institutional context, and cultural meaning. The dissertation begins by introducing affect control theory, which considers cultural meanings to be societally bound, based on consensual and widely shared sentiments, and stable over long periods of time. We advocate several refinements to the theory's assumptions about culture, proposing that cultural sentiments are dynamic and structurally contingent, and that mechanisms operating within social networks serve as important sources of meaning consensus and change.</p><p>The remainder of the dissertation presents empirical evidence in support of our propositions. First, we draw upon primary survey data to show how social position and patterns of social connectedness relate to inculcation into the dominant culture and commonality with the affective meanings of others. Respondents' demographics, social position, social connectedness, network composition, and experiences in close relationships are explored as predictors of inculcation and commonality in meaning. Second, through an experimental study, we explore social influence processes as a mechanism of cultural consensus and change. Analyses examine both conditionally manipulated features of the group structure and respondents' emergent assessments of social influence as predictors of change in task-related attitudes and affective meanings. </p><p>Our results identify structural sources of normative differentiation and consensus, and introduce social networks methodologies as a means of elaborating affect control theory's explanatory model. More broadly, the findings generated by this project contribute to an ongoing academic discussion on the origins of cultural content, exploring the complex and dynamic relationship between patterns of social interaction and cultural affective meaning. We close by introducing research in progress, which examines predictors of clustering in affective meaning and explores how values, self, and identity condition the effects of social influence on decision-making.</p> / Dissertation

The landscape of cancer care is evolving and as a result nursing care continues to develop and respond to the changing needs of oncology patients and their families. There is a paucity of qualitative research examining the experience of being an oncology nurse on an inpatient unit. Therefore, a qualitative study using an interpretive phenomenological approach has been undertaken to discover the lived experience of being an oncology nurse. In-depth tape recorded interviews has been conducted with six oncology nurses who worked on two adult inpatient oncology units. Van Manen’s (1990) interpretive phenomenological approach has been used to analyze the data by subjecting the transcripts to an analysis both line by line and as a whole. The overarching theme of the interviews is: Investing to Make a Difference. The themes that reflect this overarching theme are: Caring for the Whole Person, Being an Advocate, Walking a Fine Line, and Feeling Like You are Part of Something Good. Oncology nurses provide care for their patients through a holistic lens that further enhances how they come to know their patients. Over time, relationships with patients and families develop and these nurses share that balancing the emotional aspects of their work is key in being able to continue to invest in their work and in these relationships. Their investment is further evident as oncology nurses continuously update their knowledge, for example, of treatment regimes, medication protocols, and as they champion their patients wishes and needs. As nurses develop their own identities as oncology nurses, they in turn enhance the team with their emerging skill and knowledge. These research findings serve to acknowledge the meaning of oncology nurses’ work and inform the profession’s understanding of what it means to be an oncology nurse.

