**5. Cultural analysis**

The cultural analysis on the Arts program at an upper secondary school was predicted on the teachers and the school leader's perceptions of student learning as motivated, contingent and well situated. Central to this perspective was the assumption that students are active learners who reflect upon and may actively participate in investigating their own practice [37]. The aim of the cultural analysis was to conceptualize upper secondary school students' personal and informal approaches to learning, and to determine the extent to which these reflected the effects of teaching and assessment rather than representing stable characteristics of the individual learners [39].

Operating out of a theoretical frame that views cultural practice makes it natural to choose ethnography as methodological tool, because ethnography seeks to explain, describe and provide insight into human behavior in context [40]. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand the cultural experience (ethno) of individuals and groups [41, 42]. A hallmark of autoethnographic studies are the focusing on narrations and descriptions of personal experience in a context Autoethnographic strategy thus provide opportunities for close examination and understanding and dissemination of students engaged in self-reflexive inquiries [43]. In the study of upper secondary school students' personal and informal approaches to learning, I decided to use an autoethnographic strategy of inquiry with letter writing as an empirical research methodology [44].

The empirical material consisted of 89 letters from three grades of the Arts program in the investigated school, located in a medium-sized Swedish city. In the letters, the students gave an account of themselves, their own experiences and the experiences of another. As a research method, a merit of letters is the quality established and the give and take of an imaginary conversation between the researcher and the writer [45].

This conversation progresses simultaneously on several levels as dialogs within the text of letters by writers with similar voices. These dialogs are well suited for collective studies of pedagogical phenomena in a school, in which different perspectives and aspects visualize. One can say they function as a kind of "black box", in search of better understanding of educational processes [46]. The interpretation of the letters can lead to different understandings of what actually happens and provide important knowledge of the values and motivations among students in secondary school and their approach to learning.

Research of this kind cannot and should perhaps not even be value free, but it is helpful to have the values brought out explicitly [47]. Paying attention to factors like structural form, word choice and phrasing, the students described implicitly how they positioned themselves as learners. In some letters, the students indicted learning without explicitly stating it as such, for example, by saying, "I like to be doing, I am finding. I love to learn". Statements such as these showed that the students positioned themselves in a learning process more than taking active steps to learning [37]. Critics have argued that writers create the lives they write about [48]. Common to all perspectives on auto ethnographic strategies for research is the assumption that people enter into conversations with certain goals. Even when they cooperate to provide information for mutual understanding, they attempt to attain certain personal goals. The current educational goals did not seem to make the students planned communicators, merely spontaneous writers with a more or less clear sense of what they wished to obtain [49]. The opportunity for students to write an open letter to their teachers and the school leader about their experiences of learning perceives rather as the trading of resources of attention, concern, support and other personal needs in an effort to achieve their goals [50].
