This article interrogates the legitimacy and influence of interest groups in the elaboration of two school reforms of the last stage of compulsory schooling in two Swiss cantons: Geneva and Vaud. Based on the principle of participatory democracy, the Swiss political system raises questions about the specificities of interest groups' influence on…

In the past decades, the development of higher education institutions (HEIs) in industrialized countries has become intertwined with innovation policy and the goal of national competitiveness. Focusing on the discourses on innovation by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), this article illustrates the transformation of Finnish higher…

As ecological globalization intensifies, rural waste recycling and management has become a global concern. China's proactive efforts are significant for revitalizing domestic rural ecosystems, offering valuable insights into global environmental governance. The rampant dumping and informal processing of hazardous waste in rural China pose severe…

This study examines current approaches to professional development (PD) for school leaders in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. While PD programs indicate significant progress, school leadership remains in an early stage of development. The findings highlight the need for national policy commitments to ensure long-term sustainability. The challenge is…

Historically, teacher evaluation systems have identified few teachers as low-performing and needing improvement. In 2012, at the beginning of a national reform movement, Chicago Public Schools implemented its overhauled evaluation system, which incorporated multiple measures of teaching practice and dismissal plans for low-rated teachers. We find…

The paper presents some general facts about Bulgarian, which is spoken by over 8 million people all over the world and is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. It is shown that language diversity within the country has been relatively constant and modest over the last 90 years (with a clear dominance of Bulgarian). The focus of the…

This qualitative case study explores how rural teachers in the Colombian periphery perceive and appropriate national bilingual policies. I drew theoretically on coloniality/decoloniality, bilingualism, and teacher agency and collected data through questionnaires and in-depth interviews from four self-contained rural elementary school teachers.…

The well-being of the early childhood education (ECE) workforce is of great importance to the field, yet existing measures to capture well-being are varied in conceptual and contextual constructs. There is a need to measure well-being among ECE employees holistically and to be able to compare to other industries. The National Institute for…

Within an early childhood setting strong collaborative partnerships between the service and the family are critical to the success of a child's development and learning. Collaborative interactions with families are considered indicators of quality within early childhood services. Whilst the value and importance of collaborative partnerships are…

Purpose: This study aims to explore school health promotion (HP) as a set of institutionally embedded professional practices. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study using data from nineteen interviews with school professionals in Sweden. Data analysis was informed by practice theory and an institutional logic perspective.…

Teachers and teacher education are often presented as "problems" to be solved, with policy solutions that focus on ways to make teachers "better" and improve teacher "quality" by introducing prescriptive strategies. We investigate the ways COVID-19-related changes to university and school-based facets of Initial…

This UK-based study examines how people learned to identify digital misinformation. This included what experiences enabled this development, and the skills that were acquired in the process. This is a small-scale qualitative study of participants who self-reported as being confident in spotting digital misinformation and the data was analysed…

This is a conceptual paper that examines the emergence of the 'therapeutic university' and considers its potential implications for policy and practice in Higher Education (HE). Concern over the well-being and mental health of university students both in the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally has recently intensified in media, academic and…

This paper reflects on two research projects undertaken a decade apart. The first, "Celebrating creativity collaboratively (CCC)," undertaken in 2009-10 (see Fitzgerald and Smith 2012), explored how a collaborative approach could inspire student teachers of English to become competent, confident teachers of creative writing. The second,…

Formal and informal STEM learning settings are often assumed to interconnect, as conveyed by the widely used metaphor of the STEM learning 'ecosystem'. While this metaphor usefully conveys the sense of a complex system that comprised interconnected, differentiated parts, it has been critiqued for struggling to engage with power relations and…