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.”

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.

This project began with the basic preconception that there is a growing resistance towards reading among students and this has been partially proved correct. The research questions were: In upper secondary education, what is it that encourages or hinders the students’ incentives for reading? What effect does this have on the subsequent teaching of fictional texts? The aim of this investigation was to examine attitudes on reading among students in upper secondary education and how these attitudes affect the teaching of fictional texts. The project’s research material consists of a qualitative interview with a practising teacher, and a student questionnaire which was answered by two of the teacher’s classes; one studying the natural science programme, the other studying a vocational, practically oriented programme.  The overall majority of students recognise the importance of reading in their lives, seeing it as an activity that helps them understand themselves and the world. The importance of ”contact points” within the texts is vital for encouraging reading, yet finding texts which have a universal appeal proves to be an impossible task. Reading is seen by the students and the teacher as an activity that contributes to the students’ all-round education, although the teacher does not believe that most of his students truly understand this. A key factor which hinders reading incentives is time. Students grapple with a heavy workload of schoolwork and reading is not prioritised. Film is seen as an effective ”way in” to reading as many students state a preference for films over books, which is largely recognised by the teacher. Film is used as a supplement to the teaching of fiction and is found by the teacher to be a successful method. School texts are invariably described as boring on account of the difficulties that students have engaging and relating with them, yet many texts are also described in equal measure as exciting or interesting. Reading proves to be more popular among the natural science class, yet despite some very negative attitudes in the vocational class, there are still a number of encouragingly positive ones.

Gender plays an important role in all facets of human life and although great strides have been made against the gender discrimination, still the progress is gradual and slow. More specifically, in the field of educational management and leadership women’s attempt to gain equal groundwork with men is quite evident but the former still face gender related barriers that hamper their progress. The current research focuses on investigating the role and perceptions of women principals in the field of educational management and leadership and on drawing comparisons between their role in upper secondary education in Greece and Sweden. Therefore, the investigation takes place in the municipality of Thessaloniki and Stockholm with female principals from upper secondary schools to take part in the study. Ten from each city respond to the questionnaire, which is specially designed in their native language. The present findings provide an insight about women’s motivation to become upper secondary school principals, the reasons for their under-representation, the variations in managerial qualities and styles as part of their feminine identity, the difficulties they face towards identifying a position and ways to augment their involvement in the field. Drawing on the evidence of the survey conducted in Thessaloniki, despite the great progress that has been achieved in Greece in the field of educational management and leadership in terms of gender, women are greatly under-represented in upper secondary school management positions and significantly face sociocultural constraints and discrimination in their career path. However, the results of the study in Stockholm disclose that women progressively possess the managerial field in education currently outnumbering their male superintendents.

As the ages of gang criminality lower, the need for other perspectives is necessary. This study poses the question “why and how should literature featuring child soldiers be used to discuss human rights violations in the classroom in upper secondary school?” and deconstructs the binaries childhood-innocence and victim-perpetrator in the novel Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala. This study utilises Paolo Freire and bell hooks’ radical pedagogical theory to bridge the gap between child soldiers in other countries and those that are involved in criminality in Sweden. The agency of child soldiers in their victimisation of civilians and other combatants is something that requires further nuance as well as the assumption that child soldiers have lost their innocence and childhood upon entering combat, without consideration for the violence that might have occurred before combat. Thus, further nuance is required in order to engage in fruitful discussions concerning child soldiers worldwide.

Educational restructuring is an international phenomenon which emphasises a voucher system, upper secondary schools’ local decision-making and pupils’ choices in contrast to previous bureaucratic governing. For this reason upper secondary programmes and courses on offer, together with the pupils’ individual choices, have a direct impact on what could be called the upper-secondary education market. In terms of teaching subject matter, upper secondary education is, at the same time, broadened by means of introducing three-year programmes for all pupils as well as core subjects. The aim of this doctoral thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of how pupils’ actions of choice create different sorts of integration and differentiation processes within the restructured upper secondary education. In the light of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action combined with Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, pupils’ actions of choice have been studied within four pedagogical practices: (i) choice of upper secon-dary school, (ii) choice of upper secondary programme, (iii) pupils’ initial time at an upper secondary school and how they cope with the specific culture within a programme as well as choice of courses and subjects, and (iv) pupils’ own sto-ries and points of view on how a core subject, namely Swedish, was taught. Some of the results demonstrate that pupils’ actions of choice can be voca-tion-oriented, career-oriented and consumption-oriented. It is argued that these different types of actions of choice are constituted within a market discourse. The market discourse demands that pupils are able to make suitable choices to achieve an individualistic qualification. From that point of view upper secondary education’s integration and differentiation processes aim at developing citizens' personal opportunities in order for them to benefit to their best ability from what society has to offer. Other results demonstrate that pupils’ group-oriented, inter-est-oriented and tradition-oriented actions of choice are built upon another type of discourse, which is about educating pupils towards active citizenship. It has an inter-subjective point of departure. Pupils are driven into the integration and dif-ferentiation process where they discuss and take a stand in favour of those educa-tional options, which are conceived as the most relevant in relation to a “self-determining ethical-cultural community”. The analysis of these two paramount discourses indicates that pupils' integration and differentiation processes are am-biguous.

