While there is little political opposition towards sex education as such in Norway, recent attempts at reforming the subject reveal underlying heteronormative presumptions that seem resistant to reform. While a focus on homosexuality is included in the national curriculum at all levels of compulsory education, the sexual practices involved in…

Developing nations including Bangladesh are significantly lagging behind the millennium development target due to the lack of science, technology and engineering education. Bangladesh as a least developing country has only 44 engineers per million people. Its technological education and gross domestic product growth are not collinear. Although…

Viewed by someone with no involvement, the Association for Science Education (ASE) Annual Conference will seem like an impossibly ambitious task, relying significantly on volunteers (though increasingly supported by a small permanent staff) to organise and run it. Developed from events already established in the former associations, it offers a…

Teaching her Key Stage 3 students in Essex, Catherine McCrory was struck by the stark contrast between their enthusiasm for studying diverse histories of Africa and the Americas and their reluctance to engage with certain groups deemed different within England. Inspired by the resources in the local Record Office and keen to implement the part of…

The revised UK Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) now places a stronger emphasis on personal, social and emotional development (PSED) as one of its three prime areas. PSED has three characteristics of learning: active learning, creating and thinking critically, and playing and exploring. These aspects of the revised EYFS closely align with the…

The recently introduced "Australian Curriculum: English" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2012) requires students to "read" multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might…

The British current model of education has turned schools into exam factories and further education colleges and universities into skills factories for British industry. In their book, "From Exam Factories to Communities of Discovery: the Democratic Route," the authors offer an alternative way of thinking and talking about education, as well as…

The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to "identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves". While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense of…

With reference to the unsuccessful attempt of the Labour Government to make sex education a statutory part of the National Curriculum, this paper argues in favour of making liberal sex education compulsory at all state schools. First, the main characteristics of a liberal sex education are briefly explained. Promoting the virtue of respect for…

The revised National Curriculum for Science for key stages 3 and 4 (ages 11-16) in England provides the opportunity to develop a new coherent approach to teaching about the carbon cycle, the use of carbon as a fuel and the resulting issues. The Earth Science Education Unit (ESEU) intends to develop a new workshop to support the teaching of this…

Is a "fair test" the only way to carry out science investigations? Many children (and primary teachers) following the National Curriculum in England and Wales would answer "yes" to this question. This is because fair test investigations have historically been promoted in national assessment, published curricula, schemes of work…

This article outlines an extension exercise that is based on the elementary geometrical constructions in the National Curriculum. The challenge for students is to organise and execute an extended construction. The hidden, parallel agenda is proof, for the teacher's role is to convince students that they "must" succeed and that doing so is a…

This article considers how primary teachers can learn from the practice of artists in their own teaching of art. Fundamental to artistic practice is the notion of practising with various materials and tools. In the article I look at some children's images, as well as scrutinising some statements made by the painter Francis Bacon. The practices of…

This paper will represent the pedagogy of Innovation Education in Iceland that is a new school policy within the Icelandic school system. In Innovation Education (IE) students are trained to identify needs and problems in their environment and to find solutions: this is referred to as the process of ideation. The main aim is to improve their…

The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan observed many years ago and the "form" of what we do carries "content" as Hayden White has argued. This article reports ways in which three generations of history teachers in one history department have endeavoured to do justice to African historical traditions in their collaborative…