In research on teacher professional development and school reform attention for the role of teacher agency has been growing significantly during the last decade. The objective of this study is to create a model with the potential to view professional development and school reform from a teacher agency perspective at multiple levels. The model of…

The article aims to explore to what extent and in what ways discourse institutionalism can contribute to the understanding and analysis of curriculum change in a globalized context. By focusing specifically on curriculum change, this article proposes how discourse institutionalism can contribute to the so-called 'crisis of curriculum theory' by…

Historical thinking is a construct approached by different disciplines with a recent proliferation in research interest compared to thinking in other domains. Leading exponents do not agree on its definition and include the two main traditions: Anglo-American and German, and various groups or research centres throughout the Western world.…

The new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum has converted its traditional bullet-point guidelines to hundreds of open-ended questions. Each question acts to initiate collective inquiry, to stimulate the sharing of lived experiences and to trigger within-class conversations. The previous pre-determined educational objectives and learning outcomes, in…

This article investigates multidisciplinary teaching practices through models of General Didactics. Multidisciplinary education is gaining interest on international and national levels through policy reforms. Research on multidisciplinary teaching practices is often descriptive and there is a lack of theories to support teachers. General Didactics…

The study presented in the paper has the following goals. The first is to review and compare teacher competence frameworks developed in Eastern (Chinese) and Western (German) contexts, exemplified for the domain of mathematics. Major similarities of the two contexts could be reconstructed in the conceptualization of teacher competence as a…

Public and policy discourse about the content of history curricula is frequently contested, but the voice of history teachers is often absent from such debate. Drawing on a large-scale online survey of history teachers in England, this paper explores their responses to major curriculum reforms proposed by the Coalition government in February 2013.…

This paper frames the problem underlying the cross-cultural Organizing Curriculum Change (OCC) study of state-based curriculum-making. The paper discusses the increased use by states over the past two decades of the century-old instrument of the state-based curriculum and the tool of the curriculum commission. The paper contrasts the slender…

A growing need for utilizing school-based HIV/AIDS interventions the world over has been acknowledged as the most cost-effective means for arresting the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic among the vulnerable youth. However, the question on how teachers as educational change agents and cognitive sense-makers of HIV/AIDS curricula situated in a…

In large-scale educational reforms, many actors play their roles. The diversity of contributions and lack of harmonization prove to be frequently found to cause educational reform failures. Many explanations for these failures focus on differences between the actors and on differences in their contributions to the reform process. In this article,…

Sociocultural theory is increasingly popular as a paradigm for research in education. A recent member in this family of theories is introduced--cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)--that shows much promise to complement and invigorate the field of educational change, a large, multi-faceted, and persistent problematic. In particular,…

The authority-innovation-decision-making model, a top-down approach successfully used to disseminate some educational projects in Australia, is described. The four ingredients that make for success in this approach are: administrative advocacy, high prescriptiveness, good administrative engineering of the implementation process, and strong back-up…

This study analyzes and describes the links between the curriculum policies of one urban school district in the US and an intervention by the economics firm Standard & Poor's (S&P). It characterizes the languages and values introduced to the district leadership by S&P as ideologically neoliberal. This school-level case study that makes…

Based on a model of local curriculum development, but incorporating the ideas first expressed by Goodlad in establishing a league of co-operating schools for the improvement of learning, this curriculum development project successfully infused the study of technology into the science courses of several British secondary schools. (RM)

The Scottish Integrated Science Scheme is employed as a model of an integrated curriculum in two case studies in order to discern changes in secondary education organization and philosophy which arise with a radical change of emphasis. (Author/KM)