What the author has argued in this talk is that the answers to the question posed to this panel--"what counts as useful knowledge in educational research?"--are something which will be framed by what researchers care about as researchers. It requires a collective undertaking where a space in between them is cherished for the sake of the many…

The article addresses the widespread claim to make educational research more relevant for practitioners, policy makers, potential users and stakeholders, and proposes a problematisation of the notion of "useful knowledge". The article illustrates the conceptual, instrumental and legitimative relevance of knowledge and highlights empirically the…

This article presents findings from a comparative study of sources of educational disadvantage of immigrant children across 18 OECD countries, which is based the data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The findings show that disadvantaged family background and lack of host-country-specific cultural capital account…

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors' analyses, using data…

This article analyses how Finnish parents of sixth graders in a comprehensive school act in the local "school markets" of the case city. The parents' subject positions as choosers are reflected on and explored in relation to the discourses and resources they use when discussing their school choices. The data were gathered in 2009 by administering…

"Images & Identity" was a two-year curriculum development project in which citizenship and art educators in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Germany, Malta and Portugal collaborated on the production of teacher education materials. The article begins with a critical analysis of educational policy for European citizenship and of the potential…

The results of international school achievement studies had major educational implications in many European countries, especially for the control concepts of education. This becomes exemplarily apparent in Germany, in which a large-scale educational reform was set in motion. Thereby, the education system was set from an input- to output-oriented…

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for…

The extent to which the goals and contents of (compulsory) education should to be regulated has been a complicated balancing act in the Netherlands. Against a background of a long-standing statutory tradition of freedom of education, governmental decisions about "what knowledge is of most worth" have been delicate. The purpose of the analysis…

The European Qualification Framework (EQF) is intended to transform European national qualification frameworks (NQFs) by moulding them into a learning outcomes framework. Currently adopted as an enabling law by the European Union, the EQF has now operated for several years. In order to secure widespread adoption, however, it will be necessary for…

The European Union (EU) considers the learning of entrepreneurial skills to be an essential factor in creating welfare. Therefore, in the EU, one of the latest core aspects is to develop entrepreneurship education in teacher education. However, entrepreneurship education still seems to be, across the countries, a quite uncommon theme. This article…

The European Union is concerned about the economic prospects of its member states as they have to compete against newly emerging economies with lower wages and high ambitions. Part of the strategy to deal with this economic shadow is to create a knowledge economy, but in order to achieve this, a shift to a competence-based curriculum model is seen…

The curriculum is a governance technology of knowledge production and is also itself governed by complex dynamics within European education policy space. This article focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge; in particular, it identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of…

This article compares discourses on "Europe" in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula and textbooks over approximately the last twenty years, from the early 1990s, when Cyprus applied for European Union (EU) membership, until 2011-12, the school year during which the recently revised curricula were gradually introduced to schools for implementation.…

This article focuses on the aim of creating a flexible and self-centred self by means of entrepreneurial and therapeutic education. It is an analysis that uses documents from project-based educational programmes as well as interviews with young adults and the people who work with them in these programmes. The data are examined using a Foucauldian…