My thesis is based on a qualitative study. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether the educationalist at an especially chosen school in Stockholm promotes the students multicultural background in the education or not. This is due to the fact that the Swedish school to a considerable degree reflects the multicultural Swedish society. The socio-cultural starting point is when people come together and meet. The language is the tool of the socio-culture and it is the dialogue, discussion and sympathetic understanding that makes people meet. The cultural concept is diffuse and very wide. Everyone has their own definition of it. The cultural concept in this thesis involves identity, ethnicity, background, conception of life and nationality. I have interviewed two pedagogues and a school manager. The content of the interviews was recorded and transcribed. In addition to theses interviews, the steering documents of the chosen school have been analyzed. The parental collaboration and influence is an important issue and it is up to the school manager to make an effort increasing parental interest and collaboration. When I made the interviews it became clear that the student’s different cultural background and knowledge was not something the school took benefit of to any larger extent. The pedagogues had thoughts and points of views about how to stimulate and use the students varied multicultural background in the education, for example by being more perceptive and use dialogue as a tool and learn from the students. The most important issue for the school concerning multiculturality is how to behave and live in the multicultural society. The school is the platform where different cultures meet every day and therefore it is natural that the school finds a balance between cultural pluralism and mutual understanding for different cultures.

The purpose of this essay, is to investigate how preschool pedagogues support mother tongue development. The research questions guiding our study were the following: What activities encourage mother tongue development? What approach do pedagogues have towards mother tongue development?  The theoretical framework used to guide the collection and analysis the empirical material is social-cultural theory, and the related concepts of mediation and diversified normality. Data collection was accomplished through and on-line free-text survey of pedagogues one pre-school. Seven of twelve pedagogues participated.   In summary, we found that the pedagogues had a predominantly positive outlook on mother tongue pedagogy. The participants also gave suggestions on how one can work with mother tongue in pre-school, and how these suggestions are encouraging for developing children´s mother tongue. Through our data we also found that the work with the Swedish language happens on a day-to-day basis, but as for the activities with mother tongue they occur more sporadically. A reason for this can be that knowledge for the mother tongue the pre-schoolers have is something that the pedagogues lack knowledge in.

An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural. / Fokus för denna avhandling är spridningen av begreppet interkulturalitet inom utbildning. Utbildningspolicy, akademisk litteratur och mängden kurser i högre utbildning ägnade åt begreppet vittnar alla om dess betydelse i försöken att förena det kulturellt partikulära med det universella. Med Europas koloniala förflutna i åtanke och dess skapande av hierarkier mellan vad som definieras som kunskap, ämnar denna avhandling undersöka vilka kunskaper som krävs för att bli interkulturell. Syftet är framför allt att besvara frågan vad som händer med interkulturalitet om kulturella skillnader istället förstås som koloniala skillnader. Utifrån ett dekolonialt perspektiv som fokuserar på hur skillnader skapas och upprätthålls utifrån föreställningar om kulturella identiteter, analyseras EU-policy, akademisk litteratur samt intervjuer med studenter som avklarat en kurs i interkulturalitet. Analysen visar på hur interkulturalitet, i dess nuvarande tappning, riskerar fastna i en singulär europeisk utblick på världen upphöjd till universell lag. Snarare än att mildra eller förändra maktrelationer och skapa möjligheter till mellanmänskliga möten, riskerar därför interkulturaliteten att bidra till fortsatt förtryck av den som anses kulturellt annorlunda. En alternativ utgångspunkt står att finna i en annan översättning av interkulturalitet – interculturalidad – hämtad från ursprungsbefolkningarnas kamp för att bli synliggjorda, att dela makten, på den offentliga arenan i Bolivia, Ecuador och Peru. Genom att lyfta fram begreppet interculturalidad, som just har sitt ursprung i singulariteten och bär med sig själva erfarenheten av kolonialism, tillförs en möjlig distansering från interkulturalitet med dess implicita eurocentrism. Avslutningsvis argumenteras för att befrielse från kolonialismens ok kräver att interkulturalitet omkodas som inter-epistemisk.

Abstract Title: History teaching and intercultural competence This study takes as its starting point the relationship between the multicultural and globalised society and history as a school subject, and explores it theoretically as well as empirically.  Intercultural historical competence, which is the main theoretical and analytical concept of the study, is developed from theories of narrative competence and theories of intercultural competence, and is positioned in the intersection between the two. Narrative competence describes historical consciousness as being characterised by three distinct sub-competencies, the competence of experience, the competence of interpretation and the competence of orientation. Historical learning is seen as the qualification of these competencies to be able to tell meaningful stories about our lives.  The empirical case study explores how intercultural historical competence as a learning objective is interpreted and enacted in one history classroom. The enacted object of learning is regarded as a co-construction between the teacher, the pupils and historical narratives. This study explores how experiences and interpretations of the past are made and used in the work in the classroom. The question of what constitutes each narrative sub-competence is addressed and discussed in three empirical chapters respectively. The source material mainly consists of observations from a sequel of 25 history lessons in an upper secondary school The empirical results show how different dimensions of each sub-competence contribute to what is possible to learn in relation to intercultural historical competence. One important dimension of the competence of experience is the employment of strategies of pluralism, deconstruction and counter-narratives to open up closed narratives. The competence of interpretation is strengthened by the use of second-order concepts as tools to qualify historical thinking. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how it is possible to practise the competence of orientation by giving pupils the opportunity to use historical narratives and historical tools to make sense of the present and to think about the future. One additional conclusion is that the planning process, when the learning objective is interpreted and framed into lessons and exercises, is decisive for what is possible for pupils to learn. Finally, it is stated that history as a school subject has the capacity to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes that are relevant in a multicultural and globalised society. Key words: history teaching, historical learning, history education, intercultural competence, intercultural education, historical consciousness, upper secondary school, class room study, object of learning, learning objective, historical narrative.