Conceptual change is one of the most important influences in modern educational research and this theoretical framework can be used for empirical research aimed at improving our common knowledge about learning as well as developing new theories and practices within the education system. In its very basic meaning, conceptual change can be explained as a person who during the course of the learning experience changes their initial conception of a phenomenon (such as a object or a concept) from one specific point of view to another. The aim of this study is to map out the differences and similarities between two seemingly opposite movements within today’s pedagogical research community. Within phenomenography a constitutionalist approach to learning is used, which means that the conceptions formed by students are considered to be an internal representation of the individual’s interpretation of their own knowledge in relation to their surroundings. The intentional analytical approach suggests that contextualisation is necessary for conceptual change to take place, for the student to be able to interpret the assignment or task at hand and then incorporate that in meaningful activity that will lead to a successful learning process. Both the intentional and the phenomenographic approach agree that it is the meaning of a task that is important in the learning situation, but the differences lie in the ways of distinguishing what this meaning consists of as well as the means of finding out what the meaning is to an individual. / Begreppsutveckling är en av de viktigaste influenserna inom det pedagogiska forskningsområdet. Denna teoretiska inriktning innebär att man genom empirisk forskning studerar lärande och dess kontext. Detta kan sedan bidra till vår kunskap om vad som påverkar lärprocessen samt hur denna skulle kunna användas i utvecklingen av nya didaktiska metoder och verktyg. Begreppsutveckling kan förstås som teorier om hur en individ, genom övning och reflektion ändrar en grundläggande uppfattning om ett fenomen eller objekt från en specifik uppfattning till en annan. I den här litteraturstudien, kommer jag att försöka kartlägga två skilda sätt att anta utmaningen att undersöka hur lärande genom begreppsutveckling kan förstås och tolkas, nämligen fenomenografi och intentionell analys. Fenomenografi är utvecklat med en konstitutionell ansats till lärandet, där man menar att de koncept som individen använder formas genom interna representationer av den egna tolkningen av omgivningen samt hur det egna konceptet relaterar till omgivningen. Intentionell analys å andra sidan menar att begreppsutveckling uppstår när individen kontextualiserar uppgiften genom meningsskapande processer i relation till omgivningen och att detta beskriver lärprocessen. Den gemensamma nämnaren för båda dessa perspektiv är att det är meningsskapandet för individen som är nyckeln till lärandet. Skillnaden mellan dem märks i synen på lärandet i de meningsskapande processerna där man närmar sig betydelsen av denna process som den ter sig för den lärande individen.

Servant leadership är ett begrepp som visar potential inom ledarskapsforskningen, framförallt för att förklara meningsskapande ledarskap, hur ledaren leder sig själv samt hur ledarskap kan accepteras utan auktoritet. Problemet är att forskningen hittills varit alltför okritisk. Begreppets validitet har bevisats i kvantitativa mått, men dess implikationer för själva ledarskapsutövandet eller ledaren är oklara. Syftet med uppsatsen är att testa begreppet servant leadership som verktyg för ledarskapsstudier. Kan begreppet konkretiseras och mätas? Kan man vara säker på vad man mäter? För att besvara dessa frågor omfattar uppsatsen en granskande litteraturstudie och en tillämpande fallstudie i tre delar. Resultaten antyder att begreppet servant leadership kan brista i precision och tillförlitlighet. Vissa viktiga faktorer avspeglas inte i enkätresultat, medan andra okända eller irrelevanta påverkar desto mer. Enkätstudier av servant leadership kan, i sin nuvarande utformning, inte bidra med någon förståelse för vad man faktiskt har mätt. Servant leadership kan dock vara värdefullt genom att lyfta intressanta frågor om ledarskap, oaktat mätbarhet. Fallstudien har genomförts i tre delar: En liten replikerande enkätundersökning bland soldaterna i en spaningsgrupp, en omfattande deltagande observation vid en av gruppens övningar, samt en intervju med gruppens chef. Uppsatsen behandlar huvudsakligen teorier om servant leadership (Robert Greenleaf, Larry Spears, Page och Wong) utifrån teorier om meningsskapande ledarskap (Lars Svedberg) samt self leadership (Crossan och Mazutis). / Servant leadership is a concept that shows potential in leadership research, in particular to explain management of meaning, self leadership and acceptance of leadership without authority. The problem is that research this far lacks a critical perspective. Validity of servant leadership measurements has been proven statistically, but its implications for the leadership or the leader remain unclear. The purpose of this paper is to test the concept of servant leadership as a tool for leadership studies. Can it be concretized and measured? Can one be certain as to what is measured? To answer these questions, this paper includes an auditing study of literature and a practical, utilizing case study in three parts. The results indicate that the concept of servant leadership might be lacking in precision and reliability. Some important factors are not reflected in survey results, while other unknown or irrelevant ones have too great of an impact. Survey studies of servant leadership, in their current form don’t seem provide any understanding as to what is actually being measured. This being said, servant leadership can be valuable through raising interesting questions about leadership, regardless of measurability.