The effects of discourses in regional contexts on the development of curriculum-based literacy standards for adolescents in schooling: A comparative study of South Australia and Ontario

Governments in countries around the world are applying standards-based reforms to education in attempts to achieve future economic prosperity and social cohesion (Levin, 2010; Rizvi & Lingard,...

Analysing Design and Technology as an educational construct; an investigation into its curriculum position and pedagogical identity

The hierarchal status of academic disciplines, what defines valuable or legitimate knowledge and what should we teach our children is a topic of much debate. Amidst concerns of an academic...

Validating curriculum development using text mining

Developing a new subject from the ground up is often demanding. Developing a new program is even more of a challenge. However developing a new program for an emergent discipline in its own right...

Can self-advocacy skills support young people to participate in person-centred planning? An example from research involving young people with dyslexia

As part of a radical reform of educational and health support for young people (YP) with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, the Code of Practice (DfE & DH, 2015) now advocates the use of...

Democracy through Pedagogy: the Mantle of the Expert in Initial Teacher Education

In his powerful speech at the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s (CPRT) conference in November last year, Robin Alexander suggested, in relation to recent electoral outcomes in the UK and the US,...

“I was born here, so I’m British” – What do fundamental British values mean to teachers of RE and year 11 RE students?

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

Can our values as teachers accommodate the demands of what seems to be a progressively securitised education system? The requirement not to undermine fundamental British values (FBV) was...

The desire for knowledge

I came across this innocuous looking phrase in an interview with the French sociologist of education Bernard Charlot on the internet. He was quoting the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to explain how...

Subject Hierarchies and the Purpose of Learning – Time to press re-set?

The announcement last month that AQA was to withdraw the final History of Art A level specification brought a critical response in the press and on social media, not simply because it represented...

How Entrepreneurship Education can reproduce social inequalities

This article argues for the dismantling of the myth of classlessness in entrepreneurship education. Discourse in favour of more entrepreneurship in education has contributed to a process where a...

Curriculum design of Physics master’s degrees and national pedagogic traditions: implications for degree comparability

In 1999 higher education ministers from 29 European countries signed the Bologna Declaration (currently 49 signatory countries) and committed themselves to the creation of the European Higher...

Examining secondary history students’ notions of historical significance when using millennia-wide ‘frameworks’

History teachers, teacher-researchers, government agencies and history education academics in England often report that students are frequently incapable of producing complex, developmental...

Guardianship of subjects in 2016

I very much welcome the revival of the British Curriculum Forum and was delighted to attend the recent conference “Investigating Knowledge and the Curriculum”. My reason for attending is that...