This book explores questions about the relevance of implementing curriculum in transnational vocational education, in situations where teachers are expected to maintain standards in a country for which it was not designed. It provides a situational model of curriculum implementation that explains the complexity of factors that influence teachers'…

Prompted by William Newell's 2013 call for the Association of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) to consider whether to rethink its mission in light of other organizations' interests, this article begins by reflecting on similarities and differences among five of the founding organizations of a recently formed Global Alliance for Inter- and…

Mathematics curricula have traditionally focused on content knowledge, often in the form of a scope and sequence of increasingly difficult mathematics. The importance of using and applying mathematics is recognised in the current Australian Curriculum Mathematics (AC: M) as 'proficiencies' that are intended to be integrated with the content. There…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

The historical development of food education in secondary schools in New South Wales Australia is a compelling yet under-researched area of interest. This review starts by exploring how food curricula have evolved since the 1700s to the present day juxtaposed on socio-economic and political factors. This review is interested in the role secondary…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the role of planned, sudden shifts in lived experiences, in influencing learner capabilities towards improved problem-solving for sustainable development outcomes. The authors responded to employers of engineering and built environment graduates observing limited "real-life" problem-solving skills,…

The concept of the Citizen Scholar highlights the potential for universities to act as vehicles for social change by supporting the development of active, engaged graduates who are geared to respond to current and future global challenges. This demands a radical shift in teaching towards more interactive pedagogies, which may prove difficult for…

Reforms in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) landscape have generated significant interest in the changes to the delivery and nature of formal (off-the-job) training provided by Registered Training Organisations. Existing research has provided valuable insights into the evolving role of teachers, and speculated upon the…

With the emergence of a wealth of research-based information in the field of educational neuroscience, educators are now able to make more evidence-based decisions in the important area of curriculum design and construction. By viewing from the perspective of educational neuroscience, we can give a more meaningful and lasting purpose of leading to…

With increasing complexity in the world, universities continue to face pressure to demonstrate that their graduates have acquired skills beyond discipline-based knowledge. These are generic skills like critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, problem-solving and so forth. In order to demonstrate this, universities have to show how their teaching…

Efficacy of a teaching strategy technically refers to the ability of that strategy to produce a desired or intended learning outcomes. To date, there is little information on the efficacy of social media technologies in academia and it is likely to be some time before their effectiveness is proven. It is therefore legitimate to ask the question,…

Purpose: Interdisciplinary approaches to climate change teaching are well justified and arise from the complexity of climate change challenges and the integrated problem-solving responses they demand. These approaches require academic teachers to collaborate across disciplines. Yet, the fragmentation typical of universities impedes collaborative…

The draft Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2012c) takes a strengths-based approach that emphasizes questions such as "What keeps me healthy and active?" rather than "What risks, diseases and behaviours should I learn to avoid?". This…

In 2010, St. Leonards Primary School in Tasmania, along with other selected schools throughout Australia, trialled the draft Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. Mathematics had been a whole school focus at St. Leonards Primary School for several years, and the school found that the opportunity to be part of the trial strongly connected with their…

This paper reviews the presentation of problem solving and process aspects of mathematics in curriculum documents from Australia, UK, USA and Singapore. The place of problem solving in the documents is reviewed and contrasted, and illustrative problems from teachers' support materials are used to demonstrate how problem solving is now more often…