This article presents an in-depth case analysis of Norwegian teacher training, exploring the intricate dynamics between global blueprints, national problem constructions and local realities. As Norwegian educational policy has aligned itself with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's recommendations, the study uncovers a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine why, despite the advantages they might gain by participating in regulation of teaching by law, Israeli teachers' unions leaders abandoned the opportunity to obtain the right of regulation and instead preferred an ambiguous role. Design/methodology/approach: This is a policy research study, involving…

Miguel A. Cardona, the former commissioner of education in Connecticut, became the U.S. Secretary of Education on March 2, 2021, taking office in the midst of an historic pandemic that had profoundly reshaped the nation's schools. In his initial months on the job, Cardona- also a one-time public school teacher and principal--has focused closely on…

President al-Sisi has declared 2019 to be the 'Year of Education', whereby a National Project is to be launched to reform the education system. These proposed reforms are crucial, yet the politics driving them and their implications for al-Sisi's regime remain unclear. Discussions surrounding how education is political and can help protect…

Cooper's (1989) LPP framework focuses on 'who' the policy planner is and 'who' implements the policy to 'whom.' These are particularly significant factors in a highly centralized education system such as China's, where the effect of different individuals as actors in LPP remains largely unexplored. This article examines the controversy around the…

Scholarship on the 'manufacturing of citizenship' has focused primarily on European and American nationalism. Scholars have noted the scarcity of research on identity construction among children in the Diaspora. This study explores the role of the altruistic principle and the Middle Way approach (a political strategy for the resolution of…

The meaning of a certain policy is not given. It is shaped by the interaction among written policy, people, and contexts in which people do the policy (Honig, 2006). From this perspective, pedagogical reform is a complex social practice in which various actors construct and reconstruct the meaning of teaching and learning. In the case of…

This article promulgates a conceptual framework for researching various roles of educational assessment emphasised in governments' assessment policies as a basis for comparing policy-making related to national testing in primary and lower secondary education in Norway and Sweden from 2000-2017. The study analyses policy documents and expert…

The goal of character building in east Asian countries is often presented as a shared cultural construct and positioned within an east-west dichotomy. However, it is not at all clear that east Asian forms of character education are identifiable and distinct or that they always transcend national and cultural values. Jeynes (2008) has cautioned us…

Around the mid-2000s a crisis discourse emerged in educational policy-making in the EU and in Sweden. Using the EU and Sweden as empirical references, this article explores how this crisis discourse has been and is employed by politicians and NGOs. Discourse Institutionalism is used as an overall theoretical framework focusing on how the crisis…

Objective: To investigate the attitudes of the main stakeholders towards the introduction of sex education in schools in Russia. Design: Qualitative semi-structured interview study. Setting: Altai Krai, Volgograd Oblast, Moscow, Russian Federation. Participants: One hundred and fifty-three interviews with Intersectoral HIV/AIDS Committee members,…

Following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region developed wide-ranging curriculum reforms, including project learning. A recent survey has indicated that over 80% of Hong Kong primary and secondary schools have adopted project learning as a curriculum task. Such an…

Background: In England, the promotion of "national values" within the history curriculum has become an increasingly topical issue in the wake of recent debates about "Britishness" and community cohesion. However, despite the swathe of policy statements and pronouncements, there is little empirical evidence linking young…