Search

Asian migrant students are typically considered as educational paragons in the West. They have been shown to surpass other students in standard indicators of educational success. However, viewing this success with a purely ethnic framework is inadequate and essentialising. It conflates the experiences of various groups into a homogenised 'Asian' category and ignores the crucial role played by other properties and processes, such as social class and engagement with hierarchical education systems. This paper incorporates these multiple dimensions to provide a fuller account of 'Asian' success. Using large scale longitudinal survey data from Australia, we demonstrate the internal differences in the educational outcomes of Asian groups, and outline the stratifying role played by parental cultural capital. Most importantly, we show how unequal engagement with schools and the curriculum produces unequal outcomes. This intersectional approach enables a more theoretically integrated understanding of the factors that produce educational inequality in diverse societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the National Common Core Curriculum in Brazil, focusing both on its Introduction and the sections dedicated to music teaching. The paper draws on contributions from broad critical curricular perspectives, arguing for the access to powerful knowledge as a means of achieving social justice and democratic social relations. It outlines some aspects of an ongoing qualitative research project, which investigates the recent curricular debates about the consistent inclusion of music in the primary and secondary levels of schooling in Brazil. Preliminary results suggest that the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) relying on the development of pragmatic and generic competencies, is very far from promoting access to the pivotal epistemic structures of the discipline. At the same time, we hope to raise awareness about the potential powers provided by musical knowledge, which might help the Brazilian music education field to strengthen its curricular and epistemological bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews sociological literature to explore the challenge transnational populations pose for nation-based curriculum, and vice versa. With increasing access to dual citizenship and temporary migration, more people are living transnational lifestyles. This poses new challenges in raising the transnational child. Transnationalism has emerged ‘bottom-up’ from individualised choices and circumstances rather than ‘top-down’ through institutional strategy. As a result, education sectors are yet to respond with a reoriented curriculum that can accommodate polycentric lives. This paper adapts Beck’s critique of methodological nationalism and proposes a parallel concept in the curricular nationalism underpinning much official curriculum. It then reviews literature reporting on three curricular experiments that seek to cultivate citizenships above and beyond the nation. While such transcendent designs on citizenship unsettle curricular nationalism, they fail to address the specificities of transnational child’s memberships both here and there. The pedagogic principle of ‘connectedness’ is retooled as a pragmatic way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on the peace-promoting agency of teachers in conflict-affected contexts has critiqued the dominance of a menu of curriculum initiatives circulated within aid organizations which ignore or dismiss indigenous cultural resources available within local communities. On the other hand, the turn to local culture in peacebuilding interventions has also been critiqued for idealizing the local. This paper presents a case study of the work of Fambul Tok Peace Clubs in conflict-affected Sierra Leone which aim to support teachers in drawing on local practices, rituals and symbols. Using an interpretative approach, alert to the meanings teachers ascribe to their pedagogical practices, it finds that teachers respond to local culture in multiple, sometimes contradictory ways. These range from celebration of indigenous practices as resources for conflict resolution that resonate with their pupils and communities to critique of their oppressive gender norms and inability to address structural drivers of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition and affirmation of student identity in New Zealand primary schools is a policy requirement. While directives for its implementation are found in the current national curriculum, little, if any, guidance is given about what this means or how it might look in classroom programmes. This paper discusses a study concerning the beliefs, understandings and practices of teachers as they interpret the curriculum related to the identity directive. The findings indicate that a marked divergence exists between the identity directive encoded into the curriculum and the way in which teachers decode and enact the directive in their practice. This article argues that two unintended effects are produced as a result of this divergence. First, rather than promote the affirmation of student identity, the enactment of this directive might, in fact, lead to ethnic division. Second, attempts to recognise and affirm identity have led to the displacement of school subject knowledge in classroom programmes. These unintended outcomes are not only unacknowledged, but they continue to disadvantage the community the identity directive was intended to address. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove to ‘shrink’ the National Curriculum whilst promoting a new English Baccalaureate; secondly Frank Furedi, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes’ critiques of ‘therapeutic education’ and thirdly Michael Young and Johan Muller’s proposals, grounded in a social realist epistemology, for a ‘Future 3’ curriculum which respects the objectivity of knowledge but also recognises its fallibility and openness to change. The paper concludes by suggesting that Michael Gove’s basic objective is to shape what Basil Bernstein called a neoconservative prospective educational identity; the paper offers a critical assessment of this project and briefly considers an alternative approach, focusing on some issues relating to citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and pedagogy. This theoretical concern is examined with reference to two key pedagogical moments during a first-year undergraduate course about schooling and sexuality. Through critical reflection of these episodes it is argued that when sexuality is the intellectual focus of a course, the pedagogical scene becomes inescapably 'sexual'. While existing research analyses desire between teacher and student as a potential element of the pedagogical scene, this paper investigates how sexuality might manifest more generally and offer a pedagogical resource in educational encounters. The possibility of a sexual and embodied pedagogy that explicitly invites students to be sexual subjects in a space that traditionally prioritises mind over body is considered. How teacher and student subjects are invoked and to what ends this might be pedagogically productive are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic development has played a significant role in creating university 'learning and teaching' as an object of policy scrutiny and intervention. While academic development is a new field, its practices have been productive of new learning and teaching regimes in both the global 'north' and 'south'. This paper explores the emergence of academic development as a practice and the agentic understandings of its actors in creating the academic development project in the face of global unevenness. The paper offers a critical account of the emergence of academic development practice in both the global 'north', drawing on the intertwined histories of the UK and Australia, and in the global 'south', drawing on the example of South Africa. In looking at the ongoing debates about academic development the paper argues that in constituting teaching and learning as its object, other more radical, feminist and critical pedagogies, which are capable of dealing with the power and curricula, were marginalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post-compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio-economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the paper addresses the manner in which state policy impacts upon the sector and is followed by a discussion of curricula issues. It is argued that the rhetoric of competitiveness is over-stated and that this serves to tie educational processes to economic needs. This is reflected in curricular divisions as well as differentiations between learners. These, rather than challenging existing social relations, serve to conserve these resulting in a 'transformist' politics. The paper concludes with a section that explores the struggle for social justice, arguing that a radical educational politics needs to address inequalities endemic in wider society. Localized educational responses are limited and can only take us so far in the struggle for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), this paper documents the assessment practices of about 250 Queensland primary and secondary classrooms and the extent to which they align with those pedagogical practices described as ‘productive pedagogies’ in the research. In considering the extent of this alignment, the paper outlines in some detail the concept of ‘productive assessment’, which also developed out of the research. The QSRLS demonstrated the necessity of aligning pedagogies and assessment practices with curriculum purposes to enhance student learning and contribute to socially just outcomes. A lack of visible alignment in the assessment practices of teachers in the study is demonstrated and discussed. When considered in conjunction with the low intellectual demands of the pedagogies observed, there are serious social justice implications to be drawn from the research. The paper also shows the significance of systemic assessment policies in relation to teacher assessment practices. The paper conceptualizes ‘productive assessment’ in relation to broader sociological considerations of assessment practices. Some possible explanations for the findings are proffered and some brief recommendations about a way forward in relation to teacher professional development around assessment literacy are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent contributions have argued about the depoliticisation of citizenship education (CE), mainly through theoretical and documentary analyses, and based on the European context. Nonetheless, there is a lack of field studies which can provide empirical evidence about how does the depoliticisation of CE actually operate. Based on a mixed-method research in Mexico City’s secondary schools, this paper shows how the contemporary approach to CE, instead of looking at nurturing children’s and adolescents’ politicity, contributes to pupils’ depoliticisation. Among different potential characterisations of political participation (PP), the curriculum of CE circumscribes it within the arena of formal politics, from which students are largely excluded in the present. Additionally, CE promotes a range of practices of participation which are deprived from a political meaning. Students appropriate them discursively, but perceive limited opportunities for perform them, especially in school. Through the depoliticisation of CE, adolescents mostly learn that PP is a promise of inclusion in the future, while the idea of active citizenship becomes reduced to a correct discourse about largely imperceptible practices in students’ everyday life. The article stresses the need of shifting the priority of CE in Mexico from the formal curriculum to the transformation of school practices, in order to develop students’ politicity through participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growth of surveillance in UK schools in recent years has resulted in the development of what can be labelled as the surveillance curriculum. Operating through the overt and hidden curricula, contemporary surveillance practices and technologies not only engage students in a discourse of control, but also increasingly socialise them into a 'culture of observation' in which they learn to watch and be watched, accepting unremitting monitoring as a norm. This paper examines how the surveillance curriculum operates through observation, discourse and simulation, before drawing upon elements of Gary Marx's typology of resistance to consider student responses to new surveillance technologies, such as CCTV and Internet monitoring devices. It is concluded that although the surveillance curriculum seeks to control, it also provides a space within which students can forge their own identities through playful resistance, (re)configuring the 'algebra of surveillance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked subjects, attitudes to subject choice and the extent to which choices were shaped by parents, teachers or the young people themselves. The social structure of curriculum choice is mapped using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, which reveals the hierarchy of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low teacher morale, coupled with extremely poor schooling outcomes for students as measured on standardized tests have increasingly been reported in the media in South Africa. As elsewhere, there is growing demand for the reorganisation of teachers' work in order to enhance school performance. The paper investigates the ways in which current market-led government policies have sustained past inequalities between schools and between teachers. Drawing on Savage's notion of assets, the analysis focuses on how the material and organisational conditions of teachers' work combine to affect teachers' morale. The analysis is based on available sets of data on inequalities - at the societal level, at the level of the homes and communities of the children that attend school, at the level of schooling system and at the level of teachers. It proposes a conceptual typology in relation to the four levels of data we provide, which shows interesting differential effects on teachers' morale and the transformation of teachers' work in South Africa. We argue that the relations between enduring economic inequalities in South Africa, an underspecified new curriculum and the bureaucratization of teachers' work have created an intractable pattern of accumulation of educational disparity among teachers in South Africa. Teacher morale needs to be considered in the context of these structural conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the curricular change in French universities that has taken place over the last two decades and especially since the implementation of the LMD Reform in 2002. Curricula tend to become 'regionalised-knowledge' courses, by regrouping disciplinary knowledge and looking forward to economic and social needs. The article aims at analysing the process of producing this change. The first proposition is to show that change is not a linear process, but an ongoing process of negotiation undertaken by a wide range of institutions, social groups and agents, who operate in different institutional levels (European-level, State-level, university/local-level or pedagogic/local-level). The second proposition is that these negotiation procedures mask the differences in the social basis of each one of these discourses and, thus, mask conflict and struggle over social control in higher education reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the Hong Kong Government has introduced a new national education project which aims at building nationalism and patriotism. With an active involvement of the state and civil society in promoting national education in recent years, there have been certain drastic changes in the school system - reforms in the curriculum with more weight to national identity and China's topics, more nationalistic or patriotic extra-curricular activities and rituals, and more training for teachers to conduct national education. Informed by a Gramscian notion of hegemony, this paper analyses the advent of and struggles over the national education policy and illustrates the collaboration and contests among various groups in the nation-building project - with the controversies over display of the national flag and liberal studies curriculum as examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between government interventions into state school "discipline", and student learning and empowerment. It reports on a project where students identified the educational needs of 13 to 15 year olds. Their findings suggests, what John Furlong refers to as the "hidden injuries" of schooling. The aim of the sociology of emotion, recognizing the complexity of human personality, is to identify the infliction of "hidden injuries" as students interact with three sets of educational structures: (1) the production of ability; (2) the production of values; and (3) the production of occupational identity. Despite the volume of policy documentation, education authorities in Australia have narrowed their focus on: First, the abolition of corporal punishment;Second, guidelines for suspension and exclusion; Third, ascertainment of "special needs" and alternative programmes and placements;and finally professional development in classroom control. It further describes the Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADD transforms the child from bad to sick. They now have an impairment which is not their fault, concomitantly it is not the product of bad parenting. No longer the delinquent, the child and the family, moving into the health sector of policy and service, are looked on more favourably; albeit more patronisingly. Accompanying the discovery and contagion of ADD/ADHD has been the growth of behaviour units in Australia. The 11th class students of two schools,Collingwood Secondary College and Fitzroy Secondary College, became the researchers in this project and they surveyed and collected information from students of three secondary school representing group of Year 7,8,9 and 10 students. The research findings focused on three broad areas: (1) curriculum; (2) pedagogy; and (3) school organisation and student participation. It provides key points based on the observations by the researchers.

The article discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on curriculum inequalities in England by Alice Sullivan, Anna Zimdars and Anthony Heath, one on the beneficiaries of the Assisted Places Scheme by Sally Power, Andrew Curtis, Geoff Whitty and Tony Edwards and one the educational success of a group of elite girls by Alexandra Allan.