Recent worldwide trends in curriculum policy have re-emphasised the role of teachers in school-based curriculum development. Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence is typical of these trends, stressing that teachers are agents of change. This paper draws upon empirical data to explore school-based curriculum development in response to…

This paper asks how a teacher transforms from constrained and controlled to an independent yet dialogical agent. We analyse and describe the transformation of a teacher in the Finnish rural north in one school semester from a "conforming" teacher to a "transformative teacher," examining the narrative of her personal journal and…

At the level of policy the relative "value" of subjects is determined by their official curriculum designation, creating a hierarchy of learning within which particular subjects are categorised as optional to the educational experience of young people. This situation is well-illustrated by the marginalised position of drama in the…

During the last two decades, professional standards describing competencies for teaching staff have emerged in nation states all around the world. This article reports on a pilot-study that applies a sociotechnological "lens" to examine this standardisation process in educational policy. In line with ethnographic analyses drawing on science and…

Taking Butler's notion of embodied performativity in relation to education and global flow, this article uses one example of Samoan cultural dance within a community arts education programme to argue the need for localised, context- and culture-specific arts pedagogies which incorporate diversity in all its expressions, suggest an emerging…

This article analyses teachers' experience in the period of educational change in Estonia from 1989 to 2010. We review the introduction of the new national curricula and national exams. We show how, in the teachers' experience, the period of change can be divided into two distinct periods. Firstly, the period of freedom and chaos in the early…

In the face of what has been characterised by some as a "crisis" in curriculum--an apparent decline of some aspects of curriculum studies combined with the emergence of new types of national curricula which downgrade knowledge--some writers have been arguing for the use of realist theory to address these issues. This article offers a contribution…

If, as the linguistic turn has taught us, there is no representational knowledge, but more agreements and/or struggles over how to talk and learn about what we call reality, we need to address and analyse the consequences of different vocabularies of educational phenomena and schooling, in order to better understand and make use of both the…

This paper examines the impact of the International Standard School (ISS) on the identity of Indonesia as a postcolonial nation. According to the Indonesian Ministry of National Education, an ISS is "a school which complies with the National Standard of Education and enriches its standards from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and…

In this paper, the author shows that the issue of whether toleration promotes coexistence is controversial and therefore needs careful consideration in light of the complexities that are involved in understanding and teaching toleration in the schools of conflict and post-conflict societies. In particular, this paper offers a critique to the…

In this paper we will define the object of study of "Pedagogiek", followed by a brief discussion about current trends in educational policy, teacher education and educational research. We refer here to the continental European "pedagogy as human science", or more precisely the "science of the child's upbringing" in the social context. Central in…

In this article we investigate educational leadership as a site of practice, utilising the notion of "practice architectures" as our lens. The latter shifts Etienne Wenger's more individualising notion of 'learning architectures' to a broader study of the systems and organisations that prefigure educational practices and potentially, leading…

This article reveals how educational policies and policy contexts in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia establish the circumstances which enable and constrain individual and collective teacher professional development as praxis. We provide insights into existing partnerships between universities and schools, and, municipalities and the state as…

This article represents four emergences through which to explore the significance of lifelong learning. Drawing in particular on complexity theory and actor-network theory, it seeks to develop an understanding of the reductions and emergences, and purifications and translations to which lifelong learning is subject. To do this, the article also…

Textbooks research over the last two to three decades tends to suggest that the availability of textbooks, especially in schools in developing countries, is associated with student achievement. Such conclusions based largely on quantitative studies provide very little information about pupils' access to and use of books, and the actual interaction…