Motivated by the addition of a curriculum standard for active citizenship into New Jersey's social studies standards a group of educators and researchers set out to integrate an action research curriculum, based on a youth participatory action research (YPAR) model, into social studies classrooms. Adapting YPAR, with its promising blend of…

Preschool curriculum reform is currently underway in Taiwan. Privately-managed public preschools (PMPPs) currently play the role of bellwethers because they stand halfway between public and private preschools, and serve as testing grounds for curriculum reforms promoted by the government. This study originated from Curriculum Development Program…

In large-scale educational reforms, many actors play their roles. The diversity of contributions and lack of harmonization prove to be frequently found to cause educational reform failures. Many explanations for these failures focus on differences between the actors and on differences in their contributions to the reform process. In this article,…

View through a power perspective, this article critically evaluates tensions involved in China's school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in middle schools: the state's concern about control, accountability, and schools' eagerness to struggle for more decision-making power. This article examines how a Chinese school and its teachers go beyond…

This article presents an exploratory case study of a teacher's knowledge, understanding, and practice of critical pedagogy in a sheltered instruction high school biology classroom. This case study relied on the use of fieldnotes, videotape recordings, interviews, and transcripts to showcase the practices and activities taking place in the…

This study investigated young children's perceptions of their role in curriculum development in one Canadian preschool. There is no consensus that children have a role to play in developing curriculum. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) confirms children's right to be listened to about all aspects of their…

This paper reports partial findings of a qualitative interpretive study of female secondary school English language teachers' perceptions of curriculum change in the United Arab Emirates. The sample consisted of 16 female teachers in three secondary schools who had experience teaching the former and the current English language curricula. Data…

This study was designed primarily to investigate the impact of school-based curriculum development teams on teacher development within the tradition of school-based curriculum development. The results are expected to provide valuable insights for teachers, school management and policy making. Teacher interviews in a primary school in Hong Kong…

Delane Bender-Slack takes on the important subject of teaching for social justice. Her article's strength is in its uncompromising look at complex, often misinterpreted teaching challenges. This article focuses on actual teachers working for social justice in their classrooms. Working from a strong theoretical framework, she pushes us in new…

Background: Vocational education in Australia and elsewhere has a history of being gendered and classed, thereby limiting the post-school options of students undertaking this form of study. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, the authors used Gore's eight techniques of power to examine the micro-functioning of power relations at two case sites.…

The primary purpose of this exploratory study is to identify variations in the ways in which individual teachers in different educational contexts interpret their curriculum and plan their lessons and in particular to explore the possibility that cultural differences as identified by Hofstede (1991) may be a contributing factor to understanding…

School curriculum policy and politics in South Africa are discussed in this article as a means of highlighting the nature of Governmental power and functioning in a post-liberation developing country. The notion "policy networks" is used as a lens to understand the ways in which specific constellations of policy interests informed the…

This study is an examination of black and white preadults' cognitive and affective orientations to their nation, social power, government, authority, and laws. The data were collected by means of tape recorded interviews with 96 students attending public schools in Buffalo, New York, which were transcribed, coded, and analyzed in an attempt to…

This article, using data from a year-long study of writing processes in an institutional context, looks at the demands made on writers in workplace environments as they make requests of their colleagues. Building on Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, the study takes a view of context as being a key factor in framing requests, in addition…