This conceptual paper puts forward the construct termed "teacher curriculum competence," which is an amalgamation of theoretical or formal and personal practical teacher knowledge and orientations in relation to curriculum. We situate the competence in institutional, political, and philosophical contexts. Drawing on research related to…

Calls for reframing the subject matter of Religious Education in schools include the tricky question of how to select from a world of potentially interesting and relevant material. Pedagogues have long questioned the educational logic that takes so-called substantive knowledge as its starting point and imagines education to follow a linear path…

This paper addresses the question of what role the historical discipline might play in informing the selection of substantive knowledge for school history curricula. In the process, it seeks to clarify the usefulness and limitations of Young's social realist theory of powerful knowledge in the case of school history. The paper proposes that…

This article addresses how 'powerful' curriculum theory might be constructed from the perspective of the German "Didaktik" tradition--highly compatible with Schwab's the Practical. To start with, I scrutinize Joseph Schwab's model of curriculum planning and Wolfgang Klafki's model of lesson preparation and examine two theories of content…

In 2020, Miriam Ben-Peretz, the Israel Scholar of 2006 and a member of the U.S. National Academy (in addition to being a recipient of Israel's EMET Prize for Research in Education and an American Educational Research Association Fellow) passed away. Ben-Peretz, whose life patterned Israel's contested history (including its wars), was equally well…

Building on and going beyond Young and Muller's theory of powerful knowledge, this article seeks to articulate a model of a future-oriented, knowledge-rich curriculum by invoking David Lambert's "capabilities" approach and "Bildung"-centred "Didaktik." The curriculum is "knowledge rich" in three respects.…

Bible studies are one of the foundations of Israeli education. Nevertheless, this content area has been neglected for many years and it is now bordering on crisis. Passive learning style and classroom discussions that lead to predetermined conclusions are prevalent in Bible classes in both elementary and high schools. In this article, we present…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to posit a possible reason why non-Indigenous educators are seen to be 'cautious' in their pedagogic engagement with First Nations perspectives in curriculum, why interventions and programmess around reconciliation and truth-telling have limited traction in affecting change in school culture, and why the…

The idea of "powerful knowledge" as a curriculum principle has led to extensive discussion. It has been framed as a way of bringing knowledge back into curriculum thinking in the light if its absence in curriculum theory. However, questions have been raised regarding powerful knowledge as a knowledge-based curriculum principle; questions…

As an overview in connection with the 50th anniversary of the "Journal of Curriculum Studies" (JCS), this article begins with John Dewey's notion that all educational actions carry philosophical implications. The tension between different education-research philosophies, between non-social and social education philosophies in Dewey's…

Curriculum development at universities of technology (UoTs) in South Africa has become a matter of urgency given the revised Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (HEQSF). The HEQSF required large-scale curriculum revision of existing qualifications and curriculum development of new qualifications such as the Postgraduate Diploma (PGDips).…

Contemporary discussion of the "crisis in democracy" displays a tendency to see young people as the problem because they are "apolitical" "apathetic" and "disengaged" or point to deficiencies in institutions deemed responsible for civic education. This discussion normally comes as a prelude to calls for more…

Apprenticeships are required for many trades and can take different forms. In Sweden, one form can be viewed as a pathway where students complete a three-year-long vocational education in upper secondary school followed by a post-secondary apprenticeship in a particular trade. Another takes the form of vocational training within the framework of…

The paper identifies three tools that support the administrative instrument of a state-based curriculum commission: compartmentalization, licensing, and segmentation. These tools channel the state's curriculum-making towards forms of symbolic rather than regulatory action. The state curriculum becomes a framework for the ideological governance of…

This issue of the "Journal of Curriculum Studies" presents a symposium on the recent work of Michael Young. Contemporary curriculum theory has little specific to say about how knowledge is selected, organized and transformed into curriculum content for teaching and learning. Over the last two decades, Young has taken a rather different…