This qualitative study draws on the traditions of narrative inquiry and arts-based research to explore the intricate puzzle of the experience of writing in a grade nine English Language Arts classroom, with a particular group of participants engaged in a creative autobiographical writing project. This case study of a small rural classroom, where 10 of 12 students participated as writers in the research, explores both the teachers and the students experiences. As a participant-researcher, I designed a three-cycle writing project spanning nine weeks, where all participants engaged in conversations about writing. One specific feature of the classroom setting was that both the teacher and the researcher were themselves active writers and deliberately and systematically offered stories of their own writing practice as part of the teaching about writing process, while undertaking the same writing tasks as the students. The data collected and analyzed in this dissertation includes students group conversations in class time, participants drafts and final writing, entry and exit drawings of how students saw themselves as writers, and individual reflective private conversations. From this data, I created portraits of the participants as writers and of the instructional moments. The drawings which were shaped by a participants historical relationship with writing, their broader personal, social and educational context, and the study provided insight into the individuals relationship to and with writing, providing access to a participants knowledge and experience at times unavailable through more traditional forms of data. Two main themes that emerged were resistance to writing and students complex relationship with revision. Their resistance manifested itself in a variety of forms, including one instance of plagiarism and a total absence of writing with another. An exploration of revision practices revealed a tangled process that often failed to improve the quality of students writing, where revision became, for example, a matter of excision with the delete key or serial first drafting. This study complicates the common school use of autobiographical writing prompts, by documenting the many forms of participant resistance and task subversion. Further, the interpretation of autobiographical as necessarily entailing only the true proved an area of tension.

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The article presents results of an exploratory study with groups of music teacher students from different countries, Estonia, Germany, Netherland, Portugal and Sweden. The groups watched three german music lessons on multi-angle-DVDs with english subtitles, chose one, which they felt most familiar with, and marked significant similarities and differences to lessons, which they new from their own experience. Presentations of the country-groups and plenum-discussions about them were documented, analyzed and interpreted. The available study brings up hypothesis about (a) categories to describe music in the classroom, (b) about cultures as different contents of music education of five European countries and (c) hypothesis about interferences between musical and pedagogical cultures in music classrooms generally. / Der Aufsatz stellt die Ergebnisse einer explorativen Studie mit Gruppen von Lehramt-Musik-Studierenden aus Deutschland, Estland, Niederlande, Portugal und Schweden dar. Die Gruppen sahen drei deutsche Musikstunden auf Multi-Angle-DVDs mit englischen Untertiteln, wählten eine aus, die ihnen am vertrautesten erschien, und markierten signifikante Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zu Musikstunden, die sie aus eigener Erfahrung kannten. Präsentationen der nach Ländern zusammengesetzten Gruppen sowie die Plenumsdiskussionen dazu wurden dokumentiert, analysiert und interpretiert. Die vorliegende Studie generiert Hypothesen zu (a) Kategorien zur Beschreibung von Musikunterricht in der Praxis des Klassenzimmers, zu (b) Kulturen als verschiedene Inhalte des Musikunterrichts aus fünf europäischen Ländern und (c) eine Hypothese zu Interferenzen zwischen pädagogischen und musikalischen Kulturen im Musikunterricht im Allgemeinen.

