Although the social realist position is grounded in the fundamentally important observation that schools must engage students with knowledge that deepens and extends their understanding, rather than simply reproduce what they learn in everyday life, this approach commits a fatal flaw by equating such 'powerful knowledge' with the work of academic…

This article seeks to contribute to recent theorizing around the concept of powerful knowledge. I begin with a discussion of the current use of the term in both academia and the wider institutional environment of schools. I then give a detailed account of its origins in social realism before exploring different iterations of the concept in recent…

Human Science Pedagogy is 'a strange case,' as Jürgen Oelkers has recently noted: In the Anglophone world, where Gert Biesta has compellingly encouraged scholars to 'reconsider education as a Geisteswissenschaft' (a human science) its main themes and the contributions of its central figures remain unknown. For Germans, particularly in more…

Character Education in the UK is often considered controversial through its perceived neoliberal individualizing of character, disregarding of young people's moral agency, and blindness to the effect of social structures. This article presents an alternative framework for character educators, focussed on the biographical narratives of the students…

Manifest in research, national policy, and instructional standards, the United States has a long-documented interest in teachers as 'content experts.' Yet, research offers limited empirical examinations of teachers' discipline-specific critical content knowledges--their curricular agility in noticing and disrupting power and oppression, and…

This paper attempts to move beyond a critique of historically dominant ways of thinking about teaching and learning relationships to offer a conceptualization of relational pedagogy from a theological perspective. It offers commentary on the potential of relational pedagogy for Christian faith-based schools informed by the scholarship of German…

This article examines Irving Babbitt's probing critiques of John Dewey's ideas at the beginning of the 20th century. Babbitt (1865-1933) was the co-founder of the New Humanists, a collection of scholars and academics who advocated for a return of the Greek and Roman classics in the American curriculum. Babbitt believed that both naturalism and…

In recent years, neuroscience and brain-based approaches to education have started to feature prominently in the rationale for radical educational reform, both in terms of policy and practice. Revelations about what way the brain works, it seems, is a common point of interest for neuroscience and education alike. Out of these common interests…

Perspectives and approaches to health and wellbeing education vary considerably over time and space even as certain contextual and critical features may be maintained. Through an analysis of a range of studies published in the "Journal of Curriculum Studies", we illustrate what unites as much as divides various positions taken by their…

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to 'discipline' the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative…

Curriculum decisions are increasingly seen as technocratic or bureaucratic problems, rather than democratic issues that must be deliberated over. As such, curriculum decisions are placed in the hands of a small minority of bureaucrats and business elites who assume the only purpose of education is to prepare children for college and/or the labour…

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the alignment between the stated goals and the discursive implications in a scripted curriculum published by Teaching Tolerance, a progressive education organization in the US. Social justice education and critical race theories ground the analysis of "Teaching 'The New Jim Crow': A…

The centennial of "Democracy and Education" invites those who study education and curriculum to reconsider this major work and its place in today's world. One of the most cited works in educational scholarship (and the most cited of Dewey's many works), the perspective it provides is not evident in US policy-making or in school practice.…

Michael Young's recent paper in this journal is correct; there is a profound crisis in curriculum theory, and to be intellectually viable into the future the field must strive to "bring back" in empirical study of curriculum. Also by ignoring the empirical content of knowledge and access to it in mass education systems throughout the…

The paper outlines the reception of Schwab's essay "The practical: A language for curriculum" in German-speaking countries in the 1970s and 1980s. The story is a good demonstration of the ways in which different circumstances and phases of development determine transatlantic exchanges and the influence of concepts in the field of…