Projects with keyword: Education

Young people with the same educational qualifications do not reach the same place in the social hierarchy, because educational credentials are never separable from the individuals that hold them. The economic and social return of educational credentials (in terms of salary and the status of the job) depends mainly on the social capital of their holders. How much social capital an individual has access to, depends, among other things, on her socio-economic background, gender and ethnicity.

The aim of this project is to examine: 1) what is the impact of social capital (compared with socio-economic background and education) on labour market outcomes of young people in obtaining their first jobs, and 2), is there any differences between young natives and children of immigrants in regard to their access to and return from social capital when they get their first employment?

In order to achieve the aim of the project, we will examine the labour market outcomes (salary and the work's status) of young people with the same education, three years after completed studies from universities and secondary schools.

The method design of the project combines quantitative and qualitative method (questionnaire - and interview studies).

This project focuses on career-choices of youth with immigrant background. It explores questions of exclusion and inclusion, the importance of of social and cultural capital for school performance. It records reflections on career-paths in a Swedish and transnational perspective. The main result of the project is a PhD thesis on Ethnic Studies focusing on young persons' career-choices, their strategies and orientations and their reflections on these choices. The central research question of the thesis is how young persons with foreign background make their choices relating to education or work. Which are the ambitions, conceptions and visions of these young people? On the background of which influences, conditions, limitations and opportunities do they make their choices? The study reflects on youth's own understandings of their choices, agency and motives. Methods employed are individual and focus group interviews with youth in secondary school combined with participant observation in secondary schools in Stockholm. Teachers and other staff are also interviewed.

The project explores partnerships between schools, public institutions for adult education and immigrant associations concerning the impact of education and civic agency on social inclusion. The project relates to changes in the wider framework of school governance in Sweden in order to elucidate the interplay between structural and institutional change, civic agency and social change. Special attention is paid to cooperation between ethnic/immigrant associations, home and school and local educational institutions, and the consequences of the ways in which different kinds of partnerships are organized, in terms of democratic governance, and social inclusion/exclusion of ethnic minorities (as parents, organiserd in associations etc.).

Since the 1970s, preschool has been seen as an important place for ethnic integration. Yet, it has not been much investigated with respect to ethnicity aspects. This project aims to explore how ethnicity is accomplished in a number of Swedish preschools. More specifically it focuses on the interaction between children, parents and teachers, and how ethnicity is invoked and made meaningful in every day practices. Moreover, it maps the organizational framework for everyday interactions and practices, in relation to bilingualism and ethnicity. The project is planned as four sub-studies in order to reach a broader understanding of how ethnicity is constructed in different preschool contexts. A variety of methods will be deployed - focus group interviews as well as dyadic interviews, video recordings, participant observations, and analyses of documents - which all supplement each other. We believe that the project will deepen the knowledge about how ethnicity is accomplished in daily preschool interactions and practices. The project also aims to increase understandings of everyday constructions of ethnicity, which has relevance both for preschool teachers and for preschool teacher students.

The study, which is a dissertation study, examines how ethnicity is turned into a central category for the social organisation of the school and used to emphasise differences, whereby students are categorised as Swedes and immigrants. Interest is also levelled at how ethnicity constructions are bound up with social complexity and interact with other relations, especially gender and class.
The study is based on ethnographical field studies in a comprehensive secondary school, primarily consisting of participant observations of classroom situations, staff meetings and informal discussions where teachers talk about their work and students.
The study shows that the differences that are generated and sustained through the school personnels actions, argumentation and interactions with the students are complex, varied and closely bound up with the school context. This means that individual students are not only and alternately identified as immigrants or Swedes, but are dependent on contexts also understood in a variety of ways. For example, students who are successful in their schoolwork are, to a lesser extent, identified as immigrants.
One important observation is that the school personnels everyday work and contact with the students are ambitious when it comes to justice and tolerance, but that these intentions are seldom combined with insights into the power aspects associated with social relations. Daily practices are instead overshadowed by the need to accomplish certain teaching elements, where attention is focused on the classroom situation in preference to highlighting or discussing students individual experiences and living conditions. The school personnels intentions and possibilities of working towards equality and against discrimination are thus transformed so that the school instead produces and sustains relations of inequality.

This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2009. The evaluation includes the training project "From Immigrant Dense to International" for teachers employed in elementary and secondary school and was conducted as a process evaluation. The reader can take advantage of the result in the referenced report, which primarily reflects the quality of a training project, but also can be read as examples of teacher´s speach and notions about "multicultural education", "cultural differences" and "immigrant students". The reasoning put forward by the evaluation participants are common findings that have been shown and discussed in a number of previous studies focusing on school and ethnic relations. Not least that well-meaning but unthinking inclusive aspirations of the school might lead to stigma and exclusion of students with immigrant backgrounds.

