This article discusses challenges posed to the design and enactment of twenty-first century school curricula by examining three core issues: pedagogical autonomy, the balance and integration of knowledge and thinking skills, and curricular flexibility. It focuses on how a committee of experts commissioned by the Israeli ministry of education to…

Attitudes towards language and language education policy (LEP) interact with groups' identities, internal dynamics and intergroup relations. Combining quantitative and qualitative measures, we focused on the Habad community--a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (UO) minority in Israel--exploring its LEP and community attitudes toward languages meaningful to…

Over the past decade there has been a major move to position "thinking" (however thinking is defined and enacted) as a more explicit outcome within the curriculum of many nations, with implications for teachers' professional development, assessment, and examination requirements. This paper analyses approaches to this challenge taken by…

The last two decades have seen increased threats to agricultural landscapes in Israel. Key factors include population growth, strong pressure from construction entrepreneurs and possible profit to land owners who benefit from a legal conversion of farmland into lands allocated for construction. While each Israeli elementary school student used to…

The paper discusses the collective identity of the Palestinian citizens of Israel as it is filtered to school students through the state-commissioned school textbooks. Since it was established in 1948, Israel has maintained two separate education systems, one for Palestinian-Israelis, who are now approximately 20% of the population, and the other…

In this article we examine the Israeli Ministry of Education teacher induction program as a paradigm for preservice and in-service induction programs. We stipulate the necessity of creating a bridge between the preservice program and the field, which would allow for collaboration between the pedagogical staff of the teacher preparation programs…