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Although the contexts, structures and administrations of early childhood education (ECE) may differ internationally, effective pedagogical leadership remains an essential component in supporting young children's development and learning. This paper reports on a comparative study which considered ECE in two different settings, Finland and Florida, providing insight into teachers' perspectives on the characteristics of pedagogical leadership. This study sought to investigate and compare the perspectives of ECE teachers and directors in Finland and Florida via their discourses about teachers' pedagogical leadership. The goal was to provide an overview of the ECE teachers' and directors' discourses in each location, in order to allow comparison and a better understanding of the influence of aspects including locational contexts, curricular guidelines and teacher preparation on the ECE teachers' and directors' perspectives. A comparative case study design was used. The data consisted of semi-structured focus group interviews and individual interviews with ECE teachers and centre directors in Finland and in Florida. Data from the two locations were first analysed separately to identify the main discourses; secondly, discourses were compared collectively to reveal major themes. The analysis indicated a similar conceptualisation of distributed pedagogical leadership. However, differences were identified in teachers' expectations of independence in instructional decisions, and the extension of pedagogical leadership practices within and beyond the ECE centres. The analysis of discourses led to the identification of three major themes, which generated implications for teacher preparation, curriculum development and implementation, and ECE programme directions. The study enables a more comprehensible conceptualisation of teachers' pedagogical leadership as it emerged from teachers' and directors' discourses across two locations. Pedagogical leadership is recognised as an indicator of high-quality pedagogy in early childhood education and the findings highlight the need to continuously support and strengthen teachers' pedagogical leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tertiary programmes in a discipline such as engineering must balance the competing needs of two key stakeholders: the university that designs and delivers the programme, and the professional body that accredits it. Programme and curriculum design in universities is traditionally bottom-up in nature, with courses designed by individual academics, and assembled into cognate programmes. Graduate qualities and accreditation criteria are mapped retrospectively onto the structure. Designing programmes from the top down, driven byuniversity and the accreditation body needs, is a desirable goal. However, without proper support tools, balancing competing needs across multiple courses and year levels is a complex task. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was created for this precise purpose. Treating the design of a tertiary programme the same as the design of a system suggests that QFD, and the implementation tool known as the House of Quality (HoQ), should be ideally suited to this purpose. The aim of this paper is to show how QFD and the HoQ can be applied to the design of an engineering programme, creating a specification that accurately reflects the voices of stakeholders, and serves as a benchmark for validating that these needs have been met in the implemented design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sustainable development, as an area of knowledge, appears in several different places in the curriculum and does not fit neatly within the scope of traditional subject areas. In many countries, including Sweden, it has long been upheld as an important tool for increasing understanding of, and dealing with, environmental problems. It is not clear, however, what role education can actually have in the making of a more sustainable future. Even though there are several potential ways for sustainable development to be involved in education, the concept raises many questions when transferred to the school context. Purpose: This paper investigates how teachers deal with the difficulty of defining and approaching sustainable development as an area of knowledge in Swedish schools. Sample: This article is based on semi-structured interviews with 40 teachers, 13 of whom were lower secondary school teachers (pupil age 12-15) and 27 were upper secondary school teachers (pupil age 15-18). The study involves teachers in all subjects where sustainable development is a goal in the syllabus. The study is also based on participant observation in one upper secondary class. A total of 17 different schools were involved, from a wide range of locations in Sweden. Design and methods: The paper builds on qualitative data and the analysis of transcribed interviews and group interviews with teachers in Swedish lower and upper secondary schools. Group interviews, involving three or more people, were conducted on eight occasions. The pupils at an upper secondary school were also observed while they were working on a course called 'policy and sustainable development'. Data were transcribed and analysed thematically. Findings: The analysis suggests that, according to the teachers' experiences, the demands of equivalence and measurability in school have increased and that this affects how sustainable development is approached in teaching and learning. Three main categories of knowledge were identified. The study also presents two representations that model how teachers may approach knowledge about sustainable development - metaphorically termed 'the Accountant' and 'the Adventurer' - and their different effects on knowledge. Conclusions: There is a tendency for complex knowledge areas such as sustainable development, which do not fit seamlessly into traditional curriculum subjects, to become oversimplified when translated into teaching situations. According to the representations that we described metaphorically, the teacher, as an accountant, is characterised by 'knowledge instrumentalism', which means that teachers administer knowledge and the pupils consume it. In this transactional model, the accountant is also very dependent on external governance and control. Alternatively, the teacher, as an adventurer, is characterised by authority, knowledge and self-control. In this model, knowledge sometimes grows in an unpredictable way in the meeting between people who share common experiences. For adventurers, sustainable development is a matter of commitment and awareness, and it involves an explicit stance. The metaphors can be placed on a continuum which describes how teachers manage the demands of the school system in relation to the knowledge