In this article, tensions in teacher community arose when the school's "rainy day" policy was invoked in the middle of a class period, disturbing instruction on the athletic field and subsequently in the gymnasium. The narrative inquiry takes a multiperspectival stance towards competing commitments to educational policy, on one…

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…

For the past few years, the Republic of Cyprus has been pursuing a major educational reform across all levels of mandatory education, focusing especially on curriculum change, for the implementation of which in-service teachers have undergone a series of professional development seminars. Individual and focus group interviews with in-service…

In this article, we examine one school's experience with policy, as a means of shedding light on the intersection of factors contributing to challenges of implementing policies to support the academic achievement and social adaptation of immigrant and minority students in their school context. We begin with the presentation of a "big…

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 paper presents an exploratory study of two consecutive reading sessions conducted in primary school by two different teachers. Our purpose is twofold. From a theoretical viewpoint, we propose a tentative set of conditions of teaching effectiveness by relying on the Joint Action Theory in Didactics. From a methodological viewpoint, drawing on…

This article examines the relationship between school and cultural knowledge of Second World War in contemporary Poland. Drawing on analysis of 126 student responses to well-known photographs (photo elicitation), the author addresses what it means for schoolchildren to learn about an aspect of a contested past, the Holocaust, within the frame of…

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents' understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history…

Whereas history is seen by some as crucial in developing a sense of identity and fostering social cohesion, it is however, often based around narrowly nationalistic views of the past, and yet little is known about how students relate to the past they are taught. Thus, this paper focuses on the history curriculum and the ways in which students aged…

This paper introduces the concept of the "absent curriculum" on the premise that the study of curriculum has been prone to privileging curricular presence to the exclusion of curricular absence. In order to address this imbalance and to articulate a theory of absence in the curriculum, the paper applies ideas derived from the philosophy…

This study focuses on the comparison of the English and the Dutch primary history curriculum regarding the understanding of historical time. We compare different aspects of both curricula that can apply to other subjects as well, for example the question "what age would be appropriate to start a subject in primary school?" Here, we…

The article discusses how Finnish upper secondary school students ponder upon the questions of transgenerational responsibility and historical reparation. These questions have got a prominent place in the history culture in many societies in the last 20 years. The philosophical and political dimensions of reparations for historical injustices have…

This article demonstrates how changes in the language of Swedish education policy have opened up a new social perception of education, in which space has been created for new actors, models and solutions in terms of managing activities in schools. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate how various "promotion" and "prevention…

With the persistent criticism of teacher education as a backdrop, this article explores the common perception that teacher education is too theoretical. This article takes the view that the student teachers' assumptions regarding the concept of theory affect how they engage with theory during initial teacher education. Using a qualitative…

This article presents the results of a comparative study of the content in selected teacher education programmes for primary and lower secondary teachers in Canada, Denmark, Finland and Singapore. First and foremost, the study is a comparison between teacher education programmes in, on the one hand, Canada, Finland and Singapore, all of which…