Despite the divisions within Northern Ireland's education system along religious and academic lines, it has managed to maintain relative stability, or at least a functional inertia, over the past four decades. The full potential, however, of this system and in particular, the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), has yet to be realised. This paper…

Competency-based education (CBE) has been widely adopted in various educational contexts although research discussing how CBE is implemented in local contexts and how it shifts (or not) teaching practices is limited. This study explores how Vietnamese secondary teachers made sense of general competencies and adapted their teaching towards…

Purpose: Globalization, and more specifically international organizations, has had a major effect upon national education systems worldwide. Understandably, the academic literature covering this phenomenon has expanded at a prolific rate. This study contributes to this body of knowledge by examining how the international organizations affect…

Improving young people's engagement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is being promoted worldwide as a means of addressing projected shortfalls in expertise needed to further nations' economic, social and environmental goals. Responding to this, schools are reforming traditional discipline-based curricula into…

Purpose: The main aim of this article is to analyze Estonian civics and citizenship education. We focus on multi-level policy design and implementation, teachers' roles, and educational practices in the classroom. In order to achieve the aim, we analyzed the national curricula from the citizenship normative perspective, conducted interviews with…

There is considerable rhetoric internationally around the need for national curricula to reflect the changes that are taking place in the world outside school. This raises questions about what a quality curriculum in a technological era should look like, and equally challenging issues about how to achieve the necessary changes in schooling in…

Kenya's 2017 competency-based curriculum, the Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), seeks to address the skills gap in the education system and make the curriculum relevant to learners. Using Soka education as the philosophical framework, we provide a comprehensive review of BECF. The analysis in this essay covers the noteworthy provisions,…

Purpose: The current article on social studies in primary and secondary education in Norway covers a range of relevant topics which starts with a brief context of Norwegian society, history and social studies framework. Main topics are the new (2020) curriculum, textbooks analyses, social studies teacher competence and practices followed by…

The article sets the international context for the development of a curriculum of education for sustainable development and shows the directions being taken in the Francophone community. Building on a significant number of studies carried out in France, we constitute a typology of the positions of French-speaking researchers involved in those…

This qualitative research study sought to understand teachers' resistance to English language educational change in Kyrgyzstan. The participants were six English teachers working in both rural and urban public schools in Kyrgyzstan. Analysis of non-participant observation and post-observation interviews revealed that, despite changes in English…

The ambitious project to nationalise the Australian Curriculum has prompted great interest among policymakers, academics and civics teachers in Australian schools. The government-led citizenship education initiative "Discovering Democracy" (1997-2007) comprehensively failed to meet its objectives, most prominently the stated goal of…

The installation of the new Australian Curriculum offers rich possibilities for rethinking English in Australia, and beyond. This paper proposes that rhetoric is usefully drawn into this work of reconceptualisation, as strategically an organising principle for English curriculum theory and practice. It reviews existing work on rhetoric and…

This article investigates how learning outcomes, a concept inspired by an Anglo-Saxon curriculum approach, are expressed in policy documents, with an emphasis on expectations articulated to teachers. Developments in education policy for the last two decades reflect a widespread expansion of learning outcome orientation in curricula and assessment…

This paper provides a detailed account of the Queensland education system's engagement with reforming curriculum, pedagogies and assessment. In so doing, it responds to the University College London's Institute of Education report on "high-performing" jurisdictions, of which Queensland, Australia, was identified as one. In this report,…

This article examines how three national curricula for basic education in Finland reflect transnational policy perspectives from 1994 to the present. By developing a conceptual apparatus for curriculum analysis, we examine how national curricula in Finland can be interpreted as modifications of transnational policy transfers shaped by…