This article emerges from a stream of scholarship demonstrating the inadequacy of broad arguments favouring 'neutrality' as an alternative to 'directive normative instruction' in the early childhood classroom. We advance a moral educational framing of the tension between neutrality and normativity in education: specifically, we argue that…

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…

This paper reports a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) exploring the nature, causes and epistemic effects of knowledge recontextualization in the 'official' Key Stage Five History curriculum in England. "Recontextualization" refers to inevitable changes that occur to knowledge as it is 'pedagogized', due to the value-laden practices and…

History teaching usually focuses on understanding the past as an aim in itself. Research shows that many students do not see the point of this and perceive history as not very useful. Yet history plays a major role in the orientation on present and future. If students fail to see this, the question arises whether this is due to a lack of explicit…

In 2011, the Finnish National Board of Education assessed the learning outcomes of history with a study whose results raised doubts about the fulfilment of the goals of history education. This article seeks to expand awareness about Finnish adolescents' understanding of historical empathy. The study assessed twenty-two 16-17-year-old high school…

Seven successive curricula for Swedish in the Swedish primary school are investigated using a linguistic method that traces its origin to the Russian literary theorist, Michail Bakhtin. The amount of dialogicity, viewed as the room given to different paradigms to argue against each other, is shown to decrease from the earlier curricula to the…

Much official environmental education policy in the UK and elsewhere makes scant reference to nature as such, and the issue of our underlying attitude towards it is rarely addressed. For the most part such policy is pre-occupied with the issue of meeting "sustainably" what are taken to be present and future human needs. This paper…

The "elemental" refers to the essentials of the contents that make them accessible to a child. The effects on a child of contents that are mastered are the "fundamental". In a fruitful didactic unlocking (presentation) it is possible for a child to achieve considerably more insight than merely an understanding of the learning…

Contemporary science standards stress the importance of highlighting inquiry in the science classroom as one way of learning key concepts. One critical question that needs to be addressed for a range of instructional practices is how opportunities to learn are conceptualized so that students can engage and learn the critical ideas and practices…

Identifies nine dimensions of curriculum for use in evaluating curricular innovations: principles, objectives, student entry behaviors, assessment tools, instructional materials, learning experiences, teaching strategies, content, and time. (KC)

A critique of the Schools Council Humanities program discusses the lack of clarification of what the stated achievements of understanding, discrimination, and judgement in the human field really consist; what they logically entail, and what methodologies are consistent with them. (JH)

Outlines a theory of cognitive development designed to be useful in defining an ideal education and discusses the practical steps for achieving educational goals. Three stages of cognitive development are proposed and their implications for curriculum content and teaching strategies are discussed. (AM)

This paper evaluates the extent to which the implementation and assessment of the new citizenship curriculum in England treats learners as citizens or subjects by evaluating whether the interests of state or citizen predominate. Philosophical, contextual, and practical perspectives on citizenship education are drawn upon to evaluate mechanisms…

Examines the trend which emphasizes teachers' classroom management skills over their knowledge of curriculum content. The author contends that content knowledge should be the primary focus of both teacher education and teaching, and that teaching strategies and management skills should arise out of the need to communicate that knowledge. (AM)

One consequence of the advancing globalization and technological dependence of society is that people outside professional science are finding that issues of concern to them have a science dimension. I consider how school science education can support engagement with scientific information. I contend that teaching about the epistemology of science…