Teachers' beliefs, conceptualised as heuristics encompassing perceptions and ideologies regarding aspects of their profession, strongly influence their practices. Grounded in this perspective, this study investigated teachers' beliefs and perceived practices in the context of teaching English as foreign language (EFL) to immigrant students in…

Educational Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be an appropriate tool for creating flexible learning environments. ICT can contribute to flexibility through its potential to keep content up-to-date and to address personal learning needs. ICT could, thus, make learning more accessible to a wider group of students. However, doing…

The Finnish educational system and curricula lay emphasis on play, collaboration and equality. Modern educational practices allow the learning environment to be enlarged from indoor classrooms to outdoor playful learning environments (PLEs). PLEs have been constructed in schoolyards in Finland with the goal of increasing learning through play in…

During the last three decades Swedish education has undergone radical decentralisation involving increased school autonomy. One aspect of this change is the gradual weakening of the state regulation of teaching time. Thus, Sweden is somewhat of an extreme in the EU. This is accentuated by a five-year experiment, where 900 compulsory schools were…

During the last two decades teachers in many countries have found themselves facing new demands and changes. In his "intensification thesis" Apple made a powerful attempt to conceptualize and explain these changes: the growing economic and management oriented perspective on education leads to intensification of teachers' work, implying deskilling…

The VITAE project is a four-year (2001-2005) research study, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, conducted with 300 teachers in 100 schools in seven local education authorities in England. The project aimed to identify factors that may affect their work and lives over time and how these factors may, in turn, impact on their…