This study is an evaluation conducted on behalf of the Education Office in Linköping municipality during 2007-2008. The evaluation includes a one-year training "Language and communication in multilingual preschool groups" for pre-school staff. Purpose of the training was to undertake a development project for clarifying and strengthening language stimulation and language support activities in the preschool. Evaluation questions have been: How do they who participated in the training reflect on its knowledge material and how they reflect on language? What footprint provides training in daily preschool activities, in terms of concrete actions, thoughts and reasoning? What dilemmas can be seen in relation to the completed training?

The project illuminates, with Stockholm as a case study in a national and international perspective, how institutional changes and reforms of compulsory and upper-secondary schools affect the social inclusion/exclusion of young people with immigrant backgrounds; their careers and experiences of education and employment in segregated metropolitan environments. Special attention is paid to local cooperation involving the family, ethnic associations, and local educational institutions. The overall research question concerns the impact of education, work and civic agency on social inclusion and full citizenship in multi-ethnic society. Reforms in the system of education and changes on the labour market are related to local community development in order to elucidate the interplay between structural and institutional change, civic agency and individual social mobility.

The project is financed by the Swedish Research Council. There are two researchers involved in the project Tünde Puskás and Prof. emeritus Rune Johansson and the project consists of two parts. Rune Johansson studies the construction and re-formulation of languages policies at the national, societal level. Tünde Puskás focuses on how language policies are implemented at the municipal level within the sphere of education.
Thus the project aims at exploring
1. how Swedish language policies interact with major ideological debates on uniformity and diversity
2. how local school politicians and school leaders interpret, challenge and appropriate societal language planning principles and how they relate to the usage of Swedish and other languages in municipal schools.
The project fits well in the internationally expanding academic field ethnography of language policy. Studies within this tradition aim to link micro-level educational practices with macro-level language policies and discourses on language use through illuminating the connections between macro and micro levels of analysis. The ethnography of language policy in the context of this project allows us to illuminate the different layers of language policies. This approach requires broad definition of language policies. Language policy is thus conceptualised as the totality of language beliefs (ideologies, societal norms, values and individual perceptions) and language management (rules, laws, regulations and actions undertaken to influence or modify language practices).

The aim of this project is to grasp processes of globalization in education policies and in selected pedagogic texts in Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey through a focus on the education of the "right" kind of future citizen. People increasingly move across national borders for longer or shorter periods. The autonomy of nation states is thus challenged and questioned, but they still hedge in and concomitantly close off people in separate national spaces. These simultaneous often contradictory - processes are of great importance for how the right kind of future citizen is moulded in mandatory schooling. Research on transnationalism is a theoretical starting point for this project. Long- or short term migrants create and maintain social relations which cut across national borders, but also law and policies move and are established across such borders. Research on education and nation state building and the globalization of education are important for the project, in order to understand education polices and the governance of education. We will collect and analyze educational documents and curricula for selected subjects like history, civic and religious education, interview politicians with influence over education, as well as teachers and authors of textbooks, and scrutinize selected textbooks in the four national settings. The cases will be used for soft comparison where similarities and differences will be used throughout to generate new insights and deepen the analysis.

The aim of this project is to examine representations, knowledge and experiences around youth and sexual risk. The recent years´increase of sexually transmitted diseases indicates that sexual risk taking among young men and women are relatively common. Previous research has also shown that such risk taking varies among different groups of young people. The project will therefore specifically focus on how - depending upon class, ethnicity and sexual identity - different masculinities and femininities are linked to sexual risk taking. The project sets out from a theoretical understanding that social structures and cultural contexts shape the understanding of what constitutes "risky" and "safe" sexual practices. It uses discourse theory as an over all methodological framework, and applies several qualitative methods. It is divided into three substudies: (1) the first examines informational and educational safer sex material targeting young people; (2) the second examines, through focus group interviews, how young people interprets a selection of the same material; (3) and the third observe the formal school based sex education through observations and single interviews.

Studies of educational stratification show that children from advantaged backgrounds (more economic and cultural capital) attain higher educational merits than others. Recent research in educational stratification incorporates social capital as an additional factor with a significant impact on school achievement. The aim of this project is to examine, in a Swedish context, how access to social capital affects the educational performance of young people from different backgrounds (class, gender, and ethnicity), through the following research questions: Which characteristics of young people affect their access to social capital? Does social capital offset limited access to economic and cultural capital and contribute to better educational outcomes for young people of lower socioeconomic and/or immigrant origin? By what mechanisms does social capital improve individuals educational achievements?

