Purpose: One key aspect of European curriculum reforms is to empower students with the skills needed to engage actively in the pluralistic and multicultural global society of the 21st century. This study aims to examine the extent of multicultural education within the national core curricula of three European countries: Hungary, Finland and…

National-level educational administrators constantly face the question of how to ensure that the basic education system successfully meets complex local, national, international, and global challenges, and what is the best way to initiate and drive systemic changes in education amid such complexity and to create value for society. Studies have…

In this paper, we explore some of the challenges and opportunities of integrating environmental education in pre-service teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arctic. Case examples from teacher education programs in Namibia and Finland set the scene for a critical analysis of environmental education in teacher training from these two…

It has been suggested that the outcomes of curriculum reform depend on the implementation strategy and coherence making between the reform and school practice. This study examined how teachers perceived a national core curriculum reform implementation in terms of change management and knowledge sharing, and how these contributed to the perceived…

The present paper is a comparative examination of three European Commission (EC) countries' primary and elementary education curricula with the European Commission's Communication and its consequences for curriculum skills relating to children's lives as adults and workers. It is a documentary analysis of secondary sources of the texts of the…

National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent, responsible, and implementable curriculum--but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was…

The aim of this study was to explore knowledge in the context of creating a shared curriculum between research-intensive and vocationally oriented universities of applied sciences. Curriculum knowledge was explored from the accounts of 26 teachers from four institutions in Finland. Shared curriculum initiatives created an environment in which…

Algebraic Thinking (AT) and Computational Thinking (CT) are pivotal competencies in modern education, fostering problem-solving skills and logical reasoning among students. This study presents the initial hypotheses, theoretical framework, and key steps undertaken to explore characterized learning paths and assign practice-relevant tasks. This…

In Finland, curriculum design is allegedly carried out through a deliberative process that involves various stakeholders, interest groups, experts and ordinary citizens. To facilitate participation in curriculum design, online crowdsourcing has been applied. The objective of this study is to explore to what extent the design process of the latest…

The paper discusses the Finnish core curriculum (curriculum framework) for basic education, with focus on how lower secondary education in general, and history teaching specifically, is meant to develop the student's democratic citizenship. Developing the student's democratic citizenship is not an explicit aim of history teaching in the current…

This study responds to the demands of the rapidly changing landscape of education, the 21st century competencies and development of curriculum. Those competences are being interpreted all over the world resulting to differing curricular changes. In the Finnish National Core Curriculum 2016 they are presented as seven transversal competences that…

This article reports on a pilot study on the academic self-efficacy (ASE) of 245 Finnish pupils when studying according to a subject-specific curriculum for one week and an integrated curriculum the following week. The data consisted of selected items from the Class Maps Survey and self-reported grades of L1 and mathematics and were analysed using…

Scientific literacy (SL) has been recognized as the main goal of science curricula documents around the world; however, comparative international curriculum research is limited, especially with Western and African countries. To fill this gap, this study aimed to compare the coverage of SL competencies with the components of knowledge, attitudes,…

Pandemics, like other global challenges, are unquestionably curricular issues. They are curriculum issues not only because of the disrupting consequences of COVID-19 and the economic and social crisis alike but also because people have, through their own activities, contributed to global catastrophes and perpetuated injustices. This article…

Our aim with this study was to gain a better understanding of the emotional landscape of curriculum making by exploring the variety of emotions embedded in shared sense-making about the national curriculum reform implementation at the district level. Focus group interview data were collected from 12 curriculum reform steering groups around…