Previous research concerning teacher practical knowledge has revealed its epistemological foundations, content structure and research methodology, but little research examines its ethical dimension. Based on a four-year project in China, this study probes the ethical dimension of an experienced teacher's practical knowledge, explicated in a…

This paper sets out the main findings of the International Instructional Systems Study (IISS), conducted by the UCL Institute of Education and funded by the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The study examined the instructional systems and intended curricula of six "high performing" countries and two US states. The…

Background/Context: There is a pressing need to consider how citizens should live together, especially in societies that are increasingly ethnically and politically diverse. Even though multicultural education is constructed very differently and serves very different purposes in different national contexts, relatively little attention has been…

Over the last 20 years, the study of language teachers' beliefs has attracted much attention. One important strand of this research has been the exploration of the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their practice, generating a recurring research theme of identifying "consistency" and "inconsistency" between teachers'…

This article uses curriculum-making frameworks to analyse and reconstruct the Chinese curriculum-making model and unpack the dynamics, complexity and constraints of China's curriculum reform since the early 1990s. It argues that curriculum reform is China's main human capital development strategy for coping with the challenges of the 21st century,…

Although it seems obsolete to analyse and criticise a curriculum from the point-of-view of "subject-centredness", this is the situation we face during the Chinese basic education curriculum reform. This article gives a brief introduction to the ideas behind the development and practice of the Chinese curriculum reform and the progress of…