Multiple international studies have confirmed the positive impact of library services and teacher--librarian partnerships on delivering curriculum outcomes and quality student learning in secondary schools. Despite this, there are indications internationally that school libraries are in decline. This article uses qualitative data from a national…

Purpose: This study introduces the idea of "Kyouzai Kenkyuu" and examines its potentiality as a conceptual tool to point to the curriculum design process with a case of social science education. By doing so, this study can contribute to expanding the target of reflection from the practices "inside" classrooms toward the…

Language learning applications (LL Apps), especially those that can be downloaded to a mobile device, are popular, widely available and represent a potentially useful tool for language teachers and their students. However, concerns exist that many LL Apps are inadequately aligned with second language acquisition (SLA) theory, and/or poorly suited…

This research compared how the scientific literacy-related goals of the current Chinese and Finnish national science curricula at primary school level are actualised using a revised Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scientific literacy framework in the content analysis of the curricula. The content of the curricula focuses…

This article reflects on how English as a school subject was positioned in the seminal paper "The Teaching of English in England", otherwise known as The Newbolt Report, and its relationship with current government policy in England. Nearly a century after the Report's publication, questions regarding the content and purpose of English…

This study investigates how larger ideological tensions related to internationalisation and nationalisation are manifested in local education systems, especially in English textbooks. We begin this exploration with a review of the School Curriculum of the Republic of Korea. Using three textbooks as cases; we examine how they reflect and manage the…

Due to its historical and geopolitical contestations, Taiwan is a country whose people possess divergent imaginations of the national community. Such a condition has been described as institutional liminality, which captures Taiwan's status as not a complete nation state nor a non-nation state; not China nor non-China. Under such a condition,…

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia's federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on "policy assemblage" within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical…

The 'Does RE Work?' project, part of the AHRC/ESRC Religion & Society Programme, ran from 2007 to 2011. Drawing on textual analysis, ethnographic case studies and practitioner enquiry, the study identified core confusions as to the purposes and entailments of Religious Education as practised across the jurisdictions of the UK. This paper…

This qualitative study problematizes the interplay between Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks and students' militaristic national identity constructions in six state-schools. Drawing on field-data collected employing interviews with twelve teachers and focus-groups and participatory tools with four-hundred and twenty-four students, it also…

This paper proposes the concept of 'Curricular Epistemic Socialisation' as a process through which the school curriculum shapes the disciplinary epistemologies and identities of high school (11-18) teachers. Drawing on a survey of history teachers in Scotland (n=101), a cohort comparison is made between those trained since the introduction in 2010…

Alienation and moral disengagement have been described in the literature as some of the key factors for making some people more vulnerable to violent extremism. In this paper, I explore how mindfulness training, especially when paired with art therapy strategies, has great potential for supporting targeted educational measures for building…

The Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills, run by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Literacy and the National Literacy Trust, as well as partners Facebook, First News and The Day, has gathered a wealth of evidence over the past year on the impact of fake news on children and young people, as well as the…

In 2014, the Finnish National Board of Education launched a new core curriculum with the aim of meeting the skills and competence requirements of the 21st century. The purpose of this case study was to find out what transversal competencies Finnish eighth graders developed and how they experienced studying in a problem-based transdisciplinary…

This paper describes a model for teacher professional development as co-design for curriculum planning in which facilitators with design and pedagogical expertise iteratively work with groups of secondary school teachers, one school at a time, to plan whole terms of work, as a form of teacher professional development. It contains preliminary…