In Europe, with the dissemination of curriculum autonomy policies, teachers tend to be more involved in curriculum reforms as curriculum designers. In Portugal, in 2016, the government unprecedently commissioned eighteen teachers' associations to define a curriculum benchmark -- 'Essential Learning'. Studies have shown the difficulties felt by…

Over 60 years of technology development, transformation of educational policy and curriculum innovation in Ireland have resulted in the introduction of the Computer Science (CS) subject in Post-Primary (PP) Education. CS has always been conceived digitally and the Digital Learning Experiences (DLE) enacted through its curriculum are strongly…

Amidst views by teachers that they are not involved in decisions about curriculum making, Caribbean orality provides a way of knowing and transmitting knowledge reflective of the dynamics of the local context and the meanings people make of the spoken word. Caribbean orality provides the opportunity to understand how teachers make sense of…

In England, the development of teachers' curriculum design capabilities has been identified as a 'challenge remaining' (Department for Education [DfE]. (2022). "Opportunity for all: Strong schools with great teachers for your child."…

Music curriculum programmes are designed by English Music teachers in schools as the primary means of musical engagement for young people aged 11-14. Such Music curricula are often structured in learning topics. However, Music teacher rationales for the sequencing of the topics they have chosen to include in their curriculum is an under-developed…

Due to socio-political issues in Dutch society, citizenship education (CE) became obligatory by law in the Netherlands in 2006. Schools were to decide on their local CE curriculum. This contribution intends to open up the black box of school-based curriculum-making efforts for CE. It reports on a four-year study in four schools for secondary…

This paper reports on a research project undertaken with a group (n = 19) of Irish preservice student teachers (PSTs) during the third year of a five-year undergraduate education course. A series of workshops were carried out on the classification and design of mathematics tasks. The research is presented as a case study using mixed methods to…

Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which…

Personal values influence goals and motivate actions. The case study reported in this paper explored whether an understanding of values would provide a useful framework to guide the co-creation of the undergraduate cognitive psychology curriculum at a UK University. A design team composed of staff and students ran two co-creation workshops to…

Curriculum reform is often described as being dependent on teachers' advancement of reform principles. Many studies report the reasons for whether teachers engage with a new curriculum, and these reasons have focused on internal, personal influences including disconnections between curriculum and teachers' beliefs and practices. This study…

While critical realist (CR) ontological and epistemological perspectives and research approaches are becoming more widely adopted by higher education researchers, the scope of research is relatively limited, and novice researchers in the area still struggle to create rich, in-depth, and critical accounts of these approaches 'in action'. This…

This study, using a mixed methods design, examined the use of a photograph-based model to improve students' language and writing skills. Classes were assigned to receive the photograph-based intervention (experimental) or to receive the regular language-based curriculum (control). Both second and fifth grade students in the experimental group…

Agency, understood as the capacity to act independently and to make one's own choices, is considered central to children's development. Thus, education, and hence education curricula, have a role in the development of learner agency. While curriculum development is a key focus for educational theory, research, policy, and classroom practice, the…

The article discusses the link between a curriculum based on academic subjects derived from disciplinary knowledge and a progressive pedagogy that endeavours to engage students from all backgrounds with it. Section 1 describes the realist theory of knowledge which justifies the argument for this accommodation between curriculum and pedagogy.…

This paper reports on the initial stages of an empirical study of a new secondary school in New Zealand. The school vision and organisation reflect current international twenty-first-century learning discourse by confronting long-established beliefs concerning the nature of education and knowledge and the roles of teachers and students. The…