Today's school students are inheriting complex and harmful global challenges that are potentially irreversible and which they will need to address. The ability to think critically and creatively, to work in interdisciplinary teams and to understand the importance of a healthy planet for all life will be needed for success. Education has a major…

This essay reviews and builds upon Aníbal Quijano's contribution to decolonial theory to sketch out what I refer to as the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum, broadly understood as an imperial doctrine and a pedagogical mode of domination aimed at producing a modern/colonial subjectivity. It argues that the geopolitics and coloniality of…

The recent Norwegian curriculum reform for schools, called "The subject renewal", is part of an international trend regarding knowledge-based curricula. The Norwegian curriculum, which places decisive emphasis on subjects and subject concepts, aims to bring in-depth learning and knowledge back to schools. This paper is based on Rata's…

The aim of this paper is to explore and provide an alternative theoretical viewpoint, informed by empirical studies, of the curriculum policy enactment process which spans across different curriculum policy spaces by drawing on figurational sociology. This paper constructs this alternative figurational viewpoint of the policy enactment process by…

This study investigates teacher participation in Norway's most recent national curriculum reform. During the reform period, teachers were invited to take part in macro curriculum making as members of national curriculum committees. In policy documents, teacher participation is emphasised as key to the legitimacy of the curriculum. In this study,…

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…

National curricula influence, and are influenced by, political agendas. Understanding political enmeshment (both overt and covert) in curriculum development is therefore vital for ensuring transparency and quality in curricula. This paper analyses how the Australian Curriculum is represented in the federal Education Ministers' media releases.…

Despite the divisions within Northern Ireland's education system along religious and academic lines, it has managed to maintain relative stability, or at least a functional inertia, over the past four decades. The full potential, however, of this system and in particular, the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), has yet to be realised. This paper…

Nearly forty years ago, Stenhouse argued that the function of the curriculum was to stimulate teachers' everyday reflection about and learning from practice. This suggestion, alongside his support for teachers as researchers, aligns with the Welsh Government's commitment to build an evidence-informed profession as part of ongoing major education…

A recent article in this journal suggests that although "learner agency" is central to understanding young people's engagement with the curriculum, there is little exploration of such ideas in the field. In response, they argued for an Archerian approach to learner agency and a contextually, interpersonally, intra-personally and…

Curriculum change is an intricate, lengthy process, requiring commitment, cooperation and compromise amongst the agencies and stakeholders involved; its development is more complex in divided societies, particularly when the subject content is open to contention. The addition of Local and Global Citizenship (LGC) to the Northern Ireland (NI)…

This paper critically examines Indonesia's 2013 national curriculum, implemented in 2019. The most significant change is the mandated use of formative assessment, which we argue is an example of policy borrowing, a trend also seen in many other countries globally. We argue that this policy has been adopted due to global and regional pressure on…

This paper explores how the twin processes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism work together on, and through, curricula and their associated pedagogies. It bridges the gap between policy and classroom practice, focusing on the particular example of the school subject of mathematics and the notion of mastery, operationalised in the English…

Following trends across the developed world to devolve power and responsibility for public services to more local agencies, curriculum reforms in several countries have been characterised by policies designed to increase teacher agency and professionalism as a means of achieving successful change. In Wales, this approach has been promoted through…

Using the Internationalization of the Curriculum (IoC) model, this study analyses postgraduate educational programmes that contribute to internationalization in higher education at British and Sino-British transnational universities. The purpose is to explore postcolonial curricular design influences and opportunities. The study identified…