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This paper examines underlying beliefs and values about nature within the early years education in Turkey, as reflected in the curricula and standards documents guiding instruction. Given that not every child has the opportunity for nature-based education, it becomes essential to incorporate nature-based learning into indoor classrooms. Employing a document analysis, we comprehensively analyse the Ministry of Education's Preschool Education Program (2013), Activity Book-1 (2013a), and Activity Book-2 (2018), which guides teachers in shaping their classroom practices, therefore providing in-depth insights into the conceptualisations of nature. Our analysis reveals that 'nature' in these documents is characterised by its connection to and intersections of specific settings, concepts, and resources. Moreover, we found out that the identified patterns of relationships in the examined curriculum and standards documents demonstrate a purposeful initiative to engage preschool children in the realm of nature through various means, including conceptual comprehension, hands-on interaction with materials, and direct involvement in natural surroundings. The intersections among these elements unveil a complex network of opportunities to promote an enhanced learning journey. By fostering a deeper understanding of the relationship between curriculum guidelines and nature activities, we aim to empower early childhood educators to embrace nature as an integral part of their classroom practices.

With global trends focussed on standardisation of curriculum and increased teacher accountability, it has become commonplace for curriculum to be viewed simplistically as a product. While all teachers engage in forms of classroom curriculum-making, questions remain as to what this looks like within an educational landscape that continues to portray teaching as a purely technical activity. This paper explores two Australian early career primary teachers' experiences of curriculum-making, drawing attention to the enabling and constraining conditions which shape such experiences. We consider the impact of these enabled and constrained experiences on early career teachers' aspirations and ongoing development as knowledge-led curriculum-makers. We contend that such constrained experiences limit opportunities for early career teachers to develop professional identities as knowledge-led curriculum-makers and continue to reinforce unhelpful representations of teachers as 'technicians'.

Ben-Peretz's (1975) concept of intended curriculum describes a version of curriculum that 'official' curriculum developers create to provide a detailed guide to what teachers are required to teach in schools. While some curricula are intended to guide learning, others give a more definitive regulation of what must be taught. Either way, they are a product of curriculum developers writing government policy that defines what is considered essential for students to know. The teacher then undertakes the technical task of interpreting these policy texts to discern how they will introduce the content to their students. Once the teacher receives the curriculum text, they begin a translation process. While the curriculum developer has a vision of how teachers will interpret the curriculum, the teacher's translation of the curriculum text is filtered through the teachers' understanding of the subject matter. This notion of 'curriculum potential' represents the culmination of the teacher's subject matter knowledge acquired throughout their education and career which serves as the reference point for curriculum interpretation. This article describes the process of curriculum interpretation used by primary teachers during the implementation of Australian curriculum reform. The study examined the interpretation process from the intended curriculum to the planned curriculum to the enacted curriculum used by the teachers and the influences impacting upon these processes. The analysis of the teachers' interpretations was demonstrated through a process for curriculum mapping developed for this study. This work will present the teachers' pathways to curriculum enactment as a hermeneutic interpretation of curriculum, revealing the teachers' curriculum potential. While frequently descriptions of curriculum potential focuss on subject matter knowledge, analysis of primary teacher curriculum interpretation necessitates a broader definition. The paper concludes that the primary teachers' interpretation process is drawn from a wider curriculum potential that intersects their knowledge of subject matter and knowledge of their students.

Labeling of gifted pupils can negatively affect the life path of gifted individuals. The study explores whether and how a teacher can label gifted pupils when applying educational strategies based on internal differentiation. We focused on formally identified intellectually gifted pupils (age 7-12) educated in (mainstream) elementary schools in the Czech Republic (Central Europe). Qualitative data were collected through classroom observations and teacher interviews. We observed 24 gifted pupils and 15 teachers from 12 schools. We identified five main types of educational strategies leading to inappropriate labeling, such as Tasks for Quick-witted, Challenges, Boffins Goes to Competition, Teacher's Assistant, and Individual Projects. The "inappropriateness" of these strategies consisted of the significant preference and presentation of gifted pupils, in the useless and overused selection of gifted pupils, and the rigidity of the applied strategies. The paper seeks to highlight the existence of a paradoxical phenomenon whereby, when teachers are maximally interested in promoting giftedness, the stagnation of gifted pupils and other pupils in the class occurs. The study concludes with recommendations for eliminating inappropriate labeling of gifted pupils.

The importance of teaching reasoning in schools is widely recognised. Yet this has presented teachers with difficulties, particularly in primary education. Difficulties partially stem from a lack of cohesive theory about reasoning for education and a lack of specificity about it in the English National Curriculum. One route to improved teaching of reasoning is through recognition of the importance and prevalence of discipline-specific practices. This paper draws on socio-cultural theory and disciplinary literacy research to argue that some reasoning practices are discipline specific. The theoretical lens of reasoning styles is adopted. A cognitive history approach has been used to create a framework of reasoning styles important in primary English. English represents a curriculum area that is currently poorly understood in terms of its prevalent reasoning practices. This paper, therefore, makes important theoretical and pedagogical contributions to existing research. Examples of student engagement with identified reasoning styles are provided. The framework and accompanying examples will help teachers to support the development of student reasoning, particularly in the subject of English. Developing students' meta-awareness of patterns of language use is beneficial. Development may also support students to become fuller members of the English academic community.

