In early childhood education (ECE), global policy discourses influence national policy frameworks for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices. Although aspects of these discourses travel across national boundaries via policy borrowing, we argue that consideration is needed of the cultural-historical evolution of country-level systems, their…

Purpose: A recent United Nations (2021) report stated that education needs to be concerned with enhancing human relationships with the natural world if we are to work toward building a sustainable future. This paper proposes that educational practices underpinned by an ecological orientation in mid-century Aotearoa offer insights for educators…

Between 1947 and 1949, state-sanctioned texts on town planning and housing were produced for New Zealand schools. In these publications, ideals of social democratic citizenship intersect with modernist precepts of planning and design. Analysis of the school texts in the discursive context reveals an aim to encourage future citizens to take an…

In this article, we continue Martin Thrupp's critical work in education policy in Aotearoa New Zealand by examining the policies of the Sixth Labour-led Government (2017--2023) and the Sixth National-led Government (2023-present). We consider their attempts to mitigate social injustice via education policy and the social imaginaries that underpin…

This paper examines the contribution that Martin Thrupp made to educational policy and teachers' practice in the light of the present threat to democracy presented by the authoritarian right. Martin's work on school composition is extended to an analysis of the prospects and practice for a education for democratic citizenship. It focuses on the…

This article draws attention to shifting educational discourses on the two texts of the 1840 treaty: te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Treaty of Waitangi. Policy and resource conversations in education reveal subtle strategic shifts in use of an invented idea of "treaty principles"--from standing in for and attempting to reconcile the two…

Most secondary (high) schools in a broad range of jurisdictions internationally engage in various forms of high stakes, standardized assessment and related qualifications. In this paper, we interrogate how educational achievement regimes -- especially via the reporting of curriculum and assessment 'data' -- continue to mobilize particular gender…

There is much to celebrate about the liberal-progressive approach championed by New Zealand, which continues to be a prized feature of New Zealand education. Many liberal-progressive practices developed in New Zealand and contextualised for New Zealand students that sought to expand and enrich education were borrowed from Native Schools, Maori…

Narratives of international educational exchange programmes such as the US-sponsored Fulbright and the Commonwealth-centred Carnegie grants reveal the formative role these exchanges played in extending the geographical, scholarly, and professional boundaries of women's worlds. Notably, these award schemes influenced, shaped and expanded the career…

In response to growing attention to young children's citizenship, and recent calls for critique of Western discourses and practices, we explore the movement of Western 'pioneering' pedagogies of early childhood education (ECE) and their localisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Employing a poststructural positioning, and theoretical devices drawn from…

Handicapped, special, or diverse? Segregated, mainstreamed, or included? The field of disability and difference within education, is vast and wide-ranging. This review of the literature highlights how, although we have come far in the last 40 years, there is still much to learn about effective inclusion of disabled children in early childhood…

This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette "Polly" Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing…