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‘Open schooling’ has become in recent years a burgeoning theme in the discourse on how to rethink education for the 21st century. This paper addresses a gap between calls for implementing an open schooling approach in policy papers and international reports and the scarcity of rigorous academic discourse on what open schooling theoretically means and practically entails in terms of school organization and curriculum. To this end, the paper presents an ecological model of school openness that is composed of eight interrelated dimensions: shared governance, ‘open’ curriculum, inner-school communities, learning communities, student participation, social engagement, parental involvement, and community collaborations. These dimensions are organized into three categories, accounting for organizational, pedagogical and communal aspects of school openness. The multidimensional nature of the model presented here provides a more intricate and nuanced account of open schooling that acknowledges the complexities and challenges that the movement towards greater openness yields for school communities. From an educational research perspective, this model functions to inform the understanding and examination of the multidimensionality of opening schools to their community. From an educational practice perspective, it can instigate in-depth and meaningful dialogue within school teams on what open schooling is and its ensuing merits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some might fear that the local flavours of education will evaporate when encountering the hegemony of global, cognitive standards of the knowledge economy. This paper, however, shows that the evolution of curriculum can emerge in surprising directions, creating hybrid forms of education. We will investigate forms of meaning that emerge in Norwegian curriculum in the timespan 1988-2020, and show how systems theory can contribute to studying curriculum changes in a temporal perspective. The empirical case for investigation, is a diverse range of material, documenting curriculum changes in the mentioned period. Concepts from the late Luhmann's 'theory of distinctions' will thus be used to give meaning to the emergence of school reforms in Norway. The paper shows that Norwegian policy makers use increasingly complex deparadoxification strategies to deal with an uncertain future, conceptualized as externalization, oscillation, asymmetrisation, and internalization (re-entry). This is most pertinently demonstrated in the latest Norwegian reform LK20, in which a new, hybrid, 'temporal' construct of education, called "new-old-curriculum" or 'competence-Bildung' emerges. We thus contribute to the field of curriculum studies by observing how changing observations of the past and future fuel and legitimize the evolution of new reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which there has been a shift towards disciplinary knowledge in recently developed curriculum documents in New Zealand and evaluates whether a new 'Understand, Know, Do' structure for the curriculum has the potential to facilitate coherent design of teaching programmes and 'deep learning'. Using a social realist lens, Bernsteinian theories on knowledge structures and recontextualization, and the principles of a Curriculum Design Coherence Model, the analysis identifies instances of both conceptual coherence and epistemic confusion which raises questions about the underlying principles upon which the curriculum documents are being developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to posit a possible reason why non-Indigenous educators are seen to be 'cautious' in their pedagogic engagement with First Nations perspectives in curriculum, why interventions and programmess around reconciliation and truth-telling have limited traction in affecting change in school culture, and why the Australian education system is constructed to be, and remains, largely hostile to First Nations Peoples and perspectives. Despite several decades of studies exploring these phenomena and concerted efforts to 'fix the problem', there has been a systemic failure to shift discourses and practice beyond the completely absent, tokenistic, or superficial inclusion of First Nations narratives in Australian education. We argue that power-knowledge relations of settler-colonial discourses are fundamentally at play and that by examining how disciplinarity and settler-colonial frameworks of knowledge control operate in education, we conceptualize a possible reason to the pedagogical challenges faced in the decision-making and integration of First Nations narratives in curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights education (HRE) is an urgent historically and globally recognized challenge for societies. However, it has not been sufficiently addressed by empirical and theoretical research in education. Based on the UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training (UNDHRET), there is wide agreement that HRE should include education about, through, and for human rights. We argue that a situated deliberative pedagogy can offer these three dimensions to HRE. However, this is not without challenges for teachers and students. One way to deal with these challenges and support this pedagogical innovation is to design curriculum material that supports teachers. To contribute to this, we conducted a design-based research (DBR) aimed at participative designing of educative curriculum material for human rights deliberative education. Four teachers participated in two phases of the study. Two participated in refining the material's structure and its controversies and the other two participated in discussing the dilemmas and activities relating to implementation of the material at school with their 11th- and 12th-grade students. The results show participatory educative curriculum material designed for holistic HRE: about, through, and for HR. The implications and problems of the design process associated with a deliberative curriculum for HRE are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the passing of No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), teacher autonomy over curricular decisions has been restricted. As a result, state and local school districts faced increased pressures to adopt highly prescriptive and standardized literacy curricular programmes. Given this context, literacy curriculum adoption has become a widely conflicted process in the US. In this article, a team of literacy researchers and educators examine the state of the literacy curriculum adoption process in nine schools across the US. Conducting a qualitative case study methodology, data were collected across nine school districts across the nation, using semi-structured interviews. Analysis included viewing the curricular adoption process using the Policy Attributes Theory. Findings reveal that principals and teachers continue to have limited autonomy in the literacy curriculum adoption processes. The article provides implications for research and practice that considers the important role of a variety of stakeholders in the curriculum adoption process and a call for literacy researchers to embrace an activist stance in the curriculum decision-making process in local and national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As commercial gaming continues to thrive, there has been a recent renewal of interest in harnessing player's enthusiasm to educational purposes. Educational research on gaming and game design, as myopically focused on gaming, has been characterized. It further describes, learning from commercial gaming, examining the ways in which education has been more and less successful at taking seriously gaming's technological responsibilities for learning. Finally, a work in progress that seeks to refuse play/education divide in order explore ways in which play and education can and do intersect have been illustrated.