More and more, Dutch adolescents are no longer affiliated with or involved in institutionalised religious world views. This development raises questions on how religion is treated and taught in secondary schools in the Netherlands. In order to reconsider religious education within these schools, closer insights into this particular, growing, group…

Friction in the classroom may create useful tension for teachers when they attempt to discuss sensitive topics as part of democratic learning. Due to the openness and indeterminacy of these topics, students can experience what it is like to be (political) subjects in a diverse society and become aware of other people's subjectness in a charged…

Students at upper secondary and college level in many countries are introduced to quantum physics (QP) in a mostly mathless course. Research shows that addressing epistemological and philosophical aspects would be beneficial for novice students' conceptual understanding. However, physics teachers seldom address these nature of science (NOS)…

Classroom discussion is frequently proposes as an essential part of democratic citizenship education. Literature, however, pays little attention to what kind of discussion is most effective and how teachers can facilitate a discussion. This study aims to contribute to the development of a framework for analysing the characteristics of classroom…

Bjorn Wansink and his co-authors have aligned their teaching of a recent and controversial historical issue--the Cold War--in the light of a contemporary incident. This article demonstrates a means of ensuring that students understand that different cultures' views of their shared past are nuanced, rather than monolithic--a different concept in…

Both direct and indirect influences have been assumed to impact the transmission of political orientations within families. A lower socioeconomic status is related to lower intended political participation of adolescents. Within this context, schools play a crucial role in political socialisation, as citizenship education is assumed to either…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been said to increase not only foreign language proficiency but also learner motivation (Coyle, D., P. Hood, and D. Marsh. 2010. "CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In contexts where CLIL is elective, however, the question can be…

This study follows a group of modern foreign languages (MFL) teachers in the Netherlands during a nine-month professional development project around the theme of 'Content in MFL'. The project was initiated following proposals to refocus the MFL curriculum on the basis of integrated learning outcomes for both language proficiency and areas of…

Citizenship education is one of the main aims of the mandated subject of social studies in secondary schools in the Netherlands. Moreover, the learning outcomes of social studies refer to constitutional rights. Internationally, citizenship education and human rights education are considered to be mutually reinforcing. One may, thus, expect that…

This study analysed questionnaire responses from 309 history teachers who come from nine European countries and Israel. The open-ended questions explored their experiences of teaching Sensitive historical Issues (SI) from joint social psychological and history didactics perspectives. First data was analysed hermeneutically, it was then interpreted…

In CLIL contexts, school subjects are taught in an additional language, allowing learners to acquire the target language through meaningful use. This places language teachers in an ambiguous position. What is their role in this context? On the one hand, language teachers are expected to collaborate with subject teacher colleagues; on the other…

In recent years, a surging uptake of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has permeated the European context. This article presents the outcomes of a study about the self-reported pedagogical practices of CLIL teachers in the Netherlands. To investigate these teachers' pedagogies, a questionnaire was designed, validated and,…

The present experimental study examined whether a different focus during a pre-task planning observation task affects learners' subsequent oral task performance. Forty-eight ninth-grade students learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to two different planning conditions: video observations with a focus on language (FonL) and…

The relationship between language pedagogy and the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classroom is a key issue for research into CLIL. In the Netherlands, as in other European contexts, non-native speakers of a target language with a non-language teaching background teach CLIL content lessons. Whilst CLIL teachers teaching their…

Innovation is essential for the education sector. The ways in which curriculum decision making is organised reflects different implicit approaches on how educational systems pertain to promote innovation in education. Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by…