<p>The Hard Lesson of Life: A Study of /Re/construction of Life in School from a Religious Educational Perspective</p><p>The overriding aim of this dissertation is to examine the understanding of life that young people /re/construct, and in this sense learn, in the discursive practices of school, and to describe how such a /re/construction takes place.</p><p>The theoretical frame of the study is a critical theory perspective. Potentially problematic aspects and findings are therefore given priority over good examples. The three main concepts used were generated through the interaction of theory and empirical material. These conceptual tools are: ‘understanding of life’, ‘discursive practice’, and ‘language’. The first concept refers to the young learners’ collectively /re/constructed perceptions of how life works and of what gives life value and meaning. Discursive practice is the concept used for the context and the way in which learning takes shape. Language is an important resource in the shaping of the collective interpretation, negotiation and /re/construction of an understanding of life.</p><p>Two empirical studies are presented, a main study and a complementary one. The main study, which is regionally limited, is a group interview with 51 youths from five schools divided into ten groups. The second is a study of the most frequently used high school Religion textbook, Religion and Life, and the analysis draws on the results from the group interview study.</p><p>The institutional frames, the large-sized schools, and the tasks of school to educate pupils and to differentiate between them, are risk factors that may lead to stereotypical, instrumental, and competitive relationships in education. The group interview study indicates that there are grounds for concern since it shows that victimization works as a teaching tool in the /re/construction of a hegemonic discourse of understanding life. The empirically identified hegemonic discourse of understanding life is termed “Life as adjustment for the benefit of individual competition”. Victimization is shown to be both the cause and effect of this discourse. The hegemonic life discourse also lends contextual legitimacy to victimization. The study of the school textbook suggests that the subject Religion may reinforce such a hegemonic understanding of life if it fails to balance the book’s objective and descriptive accounts of abuse of power.</p>

The Hard Lesson of Life: A Study of /Re/construction of Life in School from a Religious Educational Perspective The overriding aim of this dissertation is to examine the understanding of life that young people /re/construct, and in this sense learn, in the discursive practices of school, and to describe how such a /re/construction takes place. The theoretical frame of the study is a critical theory perspective. Potentially problematic aspects and findings are therefore given priority over good examples. The three main concepts used were generated through the interaction of theory and empirical material. These conceptual tools are: ‘understanding of life’, ‘discursive practice’, and ‘language’. The first concept refers to the young learners’ collectively /re/constructed perceptions of how life works and of what gives life value and meaning. Discursive practice is the concept used for the context and the way in which learning takes shape. Language is an important resource in the shaping of the collective interpretation, negotiation and /re/construction of an understanding of life. Two empirical studies are presented, a main study and a complementary one. The main study, which is regionally limited, is a group interview with 51 youths from five schools divided into ten groups. The second is a study of the most frequently used high school Religion textbook, Religion and Life, and the analysis draws on the results from the group interview study. The institutional frames, the large-sized schools, and the tasks of school to educate pupils and to differentiate between them, are risk factors that may lead to stereotypical, instrumental, and competitive relationships in education. The group interview study indicates that there are grounds for concern since it shows that victimization works as a teaching tool in the /re/construction of a hegemonic discourse of understanding life. The empirically identified hegemonic discourse of understanding life is termed “Life as adjustment for the benefit of individual competition”. Victimization is shown to be both the cause and effect of this discourse. The hegemonic life discourse also lends contextual legitimacy to victimization. The study of the school textbook suggests that the subject Religion may reinforce such a hegemonic understanding of life if it fails to balance the book’s objective and descriptive accounts of abuse of power.

in English with English title of the thesis: Language of SMS and French as a foreign language The central topic of the thesis is the language of short text messages (SMS) and/or the one of chat and their application in teaching of French as a foreign language (fr. abbreviation F.L.E., français langue étrangère). The aim is to answer the question so as to how to grasp linguo- didactically this modern sociolect of young users (not only) of French, typical of written communication via digital technologies, with the purpose of the purely practical use in the classes of French. Firstly, a linguistic description will be given in order to understand the mechanisms of the explored language code not only in French, but also partly in Czech and English, as well as the determination of the position of the SMS language as a socio-cultural phenomenon in the present-day French. The following research will be dealing with the identification and the analysis of the teaching activities using the SMS language found in approximately fifty text books of French intended for the learners of levels A1, A2, B1, B2. The next section offers the theoretical evaluation of the exploitability of the SMS language in the classes of French, having as a point of reference specialised works of didactics of foreign languages. The...