The papers assembled in this thesis all address, in a Bourdieuan tradition, the question of the social structure of the Swedish education system, focusing on the Stockholm region, and how this structure can be explained by the distribution of cultural and other assets among individuals and social groups. Although economic, social and political changes during the period covered by the various studies are not the main focus of the work here, the articles depict the effects of such changes on upper secondary education in particular. While upper secondary education was radically changed by the political reforms of the 1990s, characterized by decentralisation and marketization, the analyses advanced in the studies indicate that its basic social structure remains stable. In one dimension, this structure opposes an “elite” pole having a particularly high social and scholastic recruitment to a “popular” pole with a correspondingly low recruitment profile. In a likewise durable second dimension, a “cultural” pole built up by schools and study programmes that are particularly popular among culturally strong social groups, opposes an “economic” pole favoured by social groups close to the economic and private sectors of society. The various papers reveal that the last opposition corresponds to both differences in life styles and deeply rooted convictions related to family and formal education among cultural and economic fractions of the upper-middle and middle classes. At this level, a belief in education as a development of the personality, with connected values such as individuality and originality, stands against a conviction that education is a rational investment in a future competitive career; as such, it is subject to calculated, measured risks. The existence of deeply rooted values among social groups with different structures of assets or capital also explains why schools –in the institutional strategies imposed on them by the school market– tend to express convictions (topoi) and symbolic values that correspond to those of their target groups. The various studies included in this thesis employ a combination of statistical approaches, mainly correspondence analysis, and qualitative ones such as: interviews, ethnographic observation and text analysis.

Swedish parliament in a bid to curb the large numbers of unaccompanied minors who are denied asylum status – came up with a law which is famously known as Gymnasielagen. The aim of the study was to explore how professionals in upper secondary schools setting and social services perceive the implementation of this law and how it contributes to integration of unaccompanied minors in Sweden concerning school environment.  Through semi structured interviews, professionals in contact with unaccompanied minors (UAMs) expressed their perception on the Gymnasielagen and its impacts on the lives of UAMs. The advantages and disadvantages of the law together with its contribution to integration of UAMs were investigated.  The results showed that the law renewed hope for UAMs and gave them the chance to start life afresh after the long wait for asylum. There were however significant discrepancies in the law that makes it difficult for UAMs. The condition to get permanent employment after school completion does not seem achievable and puts pressure on them. They are forced to choose courses from a limited number of technical courses that would possibly get them permanent employment.  Integration was also found not to be optimum because of uncertainty among the UAMs.

No description available.

<p> The aim of this thesis is to research what the former youth of the Construction Programme felt about their education. For this purpose I have chosen a group of students who graduated from the Construction Programme 1997 and 1998. Had they made the choice to study at the Construction Program on their own free will, or were they more or less forced into this decision (in one way or another)? I have also researched which factors that has either made them stay in the field of construction work or forced them to work with something else. The research method I have chosen to use in my thesis was a questionnaire. This questionnaire was sent to a group of thirty former students of the Construction Program, who nowadays is scattered all over the country. Through the questionnaire I have asked questions concerning their choice of upper secondary school education: what the students thought of the education they received, did it live up to their expectations, and do they still work within the occupation that they were educated for or do they work with something else?. Maybe some have chosen to move on to third level education? I have got to several results concerning both the choice of upper secondary school education made and this group of former students’ current field of work. For the majority of these students, the choice of studying at the Construction Program was made on their own, which they felt led to a varying occupation and a job after graduating. Another interesting result I have got is that a lot of students still work within the branch ten years after their graduation. This must mean that both the school and the former youth of the Construction Program themselves succeeded well in their education. The result of my research corresponds with general perceptions according to studied literature and varied sources.</p>