The project aims at enhancing empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of this complex research question, focusing on the potential of alternative strategies for social inclusion of migrant youth in multi-ethnic urban settings. We set out to examine different expressions of cooperation for social inclusion in multi-ethnic urban settings. The project studies the question of urban unrest from different empirical perspectives, ranging from institutional representatives to actors in civil society and young people themselves. Empirically, the project will scrutinize how structural change and institutional responses related to welfare reductions affects social exclusion/inclusion of migrant youth in marginalized neighborhoods through case studies in two Swedish urban settings, Stockholm and Malmö. The project is interdisciplinary and is carried out with by the use of qualitative methods such as interviews (individually as well as in groups) and document analysis.

This project is part of a larger project analyzing the implications of school choice reforms, school choice and its long-term consequences for individuals' social mobility in Sweden in general, with a particular focus on three medium-sized Swedish cities; Örebro, Norrköping and Jönköping. The project as a whole examines the general political context and implementation of school choice reforms at the local level, the experience of school choice at the individual level and the long term consequences for young people's future educational and professional careers. This particular part of the project examines the implementation of the school choice reform at the local level, through interviews with politicians and officials, and analysis of policy documents at the national and local levels. Overall, the project offers new knowledge about whether school choice reform has led to increased freedom of choice, and the long-term effects of school choice reforms for individuals' social mobility.

Young people from lower socio-economic strata living in marginalized urban areas have substantially more difficulties in school. This project aims to study if and how participation in civil society organizations may improve this situation. The research questions of the project are: 1) Young people in marginalised urban areas are active in which kinds of civil society organisations? 2) Through which processes does membership in civil society associations affect educational achievements of young people in school? 3) How does the impact of membership vary in terms of the educational outcomes of young people, taking account of issues such as gender, class and ethnic background? 4) To what extent does participation in civil society organisations restrict the freedom and mobility of young people and do such restrictions differ based on gender, class and ethnic background?
The answers will help us to grasp the significance of civil society organizations for young people?s educational achievements, and in continuation their labour market entry, and used in general educational policies, and to improve the situation for young people living in marginalized urban areas.

Stratification theory commonly puts education as the link between class of origin and class of destination. This system, where class is inherited through education and education inherited through class is often referred to as meritocracy. The concept of meritocracy - a society dominated by those with the most merits - has gained widespread support. Still, authoritarian and populist resurgences throughout the West indicate that ascriptive factors very much remain of import. So what is happening to meritocracy? In this doctoral project I address this question by studying the Swedish educational system and the phenomenon known as immigrant optimism.

Immigrant optimism refers to the fact that immigrants and children of immigrants tend to be more academically driven than expected given their socioeconomic backgrounds. This would result in advantage in the labor market, were it not for racialization and discrimination. As a result, immigrant optimism is at the intersection of the competing principles of attainment and ascription, making it an ideal subject for a project concerned with meritocracy.

This project develops theoretical insights and methods for the purpose of aiding anti-discriminatory education to accommodate value conflicts in society. The project builds upon previous research that has identified value conflicts related to gender and sexuality as a challenge for education that seeks to combat discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, in particular in situations where gender equality and sexual rights are articulated as 'Swedish' values.

The project employs qualitative methods and consists of fieldwork carried out in two upper secondary schools over a period of two years. The fieldwork follows an interactive research design where the researchers conduct classroom observations, interview teachers and students, provide feedback and, subsequently, develop the continuing practice in close cooperation with the participants. Drawing upon theories of feminist intersectionality and multicultural conviviality, the project seeks to promote reflexive knowledge among the participants, and to develop anti-discriminatory pedagogies that are inclusive and sensitive to diverse experiences and conflicting values among the participants.

This ethnographic research project deals with women’s labour migration from Kenya for work in domestic service in private households in the Gulf States. Migration from Kenya to the gulf states is well established and while exact numbers are unknown, it is currently estimated that there are up to 300 000 Kenyan citizens working in the Gulf States on temporary contracts (GAATW 2019). Conditions for women domestic workers are particularly harsh. Reports of physical, psychological and sexual violence are frequent (Ibid). To counter the abuses the Kenyan state has developed pre-departure training which includes information on workers’ rights, intercultural competence and technical knowhow. Pre-departure training is now made mandatory and integral to the labour migration process. Using policy analysis, interviews and observations, this project will critically map and analyse the various stakeholders (Kenyan state, NGO’s, recruitment firms, training centres, women workers and women workers’ families) and how benefits, risks and costs are managed and negotiated by the different stakeholders.