The general aim of this thesis is to examine and explain how education fosters future citizens when Swedish upper secondary schools work actively with entrepreneurship in school. Toward this aim, two research questions are asked: How are students governed and how do students govern when focus is on entrepreneurship in school? How do teachers relate to entrepreneurship in school? The study took place in a school development program with a focus on teachers developing their abilities and working with entrepreneurship in schools. Four studies presented in four articles form the cornerstones of the thesis. The empirical data was collected during 2013– 2014 in three of the participating schools. Different methods were used. The first step was reading and analysing policy documents, followed by observations in the classrooms, interviews with the teachers with the help of performance maps, and interviews with the students in gendered focus groups. In total, 14 teachers and 90 students were involved in the study. The schools were geographically spread and represented both public and independent schools. For this study an abductive approach was used, which means that the empirical data were collected and first studied unbiased. Various theoretical models were chosen to find answers to the specific research questions; thus, a connection between the theory and the empirical data was made. The first article examines whether a citizen with entrepreneurial abilities is fostered in school when the concept of entrepreneurship has a place in the curriculum. This article also analyses the curriculum (Gy11) and more specifically what can be read under the heading The Task of the School. The main result from this study shows that students are emphasising entrepreneurial abilities over other abilities. The second article draws a comparison between John Dewey’s ideas of progressive education from the early 1900s and the teaching methods that have come to be advocated for developing student ́s entrepreneurial abilities. The main purpose of progressive education is to foster a democratic citizen; here I could observe that techniques for teaching entrepreneurship are comparable to progressive education, but the purpose is not the same. The purpose of entrepreneurship in school is primarily to foster individuals who are active and responsible for their own future. Michael Foucault's concept of governmentality is the focus of article three, which explores how students are governed and shaped when entrepreneurship in school is emphasised, and it explores whether boys and girls are governed in different ways. The analysis of the result indicated that the students were governed in three different ways in the three school contexts, and girls and boys were governed in different ways both among the schools and within the schools. The fourth article addresses how the teachers relate to entrepreneurship in schools in light of new reforms, marketization, more regulation and the demands of being an entrepreneurial teacher. The result shows three narratives: the cool teacher, the stressed teacher, and the frustrated teacher, each handling entrepreneurship in school in different ways. This thesis shows that the entrepreneur has come to be presented as a hero and entrepreneurship as a solution to cope with challenges—to the global economy, but also for coping with ourselves and our own lives. It also shows that fostering a democratic citizen is subordinate to fostering citizens with entrepreneurial abilities, as the regime of truth is to become the entrepreneur. The students are both governed and governing toward that direction. And even if teachers have different ways of approaching entrepreneurship in schools, the will to be the entrepreneurial teacher and to foster entrepreneurial citizens is clear.

Social constructivism, known as Vygotskian theory, has been implicated in improving spoken language skills of upper-secondary school students. This qualitative study aims to investigate the perspectives of students regarding the teachers’ use of humour in ESL lessons both in Italy and Sweden. A secondary aspect of the study was to assess the use of humour in second language acquisition related to language learning and communicative competence based on dialogism and interaction. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants (5 males and 5 females from each of the respective countries). After analysis using phenomenography, results indicate that humorous dialogic instruction and interaction, as well as non-verbal forms of humour such as gesticulation and facial expression, have the possibility to dramatically increase the focus and interest in lesson content which facilitates better communicative understanding of English. Immediacy is perceived to improve feelings of well-being and harmony within the classroom. Humour and openness are considered important and necessary factors in improving motivation and self-belief during oral tasks as facilitated an effective, communicative learning climate. The study also proposes that there are four factors (teacher, student, subject and task) which affect learning processes, and moderation of humour, the fifth factor, acts as a scaffold to assist in stretching students’ knowledge within the ZPD.

The aim of this qualitative study was to attain an increased understanding as to how several upper-secondary school students perceived and experienced teachers using humour during classroom discourse. The study was based on the following questions: What does humour mean to the students? What are the forms of humour utilized by teachers? How do students perceive the use of humour with regards to learning processes? Are there recommendations and cautionary measures for teachers to consider when incorporating humour in teaching? Methodology used was a semi-structured interview of 13 questions. Participants consisted of six students aged 16 to 19 years. The length of the interviews varied between 20-35 minutes. Results of the interviews indicated that openness and understanding the unique sense of humour existing in each classroom, as well as self-confidence and a moderate use of humour, are necessary to effectively incorporate humorous text and anecdotes in lessons to facilitate learning processes. However, the study revealed that openness is pivotal in the construction and maintenance of positive learning climates. Students did not experience humour during ESL lessons, indicating a possible lack of contextual knowledge in language teaching practices.

Sweden is today a country with ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. My aim in this study is to study what view of Islam and Muslims that students at a Catholic school in Stockholm have. The reason why Catholic schools are interesting to study is that previous research has showed that Muslim students around Europe often attend catholic schools as they are regarded as more tolerant towards religion. This study is based on a questionnaire and personal interviews with upper secondary students at the Catholic school in Stockholm. The result is compared with previous research on students of the same age group (12-15 years). The results of the survey show that the majority of students have a positive attitude towards Islam and Muslims, but that there is a small group at the Catholic School who have negative attitude towards Islam and Muslims. The negative attitude increases when it comes to the Muslim’s rights, for example the right to build mosques in Sweden. The results also show that students with parents with higher education are more tolerant than students with parents with no academic education. I have used Mattias Gardell’s definition of Islamophobia to analyze the result from the survey and interview among the students at the Catholic school. When using this definition, we can see that the students have some islamophobic thoughts about Muslims and Islam. The results indicate that the school needs to actively work with this question in a more constructive way. One of my suggestions are that they need to talk more about Islam and Muslims during the lessons so the students gain knowledge about the religion but also create situations where non-Muslims and Muslims meet. In this way, students can integrate with each other. This study only shows the attitudes among the students at this Catholic School.

