This paper examines how the initiation of a national-level curricular reform invites different educational ideas and how such ideas attain legitimacy through policy narratives that confer meanings about school knowledge, schooling, and the nation using the case of the South Korean national curriculum reform of 2015. By critically analysing…

International cooperation in history teaching and related teacher education requires clarification of terminology as well as of underlying concepts and theoretical foundations, since these levels are fundamentally intertwining. If these levels are addressed, both comparison and translation do not only make cooperation possible, but promise…

Current landscapes of curriculum discourse and educational practice are examined by focusing on co-evolutions of metaphors for knowledge, learning and teaching across four prominent 'frames'--namely, Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education and Systemic Sustainability Education. It is argued that these frames…

Using the analytical tools of broadening, burrowing and storying and restorying, this narrative inquiry examines a middle school teachers' knowledge of her pedagogical practices through the strand of pearls' metaphor that she employs to explain her teaching to herself, a beginning teacher whom she mentors and ourselves as researchers. Throughout…

As teacher educators in an alternative certification and master's programme, we support Teach For America (TFA) teachers who are developing understandings of learning, teaching, and curriculum while they are already working full-time in classrooms. Using critical discourse analysis, we analysed 109 metaphors for curriculum created by 27 novice TFA…

This article examines the role that drawing can play in enabling children and young people to theorize concepts of time. In two, independent Australian research projects, children aged between 5 and 8 years were asked to respond to the question, "What might the future be like?", while 12-14 year olds were asked, "What does history…

Much of the discussion regarding religion and schooling in the US has been limited to ideological clashes surrounding the role of the courts and, ostensibly, the much litigated issue of prayer in schools. This comes at the expense of an examination of deeper curricular issues rooted in language and school mechanisms borne of historical…

This paper adopts a rhetorical perspective in order to examine language about children in the discourse of mathematics education through a study of metaphor. Previous research has tended to emphasize the notion of "beliefs", which locates responsibility for problematic conceptions of children within the heads of individuals, particularly…

This paper explores competing stories around consciousness, ecology and education, with particular reference to conceptual refinement of the idea of an "ecological consciousness." Phenomenological and functional models of consciousness are examined in terms of their implications for developing ecological consciousness in and for education.…

This paper explores one school's implementation of a locally developed curriculum reform known as "Math-Science Investigations". At one level, it offers an account of a reform told from the perspective of a classroom teacher and her 3rd- and 4th-graders. At another level, it reconstructs their experience to explore the understandings of the…

In this article we take a close look at teachers' narratives in order to describe the practice of teaching as an embodied activity. Based on the phenomenological understanding of the body as an active and intentional reaching out from its physical existence, we listened to what Finnish and Israeli teachers' narratives tell us about the voices of…

In a series of three papers, I examined the identity-development of three Chinese women teachers as they moved back and forth between Eastern and Western cultures and languages amid the rapidly changing events of the last four decades. I use a river metaphor to explore three phases in the cross-cultural lives of these women: in the first paper,…

One important challenge for researchers is to understand what happens inside classrooms that make the environment available for children's learning. This study develops the margin|centre dialectic as a general framework for describing participation of very young children in science-related activities. It employs a cultural-historical approach that…

Like any other complex agenda of reform, the notion of teaching for understanding contains areas of uncertainty and ambiguity. This paper uses an hermeneutic research cycle to identify some uncertainties in understanding of teaching for understanding. These areas of uncertainty are discussed in relation to the literature and vignettes from three…

This narrative inquiry portrays the human experience of change by way of a situated account of a reform event. Three conceptualizations ground storied the analysis: the metaphor of the "professional knowledge landscape" of schools; the "narrative authority" of teacher knowledge; and the notion that teachers have knowledge communities with whom…