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…

A widespread perception about falling standards prompted Margaret Thatcher's government to pass 1988 legislation mandating a national curriculum and accompanying testing system. The worst-case scenario feared by many British teachers is coming to pass: a test-driven curriculum without significant attention to teachers' assessments of student…

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…

This article seeks to deepen understanding of the ways in which trainees account for and justify their practice. The area of particular interest to the authors is early years education where, in England at least, centrally issued governmental curriculum advice can be viewed as calling upon conflicting conceptions of education. The article reports…

This article discusses whether the occupational culture of teachers has changed as a consequence of increased managerialism, using as an exemplar some of the routine planning, assessment and reporting procedures in common use in schools in England. The article examines this claim in the light of developments after the 1988 Education Reform Act,…

In this article, the researchers discuss school improvement for social justice in Beirut, Lebanon. They introduce the Lebanese context: its schooling systems, the revised Lebanese National Curriculum, and the issues under investigation: socioeconomic, political, as well as inclusion/exclusion. The data were collected through semi-structured…

This article explores policy and curriculum diffusion in southern and eastern Africa through an examination of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and outcomes-based education. The article argues that the NQF was adopted for different reasons in different contexts, but that discourse coalitions and conferences have been critical in…

The place of economics in the curriculum in England and Wales provides a lens through which we may view the ways in which the curriculum as a whole is fought over and remains shifting terrain. Conceived of as social movements, school subject communities are made up of competing factions giving rise to contest and conflict both within themselves…

I take up recent remarks by Teruhisa Horio about school student disaffection in Japan and see echoes of this in Britain. In that country the traditional school curriculum of discrete largely academic subjects is often taken to be one cause of the problem. I review justifications for it but no sound ones appear to be available. We need to…

In 2006 Vietnam had experienced more than two decades of reform. However, while the reforms have transformed the entire Vietnamese economy and opened the country to globalization, the education system is still very much under the Vietnamese Communist Party's control. The schoolbooks are published under close supervision of the authorities. The…

This article is concerned with how and to what extent cultural diversity and difference are promoted in early childhood education and the curriculum. With reference to the "Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage in England" (2000), I argue that dominant discourses of cultural homogeneity continue to powerfully inform the…

A novel "Whiteheadean" science program was initiated in England and Wales in September 2006. Following a critical House of Commons report in 2002, the government altered the National Curriculum targets and thus forced the Examination Boards to alter their specifications in order to come in line. Assessment at GCSE level (i.e., the 14-16…

The National curriculum assessment (NCA) in Wales has evolved from common foundations into a system that is now distinct from that in England. The influence of the political and social milieu of Wales can be seen both in the distinctive features that have been in place from the outset and in the more radical changes introduced since 2002. In this…

This article explores the possibilities of shifting ethnocentric bias in curricula and pupils' constructions of national and European identities using the concept of "Europe" as a tool. The European dimension was conceptualized as a subtle approach, within the deeply divided society of Cyprus, to alleviate the ethnocentrism of history…

This book focuses on educational change processes in the context of larger scale educational reform. The first of 2 volumes, the book contains 11 chapters that examine the historical, social, and economic forces at work in the formulation and implementation of educational policy. The chapters present different cross-cultural experiences of…