Background/Context: Montessori education has flourished as an alternative approach to schooling for a hundred years. In the century since the first Montessori school opened in the slums of Rome, the movement has undergone sustained growth while simultaneously enduring efforts to modify the method in order to reach a wider audience. Despite…

This paper presents a qualitative study about how teachers entering the profession at different times over the last five decades made sense of their professional lives and continuing professional development (CPD) experiences against the backdrop of the CPD policy infrastructure and wider educational context in Hong Kong. The life history method…

This article explores the implications for teacher education and continuous professional development (CPD) of enquiry-based learning, by drawing specifically on data collected during a four-year curriculum development and research project, Enquiring Minds (2005-9). Within the partnership approach to curriculum design endorsed by the project,…

This study suggests the need for complex research approaches that provide richer, contested, and nondichotomous portrayals of classrooms, schooling life, and teachers. Drawing from a qualitative study of Tajik teachers' practices and perspectives (Niyozov, 2001) and studies on teaching conducted in Kyrgyzstan (De Young, Reeves, & Valyaeva ,…

By its emphasis on arbitrary standards and misleading systems of accountability, the No Child Left Behind Act has had deleterious effects on classroom practice, teacher education, and even educational research. The new constraints on educational research, driven by a logic of randomized field tests, are part of a larger and more invidious…

In the current political context, researchers have, as Ivor Goodson (1992) earlier argued, a special obligation: "to assure that "the teachers' voice" is heard, heard loudly, heard articulately." But not just any "voice" will do--teacher troubles need to be tightly linked to issues, biography to history. On every front, directly and indirectly,…

Has Harry Judge's career reproduced in a lifetime the centuries-old history of Brasenose College and the University of Oxford? His biography and the history of his college in relation to Christian belief and modern university reform are briefly recapitulated. All tell a story of adaptation and modernisation, the man short, the college long, the…

This article uses the themes of genesis, metamorphoses, continuity and change from a comparative perspective to show the links and relationships between the ideas of the New Educationists, progressive education and the counter culture of the late 1970s. The article discusses important educationists from different continents and different time…

This is a self-study of my professional and cultural biography and identity, a history which directed me first toward the work of urban teaching and then into teacher education and research into comparative educational issues of racial and national identity. I use this inquiry to demonstrate how biography and identity influences the lived…

Background/Context: If we take as a given the desirability of an education that promotes principles of respect, pluralism, rational critical inquiry, compassion, innovation, and excellence, then humanistic pedagogies should be paramount to that educational vision. Yet humanistic education in the Middle East has been on the demise in past decades…

In early twentieth-century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women's hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with…

This integrative review uses two of Asa Grant Hilliard's books, "SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind" and "The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization", to discuss aspects of his scholarly legacy in teaching, history, and psychology. His scholarship is provocative. Hilliard rejected the supremacy of the…

Background: National curriculum assessment (NCA) in England has been in place for nearly 20 years. It has its origins in a political desire to regulate education, holding schools accountable. However, its form and nature also reflect educational and curriculum concerns and technical assessment issues. Purpose: The aim of the article is to provide…

Based on life history accounts of two elementary school teachers in South Africa, this article examines the construction of two teachers' mathematics identities. In the article we juxtapose these identities with the identity forms that are envisaged by the policymakers and the mathematics reforms currently underway in the country. Using the data…

The cult of efficiency, comprised of leading lights in education early in this century, stressed the necessity of bringing more efficient industrial practices into schools. This article describes the efficiency movement and Ella Flagg Young's dissent. Young's career as teacher, professor, and superintendent of the Chicago schools is highlighted.…