This study explores how HIV-positive teachers within a specific social context understand, interpret and act on HIV and Life Skills policy. My aim was to illuminate the experiences of teachers living with AIDS and how their experiences affect the ways in which they understand and act on government policy. As a constructivist, I worked on the premise that people’s experiences can best be understood by interacting with them and listening to them. I chose a narrative research design because it allowed me to explore and understand the perceptions and complexity of my research partners’ experiences, and to faithfully present and represent the stories told by teachers living with AIDS. I used the data collected from the teachers’ stories to write narratives that gave a first person account of the experiences of each teacher. To express my own voice in the text I created a column on the side of each page where I recorded my own experience of the process of the inquiry. I used inductive analysis in order to make sense of the field data. Rather than beginning with a theory, inductive analysis allowed me to expose the dominant and significant themes in the raw data without imposing preconceptions on the data. Three distinct themes emerged from the analysis, and formed my conceptualisation of the experiences of teachers living with AIDS: a) conflict between teacher as role model and ideal citizen, and teacher as an HIV-positive person; b) HIV illness and its impact on the body of the teacher; c) teachers as emotional actors. The main findings from the study suggest that in a context with AIDS there are limits to what education policy can achieve if it remains out of touch with a real world in which school is attended by children and teachers whose bodies are either infected or affected by the HIV virus. This is substantiated by the fact that while the HIV/AIDS policy is about bodies and about emotions, it is blind to the bodies and the emotions of those implementing it. I contend that it is this oversight that creates the wide gap between policy intentions and outcomes. Secondly the study highlights the uniqueness of HIV/AIDS education policy and its implementation which, unlike other education policies, powerfully brings to the fore the emotions of the implementers. I conclude the study by suggesting that the policy-making process be reconstructed to inscribe the real bodies and real emotions of the teachers into the policy, to shift from a purely prevention mode to one that looks at the whole prevention-to-care continuum and acknowledges that a significant majority of school pupils and teachers are infected and affected. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur lärare i årskurs 4-6 genomför litteraturundervisning i ämnet svenska för att främja elevers läslust och läsmotivation. Syftet fördjupas vidare i vilka metoder lärare använder när de arbetar med läsning i klassrummet, vad lärare anser kan påverka elevers läslust och läsmotivation, samt deras egen inställning till läsning och om den kan ha inverkan på hur de i sin undervisning lyckas intressera elever för läsning. För att ta reda på detta användes metoden kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer. Jag intervjuade fyra lärare som arbetar i årskurs 4-6, på två olika skolor i Sverige. Vid genomförandet hade jag en intervjuguide till min hjälp och intervjuerna spelades in. Resultatet visar att alla fyra lärare ser svårigheter med att motivera eleverna att läsa och att främja deras läslust. Högläsning är den metod de alla använder sig mycket av, för att de tycker att det kan väcka ett intresse hos eleven. Bokval, lässvårigheter och hemmet är några faktorer som de tror kan påverka elevers läslust. Gällande lärarnas egen inställning till läsning är svaren varierande, men alla tror att de kan använda sitt eget eventuella läsintresse för att i sin undervisning intressera eleven för läsning. / The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers who work in grades 4-6 organize their teaching of literature to encourage pupils’ enjoyment of reading and their motivation to read. More specifically, the study looks at what methods teachers use to teach reading; how teachers feel they can encourage pupils’ reading enjoyment and motivation to read; and teachers’ own attitude to reading and if it can have an impact on how they manage to interest pupils in reading. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four teachers in grades 4-6 at two schools in Sweden. All interviews were conducted with the same list of questions and sound recordings were made. The results show that all four teachers experience difficulties in motivating their pupils to read and in promoting reading enjoyment. They all relied to a great extent on reading aloud as a method. In their experience, pupils developed an interest in reading through reading aloud. Other factors affecting pupils’ reading enjoyment were: choice of book; reading difficulties; and their home environment. The teachers varied in their own attitudes to reading but they each thinks that they could rely on their own interest in reading to give an interest in reading to their pupils.