Even though religious schools are common in Australia, many government schools provide religious instruction (RI) classes. Religious instruction involves students being segregated into faith based groups so as to receive instruction in the beliefs and practices of "one" religion. This practice also occurs in many other countries. In…

Amidst increasing religious disaffiliation, often due to a perceived tension between faith and the STEM disciplines, Catholic schools provide critical opportunities for young people to recognize how these domains can be mutually elevating. The field, however, lacks guidance as to how this integration should occur in practice. This conceptual paper…

Climate change is of great concern to all age groups but in particular to children. "Simple" climate models have been in place for a long time and can be used effectively with post-16 students. For younger children, modifications are required, and we describe in this paper the development and use of two such models. The first (the Granny…

Regular physical activity provides physical, mental and cognitive benefits for children. However, globally, only 20% of children meet the recommended levels of physical activity and, on average, students sit for three-quarters of the school day. Active breaks are a well-tested component of many school-based physical activity interventions, but…

I interrogate the Philippine Indigenous Peoples Education's operational construct of culture to explicate its indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP) integration into the K-12 curriculum. Pragmatism as a philosophical framework mainly guides the argument in this paper. In the first part, I introduce the old and contemporary meanings of…

The past decade has seen declining numbers of 0-4 year-olds while the number of 5-14 year-olds has continued to rise. During this period, most countries increased their financial investment in primary and lower secondary education, improving student-teacher ratios. However, the distribution of teachers remains uneven, with urban areas often facing…

America's reckoning with racial injustice and the pursuit of equity have led some public school systems to reduce or terminate (or at least question) special programs for high achievers, such as "gifted" education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Historically, such programs have served disproportionately few Black, Hispanic,…

In this article, we explore why American populists may be attracted to the educational choice. Though populist factions may support either elitist institutions and policies or institutions and policies that promote pluralism in the short term, their motivations and interests over the long term may diverge from elitism and pluralism in important…

Recent debates about the status of knowledge in the school curriculum have seen the emergence of attempts to connect curriculum reform to the ideas about 'powerful knowledge' articulated by Michael Young and other sociologists. This article argues that for the case of media education, and specifically its application in secondary schools (in the…

An examination of school curriculum documents which guide teaching in Caribbean schools indicate that while some efforts have been made to infuse ESE into some subjects, very little progress has been made in incorporating it into the teaching of English. One pedagogical technique to address this situation is ecocriticism. The authors conducted…

In this article, I conduct a critical scrutiny of how best to frame "Teacher Professional Learning" (TPL) in a time of uncertainty, to what extent, contemporary mainstream literature provides a complete description of this construct and, if not, what might be missing, hidden, unintended or otherwise overlooked. I draw from critical…

This paper comprises a re-reading of the 1955 novel by John Wyndham, "The Chrysalids," in conversation with philosopher Rosi Braidotti's formation of critical posthumanism. The author argues that such re-readings of curricular fixtures within secondary English classrooms constitutes a necessary pragmatic intervention in a school system…

Contemporary art educators design artmaking experiences around questions, ideas, and themes to help engage students in personally relevant meaning-making (Anderson & Milbrandt, 2005; Gude, 2004, 2013; Walker, 2001). Preservice art teachers are trained to plan lessons and curriculum to move beyond the so-called school art style (Efland, 1976;…

In 2008 and 2012, Pioneer Institute published reports documenting declines in enrollment in Massachusetts' public schools. At the time, enrollment had fallen by about 35,000 students over a decade, or roughly 0.5 percent per year, with especially large drops in western Massachusetts and parts of Cape Cod. This paper examines enrollment trends…

Arizona shifted to using current-year enrollment, instead of prior-year enrollment, as the basis for determining state aid for school districts following the passage of Arizona Education Finance Amendment (AEFA) in 2017. This study examines the short-term effects of AEFA implementation on school inputs--namely, expenditures and district personnel,…