This article arises out of work undertaken within the After Religious Education project. It synthesizes the curriculum expertise of established researchers, with the expertise of current teachers of RE in England. A question drives our shared interests: how should we approach curriculum development in RE and how do we justify the approach taken?…

Hong Kong, as a capitalist society, has an achievement-driven education system. Visual arts have become a marginalized learning area, especially in early childhood education. Although 'art and creativity' is one of the six learning domains for early childhood education in the kindergarten curriculum guide in Hong Kong, product-oriented and…

When working to connect homogeneous curricula with heterogeneous groups of pupils, teachers have to sort pupils according to the categories allowed for in the national school system. In this article, we compare German organizational differentiation, where pupils are divided into stable groups, to Norwegian pedagogical differentiation, where…

In this paper, we aim to outline what foundations can offer in terms of understanding education and educational practice, and thus for providing a basis for teachers' professional knowledge. We look critically at the struggle foundation disciplines often experience with coherence and integration in terms of both their relation to each other and to…

The study refers to the unfavourable reputation and status of general didactics as well as its decreasing importance in teacher education. This is a result of poor performance achieved in international tests by students. They score low on knowledge and arguments, and empirical studies indicate that didactic models are useless. In view of the above…

Despite a groundswell of evidence for transformative education, manifestos for 'transformative pedagogy for global citizenship' remain under-theorized and pay limited attention to implications for practice. This paper connects theory and practice through analyzing a curriculum development project that sought to produce a framework for 'engaged…

This study draws upon survey data of 486 student teachers from five different programmes based in five different countries (one programme in each country), and programmes that have varied in their efforts to become more coherent. We explore students' perceptions of the coherence within their teacher education programmes and across the five…

With the persistent criticism of teacher education as a backdrop, this article explores the common perception that teacher education is too theoretical. This article takes the view that the student teachers' assumptions regarding the concept of theory affect how they engage with theory during initial teacher education. Using a qualitative…

This paper explores the relevance and significance of the Practical in Schwab's the "Practical 1" paper in relation to the reconstruction of pedagogics as an educational discipline in China. It begins with employing Schwab's 'medical" framework--in terms of "symptoms," "diagnosis" and "prescription"--to…

This paper reports on a qualitative enquiry into the affordances of case-based teaching for the professional learning of student-teachers. The context is a first-year foundational course in a four-year undergraduate teacher education programme, offered by an urban university in Johannesburg, South Africa, with a student enrolment of close to 700…

This article uses curriculum-making frameworks to analyse and reconstruct the Chinese curriculum-making model and unpack the dynamics, complexity and constraints of China's curriculum reform since the early 1990s. It argues that curriculum reform is China's main human capital development strategy for coping with the challenges of the 21st century,…

This self-study of my role in teacher education examines events in my career, using Schwab's deliberations on "the practical" as an interpretive tool with which to broaden, burrow, and re-story my personal experiences. Through reflecting inward and outward, backward and forward, I connect specific episodes I encountered in my career with…

Since the late 1990s there has been a fundamental shift in the way schooling and even education as a whole is evaluated. From this new perspective the education system would seem to be interpreted as a sub-system of the economic system and thus subservient to it. Decisions on education matters seem to have become determinant for individual…

Defines the concept of pluralistic education and discusses its goals. Interviews a number of teachers to investigate their conceptions of education and their response to the idea of pluralistic education. Reports that teachers share an affinity with certain aspects of pluralistic education but differ in a number of fundamental ways. (DSK)

Presents letters, from Joseph Schwab to the author over the period 1979-1982, that focus on liberal education, the theory practice relationship, and writing history of the English Sixth Form (grades 11 and 12). Suggests that the idea of 'orality' provides an important key to Schwab's philosophy of action. (CMK)