This paper presents a comparative analysis of two language policies developed in the 2000s by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The two language policies analyzed in this paper are the 'Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities' and 'JSL [Japanese as a Second Language] Curriculum in…

This article examines relationships between children and youths' judgments and their justifications of truth telling and verbal deception, in situational and cultural contexts. Han Chinese, Euro-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, seven- to 17-years of age were presented competitive scenarios in which protagonists told either lies to protect, or…

Purpose: Employee engagement (EE) is a highly popular topic within workplace research, but has been studied almost exclusively from a quantitative, survey based approach, both in academic and consultancy led research. Yet, employee engagement is essentially an individual concept, concerning self, and this highly personal dimension fails to be…

This paper reviews the nature and implementation of the Australian VET FEE-HELP (VFH) policy initiative: a scheme introduced in 2008 to extend income-contingent loans to the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia. We argue that the implementation of the scheme has been seriously flawed, leading to a range of…

This article presents partial results of research exploring links between language teacher identity and queer identity in English language teachers working in Colombia. Three gay male teachers participated in a narrative research project framed within a poststructural perspective on identity. I conducted and recorded semi-structured interviews…

This article explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets the relationship between religious and citizenship education. The contextualisation of the meaning of religious education shows the extent to which social, historical and political elements shape teachers' perceptions about the entanglements between…

Researching quality in early childhood settings has been operationalized in many ways, within and across countries. Nevertheless, despite some consensus on what might constitute a universally recognized view of what is considered essential for young children's development, there are strong indicators that locally developed assessment tools are…

Purpose: This article seeks to investigate the leadership challenges in international schools in one region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It particularly examines the dissonance between the more liberal approaches to education prevalent in international schools and the conservative nature of those observed in the Saudi context, unveiling…

This paper focuses on the rapidly expanding field of largescale international assessment surveys and their impact on the field of adult education and learning. I take the case of OECD's survey assessing adult skills (PIAAC) and situate it within the wider context of the datification of educational policy and practice. The claims made for the…

Working within a multiliteracies framework, this paper moves beyond the traditional concerns with comprehension of a video text or the use of video for communicative purposes and demonstrates how a film clip might be used in a language classroom to explore the meaning-making process in film. Specifically, I investigate how language, filmic…

This instrumental case study explored the contextual knowledge urban music educators hold about their particular learners and the school, community, and broader cultural contexts in which they are situated. The two urban choral music educators who participated in the study represented unusual cases in that they were employed by a children's choir…

Opportunities for American Indian youth to meaningfully engage in school-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experiences have historically been inadequate. As a consequence, American Indian students perform lower on standardized assessments of science education than their peers. In this article we describe the emergence…

The production-oriented approach (POA) has been developed over ten years to overcome the weaknesses in English instruction in tertiary education in Mainland China. The POA tries to integrate the strengths of Western instructional approaches with Chinese contextual features and consists of three components: (a) teaching principles; (b) teaching…

The purpose of this research was to explore and compare the ideas of Saudi boys and girls on animal species. Eighty-four children (comprising 42 boys and 42 girls), aged nine years, from four primary schools, participated in structured interviews to determine their ideas pertaining to taxonomic labels, namely 'animal', 'fish', 'amphibian',…

Despite recognition of the influence of social and cultural contexts on young people's participation in youth sport, there are a limited number of studies that have identified how culture shapes the nature of participation and how it influences experience. This article reports on a study that inquired into what adolescent girls (13-16 years) enjoy…