This article argues that curriculum work can benefit from signifiers of Bildung to promote democracy in public education. The argument is built on the premise that cultural and intellectual traditions that value Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of better societies (Horlacher 2017). I start…

Despite the long history of the idea of democratic education, the articulation of how teacher educators enact democratic practices remains elusive. The purpose of this research was to examine how we understand and enact democratic principles in our physical education teacher education (PETE) practices. Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices…

The authors begin this article with an account of the crises in education in the US today. Curriculum theory is applied to the ideas in the 4th edition of NAEYC's 'developmentally appropriate practices,' and the relationship between the ideas in this edition to current issues is discussed. The authors also present a brief description of democratic…

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical CAL project, HOLD ON, which developed leadership towards social, economic and ecological sustainability. The latter became a target area in the 2018 reform of the Swedish preschool's national curriculum, Lpfo18. A "Whole School Approach" (WSA) and "Education for Sustainable…

Civics courses have a great significance -- they are supposed to train new cohorts of citizens to engage in multiple public roles in (democratic) society. How it is done depends on a multitude of factors, and teachers' performance and program contents are among the most important. In post-authoritarian order like Poland, civic contents of…

In this article, we report a case study of our experiences of a curriculum reform process based on the principles of phenomenon-based learning in higher education in the context of Finnish teacher education. We explore how democracy and participation were present in the decision-making process, highlighting the challenges of promoting the…

The purpose of this phenomenological, qualitative study was to explore how curriculum specialists in middle leadership positions perceive their use of democratic leadership to build teachers' leadership capacity across high schools within one Midwestern public school district. The key democratic leadership practices that guided this study include…

Within political philosophy and particularly in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, "agonism" has been described as representing the notion of being able to challenge and dissent in a productive way. However, little is known about how agonism is used in the educational literature, other than some applications relevant to…

Democratic society, which is developing in the Republic of Croatia, has aspired for a flexible and developmental curriculum oriented towards the individualization of the educational process, cooperation of all participants and positive communication. Such curriculum is enhanced by pedagogical documentation of the educational process, constructive…

We examine school governance in populist era, using contemporary readings of pragmatist philosophy. We are in a "populist moment," a time of uprisings and movements of the "demos" making political claims (Mouffe, 2018). School officials in the U.S. are subject to an array of political demands in the form of protests and…

Student democratic participation in schools is often limited to involvement in school councils with associated dangers of tokenism and speaking for others. There is limited space for students to have a voice in what is learned due to mandated state curricula and scepticism about student capacity, even though consultation with students about…

Purpose: Taking the form of a report, the presented text aims to map the curricular changes in civic education and social science learning in basic and upper secondary schools after 1989. It seeks to identify the key features of undergraduate teacher training at universities, with an emphasis on field-specific didactics, and to provide a brief…

Institutions of higher education have recently been embroiled in a series of controversies concerning two related, though hotly contested ideas: the creation of safe space and the preservation of free speech. On one hand, there is a demand for institutional safe spaces--literal refuges or broad university norms that create a sense of inclusion for…

This article describes a collaboration between the "Rubin Center" and my "Methods of Teaching Art" class and explores how constructivist practices support democratic citizenship and idea-based art education curriculum building. The collaboration came about as a revived attempt to expand the performance-based and experiential…

The history of Australian mass schooling has seen contestations over school and curriculum purposes, zig-zagging across conservative and progressive directions. In this paper, we examine how possibilities for students to have 'voice', 'participation' and 'leadership' in their learning are currently limited in Australia. Policy framings, we argue,…