Using principles from cognitive science to design a school mathematics curriculum

Introduction For many years, school curriculum resources have been designed without explicit reference to research evidence and without extensive trialling in classrooms (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld,...

A hidden curriculum of certainty: Inadequate education in an uncertain world

As educators in university education departments, we want to teach about the complex and contested nature of education and society. Furthermore, we are very conscious that our planetary...

Parent engagement in school curriculum: Whose voices get heard?

Image by Freepik School curriculum has always been a contested space where parents, teachers and policymakers expressed their often-divergent views on purposes of education. Such debates...

Editorial: A global goal but local challenges: Perspectives on education in the Global South

This special issue of the BERA Blog is the result of a collaboration between Antonia Voigt and Deepti R Bhat, two doctoral researchers at the School of Education, University of Bristol. Although...

Re-examining SDG 4 through decoloniality: The case of Adivasis, India’s indigenous people

Decolonisation is a continuous struggle for many countries in the Global South, yet it is often overlooked within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among other ambitions,...

A global goal but local challenges: Perspectives on education in the Global South

This BERA Blog special issue highlights educational topics in the Global South that require urgent attention if we want to reach the goal of quality education for all. The contributions illustrate...

‘I know kung fu’: Rethinking education in the metaverse

If you know kung fu, how do you know it? In the 1999 film The Matrix, the protagonist Neo has martial arts instantly uploaded into his brain. ‘I know kung fu’, he states, definitively, before...

New GCSEs in Wales for a more equal society

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The challenges young people will need to overcome in the future transcend their employability qualities. They need to understand what knowledge and skills are valuable in the world, how these are...

Curriculum work and hermeneutics: A new paradigm for contemporary education?

Teachers’ curriculum work can be a controversial topic (see for example Priestley, 2011). It is a high-level concern for politicians, public commentators, parents and professional groups, and...

‘So I suppose they think I’m a failure’: How schools (unwittingly) marginalise white working-class families

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This blog post relates to a qualitative research project focused on the engagement and achievement of white working-class students carried out in three comprehensive secondary schools in an inner...

Informal education, school bullying and ‘public executions’: Young people’s experiences of the hierarchical nature of relationships in school

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The reference to ‘public executions’ in the title of this blog post is a quote from a research participant who was describing his experience of what happens when someone is caught bullying in...

BERA Bites, issue 9: What are we educating for?

BERA Bites

This BERA Bites collection started out as a seminar series in which policymakers, educational practitioners and researchers came together to discuss what we are educating for across the English...