This thesis aims to describe one educational sequence in religious education.  The study shows articulations and negotiations in the religious education classroom, as well as on digital discussion forums. Two questions are the core of the explorative case study. What is communicated between teachers and students in a Re-classroom in Sweden? How does the content of the communication contribute to constructing the Re-subject in two different discussion forums: digital and analogue? The case study follows an upper secondary school class, with 18 years old students, during one teaching sequence. The theoretical foundation is based in a social-cultural perspective. Data is produced by ethnographic methods and consist of classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. For the interpretation of speech Even’s relief theory is used concerning what is said and Michel Bakhtin’s thoughts on speech genre concerning how it is expressed and negotiated in the teaching sequence. The analysis of the different forums show that in all of them, teachers and students tend to focus on what religious persons do, their appearance, and how they are limited by their faith. The religious persons are compared to a way of living according to a secular norm that the students find more relevant and up-to-date. When speaking of religious persons the students tend to express it in a derisive and disparaging way. Negotiations on content and framework factors interrupt the actual teaching in the classroom environment whilst digital forums are self-regulating and discussions quickly return to the topic after irrelevant digressions. In the discussion part of the thesis the various discussion forums are evaluated didactically. The impact of gender and framework factors on the student-teacher discussions is also raised. An additional question that is problematized is the tension between the curriculum of the subject and the teacher’s desire to get students interested in religion as a subject, described as ‘the teacher’s dilemma’. It is discussed whether this dilemma controls the teacher’s choice of subject. / Vad talar lärare och elever om i religionskunskapsundervisningen och vilket religionskunskapsämne konstrueras i två olika samtalsmiljöer? Detta undersöker denna fallstudie, som följer en gymnasieklass i åk 3, under ett undervisningsmoment. Syftet är att beskriva och jämföra hur ämneskonstruktioner i religionskunskap artikuleras och förhandlas, av elever och lärare, i en klassrumsmiljö respektive i ett digitalt diskussionsforum. Empirin utgörs av klassrumsobservationer, digitala diskussionsinlägg och kvalitativa intervjuer med lärare och elever. Analysen visar bland annat att i alla diskussionsmiljöerna fokuserar både lärare och elever på vad troende människor gör, hur de ser ut och hur de upplevs begränsas av sin tro. Förhandlingar om innehåll, ramfaktorer och annat stoppar upp undervisningen i klassrumsmiljön medan de digitala miljöerna är självreglerande och diskussionerna återvänder snabbt till ämnesstoffet igen efter ovidkommande utvikningar. I diskussionen lyfts frågor om genus och ramfaktorers inverkan på diskussionerna. Det som undersökningen kallar lärarens dilemma lyfts och beskrivs som spänningen mellan läroplanens ämnesstoff och känslan att som lärare få eleverna intresserade av religionskunskapsundervisningen. Huruvida lärarens val av ämnesstoff styrs av det sistnämnda diskuteras och de olika diskussionsmiljöerna värderas didaktiskt. / <p>Examinator: Stolare, Martin, Docent</p><p>Centrum för de samhällsvetenskapliga ämnenas didaktik</p><p>martin.stolare@kau.se</p>

One aim with the Swedish non-confessional religious education is to increase students’ understanding and respect for different ways of thinking and behaving. One opportunity to reflect upon other people's interpretations of life, are field visits. Many teachers and students want to make field visits but few actually do. This thesis explores educational opportunities and challenges generated by field visits as part of religious education. This is a classroom study in an upper secondary school (the students were 17 years old), during the teaching sequence about Islam where one part was a field visit to a mosque. Data were produced by classroom observations and observations from a mosque visit, students’ journal writing’s before and after the visit and student interviews. The students’ utterances about Islam are analysed using Michael Bachtin’s dialogue theory and Robert Jackson’s interpretive approach. The analysis shows that students apply a speech genre, which in this study is denoted genre of politeness. In some cases the genre of politeness affect the students such that they do not dare to ask all questions, in particular questions about Islam and gender. Another result is that students more widely apply a self-reflexive speech genre during and after the mosque visit as compared to before the visit. By self-reflexive speech is meant that the students mirror what they have met in the mosque with their own interpretations of life. The analysis also shows that the several students express critical opinions about Islam both before and after the mosque visit and the teaching sequence. The study explores educational opportunities and challenges generated by the mosque visit. Some of the themes that are discussed in the thesis are: 1) questions about representations of religion, for instance in what way “lived religion” and religion as a “philosophical ideal” can be combined, 2) the students’ different ways of reflection, 3) how do students relate and rely on the faith representative’s utterances, and 4) how students formulate questions to the faith representative. / Baksidestext Studiebesök är en metod i religionskunskapsundervisningen som förefaller vara uppskattad av både lärare och elever. Trots det visar det sig att det är relativt få lärare som verkligen gör besök, vilket delvis kan bero på en osäkerhet vad som händer ur ett elevperspektiv i mötet med en ny kontext. Den här studien har undersökt religionsdidaktiska utmaningar och möjligheter som aktualiserats genom ett moskébesök. Empirin utgörs av gymnasielevers yttranden om islam i loggar, elevintervjuer, klassrummet och under ett moskébesök. Analysen visar bland annat att elevernas tal under besöket påverkas av en ”artighetsgenre” som både kan underlätta och försvåra för eleverna. Vidare framkommer det att elever i större utsträckning under och efter besöket speglar det de möter i moskén i sina egna livstolkningar. Analysen visar också hur elever uttrycker att deras inställning till islam påverkas på olika sätt av besöket. Några religionsdidaktiska områden som aktualiserats av besöket och diskuteras är frågor om religioners representation, hur trosrepresentanten ska behandlas som källa samt olika sätt att ställa frågor till representanten.