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Purpose: Given the less mature homeschooling ecosystem in China, together with the similarity of purpose, the current study examined the lived experiences of curricular choice making in the USA and China and categories of respective families (homeschools), as a way of understanding curricular flexibility. In addressing these features, based on an updated model of curricular flexibility as it applies to homeschooling, the authors examined the aspects of who, what, when, where and how to see if this context offers new light. The authors then consider ways in which the model can be further updated for greater analytical clarity and accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach: A descriptive case study was conducted in the Xi'an city of China and the Seattle metropolitan area of the USA. A survey and two rounds of semi-structured interview data were collected from ten homeschooling families in both contexts. Findings: The study found families' adjusted curricula for different motives, as they navigated differing societal contexts, and curricular flexibility in homeschooling contexts was theorized as standardization and structuring strategies and social dimensions, and family preference patterns were identified. Chinese homeschooling families had comparatively less variety of available resources and freedom to homeschools compared to American counterparts, and they operated with the awareness of a standard national curriculum and its social implications. Originality/value: This study elaborates on a little-discussed topic -- the overall curriculum of each homeschool and motives influencing changing curricular choices during the process of homeschooling. And it is the first paper to use the model to explicitly define curricular flexibility in the homeschooling context, thus extending the existing theoretical discussion of curricular flexibility.

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese-English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis was conducted to derive three underlying CALE components, each representing educational intervention strategies. These three components were comprised of primary loadings that depict the respective aspects of the Japanese transnational experience with their children's supplementary education during their overseas sojourns and reveal families' needs for: L1 maintenance communities, L2 acquisition support, and a means to convert their children's bilingual skills into academic credentials that are adequate for both L1 and L2 contexts. Principal components were thus interpreted as sojourning families' three approaches to environmental structuring: a Japanese Cultural Community Approach, a Quasi-Bilingual Approach, and a Japanese Test-oriented Approach. Implications are drawn, both for the sojourning community and for future research needs. (Contains 8 tables, 4 figures and 18 notes.)

History praxis can transform perceptions of the "other" by reshaping ideas about events transpiring between groups. Nevertheless, peace education research has rarely examined history teaching. This article addresses the potential for teaching peace through history teaching. After laying out a conceptual framework for understanding the importance of teaching peaceful values in history, as well as providing a background of history teaching in the US and Japan, an analysis is given of qualitative interviews with junior high school teachers regarding history teaching in Japan and the US. Findings revealed teachers in both countries feel expected to teach mostly historical facts, find it difficult to give satisfactory coverage to events in which their country engaged in immoral acts, and are expected to teach a curriculum generally favourable to the national state. The countries differed in that American students are presented with extensive coverage of their country's activity around the world whereas Japanese students are not, and Japanese students are taught that war is an immoral act of which their country is historically guilty whereas American students are not necessarily taught this. (Contains 3 tables and 9 notes.)

In this paper, both the empirical insufficiency and political necessity of ESD are presented, taking a deep-green approach to understanding the severity of ecological crises, specifically addressing a convergence of environmental urgencies currently facing humanity. Simultaneously, rigorous revision is recommended to remedy ESD inadequacies. ESD's rhetorical inferiority to Environmental Education is addressed, noting social issues that have attached themselves as riders on the ESD agenda. Yet, despite the green-washed incoherencies of ESD, adoption is recommended on pragmatic grounds, because the sustainability we all hope for depends on global cooperation, which duly substantiates the need for global social justice issues on the agenda. Finally, rigorous revision of ESD is recommended to incorporate strong calls for both the decreasing of consumption and the humane reduction of the global human population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]