This research investigates how pupils perceive performance anxiety and where this trait may originate. Based on the findings from the interviews, it was factors such as lack of studying technique, expectations of a high grade, and pressure from home as well as classmates that were the main reasons to why their performance anxiety arose from the very beginning. In relation to this, the study aims at discussing how rhetoric as a subject in school may reduce performance anxiety amongst pupils. A qualitative method was used to investigate the research question of this essay. The interviews have been done through semi-structured interviews as a primary source. Through these interviews, the work aims to examine performance anxiety amongst students and exploring how public speaking skills and performance anxiety may be influenced by preparation and rhetorical knowledge. Although this study cannot conclusively argue that the teaching of rhetoric would reduce performance anxiety, the results of the interviews suggest that better rhetorical skills would enhance students public speaking skills.”

This essay argued the importance of literary theory in the classroom. As a teacher, it is possible to achieve the empathetic goals of the English curriculum and Judith A. Langer’s ambition of literate thinking by using poetry and literary theory in school. The essay demonstrated this with a Lacanian reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems “To a Skylark” and “Ode to the West Wind.” The analysis focused on readable and unreadable aspects of the poems. The readable aspects centred on the role of the Imaginary in “To a Skylark” and the representation of the fragmented body in “Ode to the West Wind.” Furthermore, the unreadable elements of the poetry demonstrated the discrepancy between the performative and declarative dimensions and the role of the pathetic fallacy in the signifying chain. Finally, this essay argued that, although all aspects of psychoanalytic literary theory should not be used in the classroom, elements of Lacanian thought can be used to combat the prevalence of individualism in Swedish upper secondary schools.

This study has sought to investigate the expressions of content and purpose of the swedish upper secondary school based on three distinct categories. These being Qualification, Socialisation and Subjectification. The questions asked are What expressions do these three categories take as well as What consequences do these expressions have for civics teachers? Critical discourse analysis was leveraged to study the curriculum of 2011 and commentary thereof, as well as the syllabi for the Civics subject and the relevant commentary material thereof. The results show that a great deal of the studied material centers around qualification as an aspect, although the other two are still very much present. In addition to this the presentation of students as individuals in the larger society, as part of these expressions belonging to the categories, overall took on a particularly passive tone, where students were urged to be flexible and adaptable to outside influences rather than become sources of influence themselves. These findings resulted in several questions being raised to civics teachers about how to approach teaching their subject in regards to these particular trends, if they ought to encourage students to the passive mentality, for example.

This essay examines the 1962 filmization of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird through gender theory to identify its representation of gender, underlying gendered norms and how power is exercised through gender. The analysis concludes that the film’s portrayal of men and women follow a pattern of traditional gendered roles and norms in terms of their respective gender roles, accepted behavior, dress-code and men’s overarching influence in society in accordance with the film’s time and setting. Although the film’s main characters question and oppose certain gendered roles and norms, its problems are left unsolved and not reflected upon towards the end of the film. The film can be used in the Swedish EFL-classroom to identify and analyze gendered norms which can then act as the starting point of a discussion on how it stands in contrasts to the gendered norms and roles of modern-day United States and Sweden.

How do upper secondary schools work with image to compete online? Through meso-discourse analysis we have analyzed the descriptions of 147 schools offering university preparatory programs in Stockholm County, at one of the larger online information portals for upper secondary education (gymnasium.se). Such information portals have lately seen a tremendous growth in traffic, yet received scant scholarly attention. Our findings suggest that schools work with image mainly by drawing from four distinct image archetypes, which we have metaphorized as The Springboard, The Democratic World Citizen, The Nanny, and The Pedagogical Peacekeeper. These images were tweaked and combined in various ways by schools to project an image to their desired student audience. We also found that different school types used the archetype images with slight variation. Further implications, such as the performative aspect of image work and possible future research on competition in upper secondary education, are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine how social science teachers regard the Swedish school's democracy assignments and opinions that conflict with those described in the school’s value system. The study aims to examine how teachers in social science view the school's democracy assignments and value system, how permissive social science teachers are during student discussions, and how social science teachers relate to pupils with xenophobic views. To achieve this goal, five semi-structured interviews have been conducted in which the respondents share their experiences of pupils who express xenophobic views and how they have chosen to act in these situations. The results shows that social science teachers believe that the democratic assignment in itself is clear. A problem with the democratic assignment however is that the value system needs to be interpreted, which brings a risk that different teachers choose to interpret the assignment in different ways. Furthermore, the results show that the respondents of the study have a varied experience of students who in some way expressed xenophobia. The respondents' actions in these situations can be linked to a number of the working methods or perspectives presented in the study's theory section. The conclusions that can be drawn from this study are thus that the respondents' experiences, actions and perceptions of the researched issues vary, yet all emphasize the importance of the social science topic in order to reinforce the future generations to become responsible and democratic citizens.