area of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inclusion of Drama as a subject in the Australian Curriculum is largely a result of the unwavering advocacy of national associations (like Drama Australia) and alliances, in particular the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE). This article briefly outlines stages in national curriculum development in Australia and delineates key organisations and individuals who have contributed to the inclusion of drama within Australia’s national curriculum. The paper draws from previously published material, interviews with representatives from each state professional association, and extended interviews with members of the NAAE. The authors propose that the most significant contributing factor to the inclusion of drama in the educational entitlement for all young people in the Australian national curriculum has been collaborative advocacy, carefully managed by a national advocacy collective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper describes a recent review of Library and Information Management courses offered by the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University, and the resulting program of curriculum renewal and expansion. This program aimed to address concerns over the long-term sustainability of the courses and respond to an increasingly converging professional landscape. The courses were redesigned in a way that allowed them to maintain their relevance to the School's established librarianship market, while at the same time develop a significant application to other information fields. This was achieved by essentially turning the curriculum on its head. Instead of a library focussed core with electives in other information areas, the new curriculum offers core subjects that cover the information-people-technology nexus in generic fashion and provides a foundation for a wide range of specialisations. This transformation represents what could be described as a move from a traditional Library and Information Studies (LIS) approach to a broader Information Studies (IS) orientation, accommodating advanced areas of study in specific fields, including Librarianship (L). The paper goes on to discuss key issues concerning the implementation of the course redesigns, and the results of their implementation to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost-efficiency and laissez-faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditions for drama in compulsory education vary from country to country. The situation in Queensland, Australia, is interesting as Drama was introduced as an arts subject in the compulsory school curriculum (P-10) in 2002. This paper uses a case study approach, to describe and analyses the context and conditions for this specific curriculum development project. Findings suggest that curriculum development is unlikely to be a predictable and linear process, and to some extent, curriculum documents are reflecting changes that have already occurred. The author proposes a list of considerations which may be of benefit to drama educators in a range of curriculum contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Curriculum developers, whether at a systemic or classroom-based level, become involved in complex decision-making about what is important and valuable for students to learn; how and when that learning can be enabled; and what evidence will tell us that learning has taken place. This paper identifies a few of the significant influences and constraints on the systemic curriculum development process, and argues that we need to acknowledge the limitations of personal and professional knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' perspectives on the paper by E. Brown and R. Kass concerning statistics education and practice in the U.S. They agree that it is essential for the field to take significant curriculum changes and additions to its content and focus of training to encourage students to become statisticians. They mentions the important of broadening the view of statistic education, incorporating real-world data analysis and skills in computing and data technologies.

Despite the ‘progressive’ influence of the English Plowden Report and Scottish Primary Memorandum on British primary curricula from the 1960s onwards, secondary education has generally continued to follow a more traditional subject-centred route and post-war educational theorists have not generally been favourably inclined to other than subject-based modes of curriculum planning and organisation. However, in the light of current curriculum reviews on both sides of the Scottish border – calling for more educationally meaningful curricula – the perennial issue of how school knowledge might best be ordered for the coherent educational experience of pupils seems worth revisiting. To this end, this paper examines some of the influential post-war philosophical arguments against integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to the curricular organisation of knowledge, concluding that they are not as compelling as they might formerly have seemed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of geography is declining in popularity at secondary school level and recent developments following the ‘cultural turn’ in Higher Education have had little impact in revitalising it. In this paper I explore the question: is there a problem with the school geography curriculum policy? After briefly sketching the history of the Geography National Curriculum policy (GNC), I focus on Caputo's (1997) commentary on Derrida and the idea of deconstruction and invention to explore the contemporary GNC policy text (1999) programme of study at Key Stage 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social meaning of subject choice in the post-16 context through a case study of Media Studies in a selective school. Students' accounts are discussed in terms of both their enjoyment of the subject and their negotiation of its ‘legitimacy’. The analysis of their comments in interviews stresses the subject's precarious position in a school where a relatively traditional hierarchy of subjects still prevails. It also considers the strength of family ‘projects’ in framing children's educational ‘choices’. Media Studies is discussed as a negotiable option primarily facilitating projections into a new middle-class sense of self-hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' comment on the paper by E. Brown and R. Kass concerning statistics education and practice in the U.S. They contend that the recommendations by Brown and Kass for changes on interdisciplinary training of statisticians, graduate programs and curricula are potentially perilous and maybe counterproductive. They also note on the lack funding enough to support the changes recommended by Brown and Kass.