Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations are shaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasing turn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curriculum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one in which…

This paper considers the impact of a small-scale action research project which focused on the development of an emergent approach to curriculum making in a general certificate in secondary education course in geography. In this context, we argue that complexity thinking offers a useful theoretical foundation from which to understand the nature of…

This article describes an attempt to bring disciplinary historical inquiry into the social studies classroom. This work emerges from a five-school 6-month intervention in San Francisco, "Reading like a Historian", which found main effects for student learning across four quantitative measures: historical thinking, factual knowledge, general…

During the last decade, expanding research investigating the school subject Physical Education (PE) indicates a promotion of inequalities regarding which children benefit from PE teaching. Outdoor education and its Scandinavian equivalent "friluftsliv," is a part of the PE curriculum in many countries, and these practices have been claimed to have…

This paper draws on the experiences of two graduate level curriculum theory classes taught at different teacher education institutions in the US. Teacher educators and curriculum theorists invest in creating reflexive spaces for teachers to explore the complex terrain of lived curriculum. Narrative inquiry is chronicled as acting as an important…

Broadening the role of teachers in curriculum development was among the fundamental objectives of educational reforms in the formerly communist Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The research done so far, however, calls into question the degree to which teachers perceive the relevant changes in curriculum and their new role. This article first describes…

If the purpose of an educational system is to guide pupils towards achieving independence, then certain conditions about the design and conduct of that system must be met. In this paper, those conditions are formulated from a socio-cultural perspective on learning and development. This paper examines the extent to which those conditions were…

Various psychoanalysts have written about the implications of psychoanalytic theory for teaching and learning. Although many curriculum scholars have offered their personal interpretations of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to education, there is very little in the educational literature about what psychoanalysts "themselves" have had to…

We analyse two narratives of teacher-facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher-facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development-team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to…

There is a strong consensus in the educational literature that teaching is an inherently moral endeavour, and that the moral work of teachers is of central importance to education. However, programmes of teacher education in the USA typically do not reflect these beliefs in their curricula. One reason for this inconsistency is that researchers…

Starting in 1997, a sophisticated, outcomes-based curriculum was to be implemented in South African schools. This study examines and analyses how science teachers in one rural school responded to the demands of this new curriculum. I consider the capacity of the school and the extent to which outside support and pressure was provided. The levels…

This exploratory study examines how teachers perceive their work within the current context of educational reform. A cognitive social-psychological approach to emotions offers the theoretical framework for understanding what teachers have at stake within the context of the reforms. Six Dutch secondary school teachers with strongly differing…

Many observers have commented on disparities between the theoretical understandings of environmental education portrayed in academic literature and the environmental education that takes place in schools. In much of the literature and in curriculum documents there has been an increasing emphasis on promoting positive attitudes towards the…

Increasingly, there are calls for the school curriculum to reflect the real-world needs of students, such as the need to make difficult choices as citizens. The science curriculum is not exempt from these reappraisals of the relevance of what occurs in schools. Approaches to science involving social contexts are increasingly common, and with them…

The systemic approach to reform recognizes that schools are part of a complex system of expectations and that reform plans must recognize the diverse interests at play in any reform. While systemic approaches understand that the interaction among factors influencing change are complex and that piece-meal change is problematic, there is a danger…