Since the late 1980s, school curriculum revisions in Japan have sought to promote capabilities and dispositions that transcend subject boundaries and are often labelled 'competencies' in international curricular discourse. This study examines policy documents over the period, showing how Japanese policymakers have sought to navigate pressures…

We examine the ideal twenty-first century learner as discursively produced in recent future-oriented documents published by the OECD and UNESCO. Drawing inspiration from Bacchi's question 'What is the problem represented to be?', we identify a constellation of interrelated discourses that together craft an image of a post-political, resilient,…

This historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two…

Competence-based approaches (CBAs) in education have become an internationally important educational policy concept in recent decades. However, a substantial body of research has suggested that in order to understand and explain the evolution of CBAs, there is a need to analyse curriculum-making as a complex and multi-layered practice. To…

This article discusses the 'Indianisation', 'nationalisation', and 'ruralisation' of the Montessori method in India at the eve, and in the aftermath of the country's political independence (1947). From 1914 onwards, Indian nationalists received Montessori's ideas through publications, the networks of the new education movement, and the…

Issues of transitional justice are central to countries moving away from identity-based conflict. Research tends to focus on the most well-known forms of transitional justice, like truth commissions. Far less attention has been given to education as a form of transitional justice, and even less to teacher professional development, even though…

Kosovo introduced two major curriculum reforms over the past 20 years -- in 2001 and 2011 -- each aiming to bring education closer to international trends. Simultaneously, Kosovo underwent major political, social, and cultural changes after the war in 1999, and the declaration of independence in 2008. This article relies on document analysis and…

Educational interventions are often administered at scale in diverse settings as part of international development programmes. Their implementation is subject to a linear process that begins with finding out 'what works' at a local level, frequently through the use of randomised controlled trials, and continues with rolling out the intervention to…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

In the aftermath of the World War II, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an ambitious campaign to improve access to education and to fight illiteracy worldwide. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 had legitimised international action to raise educational and living standards in the…

This paper interrogates the ways in which "reflexivity" has proliferated as a normative methodological discourse in the field of international and comparative education. We argue that the dominant approach to reflexivity foregrounds the standpoints of researchers and their subjects in a way that does not attend to the situated,…

This paper examines Indonesia's experience with neo-liberal higher education reform. It argues that this agenda has encountered strong resistance from the dominant predatory political, military, and bureaucratic elements who occupy the state apparatus, their corporate clients, and popular forces, leading to continuation of the centralist and…

The article seeks to formulate a comparative framework that explains the uneven development of schooling in Cyprus and Singapore during the British colonial rule. It specifically focuses on the moment of transition to independence and on the role played by ideas and the interaction of ideas in the evolution of social institutions. The overall…

Building on the Education for All movement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development re-emphasises quality education as a discrete goal. Contextualising the discussion surrounding this goal in Zambia, this study examines how education quality is conceptualised by educational stakeholders at local, national, and global levels. Triangulating…

This article introduces the notion of "justice-sensitive education"--derived from the ideals and practices of transitional justice (TJ) in countries emerging from conflict. It describes three mechanisms for this: structural reforms (relating to inequity and division); curriculum change (the treatment of history, human rights and…