This scientific essay begins with three stories that portrays situations where different ways to view and understand the learning process of children in preschool. In the first two stories The Cakegame and Still life the aim is to describe how me, and my colleagues can have different perceptions on our role as preschool teachers. The purpose of the third story Have you done something fun today? is to present how daily interactions with the children’s guardians can create difficulties describing the process of teaching. Considering these differing views, I have, by reflecting, tried to figure out what it is that has brought on these individual perspectives. I have also looked at how the lacking of a common approach in how the teaching is carried out affects the children in questions. In the essay there is a common thread that to a great part is about the practical knowledge but also about the too varying view on children's learning in preschool, things that was revealed to me through my stories. The essay is also about how to compare between how I and other educators choose to support children in their learning through theoretical and practical knowledge but also through our own experiences and approaches. In this essay I will approach the concept of teaching and I will try to unravel what it means especially for myself, but also for other people that will in some way come in contact with the education system. I will compare the forthcoming pre-school curriculum with the current one to see if that will bring any answers to my questions. The theoretical perspectives I have analysed in relation to my own stories is based on concepts on preschool educators competencies described by researches Sonja Sheridan, Anette Sandberg and Pia Williams. A brief analysis about the concept of scaffold play has also been done, which refers to the supportive education while playing. The reflection is divided into two parts and are based on these two questions: How can the educator understand and interpret the learning assignment? as well as How can the educator describe and mediate the learning assignment? / Min vetenskapliga essä börjar med tre berättelser som gestaltar situationer där det framträder olika sätt att både se på, och förstå barns lärande i förskolan. I de första två berättelserna Tårtspelet och Stilleben vill jag beskriva händelser där jag och mina kollegor har skilda uppfattningar om våra roller som lärare i förskolan. I den tredje berättelsen Har ni gjort något roligt idag? vill jag visa på hur svårt det kan vara att i den dagliga kontakten med barnens vårdnadshavare beskriva undervisningsprocessen. Utifrån de skiftande synsätten har jag sedan, genom reflektion, försökt nysta i vad som bidragit till dessa enskilda perspektiv. Jag har även tittat på hur det påverkar barnen i verksamheten då det ofta saknas ett gemensamt förhållningssätt till hur undervisningen praktiseras. I texten framträder en röd tråd som handlar till stor del om praktisk kunskap men även om den alltför varierande syn på barns lärande i förskolan som jag fått syn på i mina berättelser. Den handlar också om att jämföra hur jag och andra pedagoger i förskolan kan stötta barnen i deras lärande genom teoretiska och praktiska kunskaper men också genom egna erfarenheter och förhållningssätt. I min essä närmar jag mig begreppet undervisning och försöker reda ut vad det kan betyda, framförallt för mig själv men även för andra människor som kommer i kontakt med förskolan. Jag jämför den kommande läroplanen med den nuvarande, för att se om den kan ge några svar på mina frågor. De teoretiska perspektiv jag undersökt i förhållande till mina berättelser utgår bland annat från några av de begrepp om förskollärares kompetenser som framlagts av forskarna Sonja Sheridan, Anette Sandberg och Pia Williams. Jag har även kortfattat tittat på begreppet scaffold play som handlar om stöttande undervisning i lek. Reflektionen är uppdelad i två delar utifrån mina frågeställningar; Hur kan pedagogen förstå och tolka lärandeuppdraget? samt Hur kan pedagogen beskriva och förmedla lärandeuppdraget?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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Examining representations of gender from a postcolonial feminist perspective, Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Masculinity in Irish Film analyzes select works of three popular filmmakers whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present.1 I argue that these three artists--John Ford, Jim Sheridan, and Paul Greengrass--explore fundamental questions about patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and that, in the process, they upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Investigating alternative conceptions of manhood presented in these films, as well as these filmmakers’ complex engagement with Hollywood film genres, I offer a fuller understanding of their subtle critiques of patriarchy. I contend that their illustrations of socially sanctioned male dominance in the lives of women, as well as their portrayals of male and female resistance to patriarchy, constitute a subversive challenge to traditional order. In the process, I address gendered archetypes that are prevalent in Irish and American cinemas and analyze the ways in which Ford, Sheridan, and Greengrass employ and critique these masculine types through their portrayals of fathers, sons, boxers and pacifists. Ultimately, I argue that the recent Irish films of Sheridan and Greengrass gesture toward future modes of manhood that completely disavow patriarchy and violence. In sum, this project plots a trajectory of Irish cinema during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, charting a progression from ambivalent critique of patriarchy (in the films of John Ford) to outright rejection of patriarchal masculinity (in Jim Sheridan’s work) to reconceptualization of manhood and the family (in the Irish films of Sheridan and Paul Greengrass). / text

This paper examines the expansive history of literary tomboys in the century preceding Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868). Applying concepts from gender performativity theory, it explores earlier and previously overlooked portrayals of tomboys (or, alternatively, "hoydens" or "romps"), especially in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777), Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Romp; A Comic Opera in Two Acts (1786), Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859). Because the tomboy phenomenon emphasizes that gender roles must be learned and can be resisted, tomboy characters are implicitly making a feminist point. As such, in the gap between Austen and Southworth, texts with minor and derogatory mentions of tomboys connect tomboyism with the prevailing anti-feminism of the early nineteenth century. By examining the developmental arc of tomboyism throughout literature and culture, this essay develops a greater understanding of how tomboyism fits within different historical periods and was a fully recognizable type in Britain and America decades before Alcott's Jo March supposedly normalized it in popular culture.