Curriculum integration is a feature of many new curricula that have emerged in different countries since around the turn of the millennium. It focuses on removing the boundaries between traditional subject specialisms, to enable more holistic and 'joined-up' learning opportunities. This study draws on the experiences of a group of primary and secondary teachers in Wales, engaged in creating a framework for an integrated curriculum for expressive arts. Whilst the teachers are united in their ambition for establishing a curriculum that gives greater status to the arts, curriculum integration presents significant challenges, notably in how subject knowledge is understood and presented within an integrated curriculum. The teachers take different approaches to curriculum integration, with primary teachers favouring a "transdisciplinary" approach, with child-led learning and themes taking precedence, and secondary teachers opting for "multidisciplinary" approaches, where the themes are organising devices but where subjects take priority. Differing practices suggest differing conceptions of subject knowledge and mastery within an integrated curriculum. Drawing, in particular, on Bernstein's concepts relating to knowledge discourses, this paper suggests that the danger of an integrated curriculum is weakened disciplinary knowledge. Whilst this paper relates to the arts, the messages about curriculum integration might be applied more widely.

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 potential implications of curriculum content selections for learner agency remain underexplored. Theoretically, this paper engages with critical realism, explaining how it can provide theoretical foundation for a more comprehensive view of learner agency and, by implication, more balanced curricula. Empirically, the paper draws on the findings from a content analysis of the national curriculum documents of four countries with relatively high scores in international comparative tables, England, Australia, Hong-Kong, and Canada, to develop a new typology of primary curricula. Based on the extent of emphasis placed on knowledge versus skills, values, and attitudes, three types of curricula were identified: knowledge-based, skills-oriented, and learner-centred. Due to its significant theoretical and practical influence globally, we focus on the knowledge-based model and its likely impact on students' agency. We conclude by highlighting the importance of making learner agency a key orientation of the curriculum and suggesting directions for future research.

The new national core curriculum has been put into operation in Finland. Teaching and learning is intended to focus on historical literacy. In this paper, we study how it can be assessed with a pen-and-paper test, and what that reveals in regards to the mastering of historical literacy among elementary pupils. To study this, we designed a test where pupils analysed sources, answered open-ended questions, and filled out weighted multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, we implemented the test with the think-aloud method. The results from this indicate the way 12-year-olds read historical documents and formulate their own interpretations. The results demonstrate that most of the pupils succeeded in acquiring historical information from different sources, as well as understanding the interpretative nature of historical knowledge. The test also revealed that pupils can identify some intentions of the sources' producers, as well as reasoning through their own interpretations using a single source. Some pupils, however, could not process the cognitive noise inherent to the test (i.e. conflicting sources). Some of them also considered an authoritative source to be principally more reliable than other sources. Our study sheds light on which kind of task can be used at the elementary level to assess historical literacy.

This paper examines a problem described as widespread and long-standing in mathematics education: supporting pupils into multiplicative reasoning, a form of reasoning that has been noted as central to large tracts of secondary mathematics and beyond. Also noted, however, is a persistent perception of multiplicative situations only in terms of repeated addition -- a perception held not only primary pupils, but also among primary teachers and curriculum developers. The focus of this paper is to synthesize literature on multiplicative reasoning as a conceptual field together with a sociocultural discussion of the role of mediating artifacts in the development of this conceptual field. Bringing MR into the primary classroom can then be achieved, I propose, through a pedagogy oriented toward model-eliciting and teacher appropriation of pupils' models as pedagogic tools with the subsequent re-appropriation of refined models by pupils. This pedagogy is illustrated through the analysis of two vignettes from a teaching experiment which demonstrate the beginnings of MR as an emergent conceptual field in the classroom. The paper concludes that it is possible to move primary teaching and learning toward understanding the functional aspects of multiplicative reasoning, but that any such moves requires attention to teachers' pedagogic and content knowledge.

This paper explores the knowledge conceptions in teachers' curriculum making within a classroom perspective through a lens of social realist theory. Curriculum making is conceptualised as a process that occurs between students, teachers, knowledge content and contextual factors, in which teachers must balance various priorities and knowledge boundaries. The analytical distinctions between knowledge conceptions, boundaries and structures are based on Young and Muller's three future curriculum scenarios and applied to empirical data retrieved from two eighth-grade (14-15 year olds) classrooms in Sweden regarding lessons on Swedish and the natural sciences. The findings show that the curriculum knowledge requirements impede the agency of teachers and shape the conditions for curriculum making. Teachers seek to balance priorities in terms of the aim and content of subject knowledge, teaching activities and their knowledge of the students. Conceptions of knowledge and boundaries are constructed in complex ways as teachers try to build bridges and engage in disciplinary boundary crossing between subject-specific knowledge and knowledge from the world of students' subjective experience. These movements and epistemic transactions in curriculum making are ways of integrating different knowledge structures, and they have the potential to encourage exploration and moving beyond social contexts and everyday experience.

This paper outlines the processes of creating a 'Storymaker Wheel', a creativity evaluation tool conceptualised with input from a children's book author, a children's book illustrator, academics and teachers, for teachers and pupils to use to support and develop their creative writing. It documents the ways in which teachers and pupils engaged with the Wheel in three schools in England: a primary pupil referral unit, a primary school and a secondary school. Interviews with teachers and pupils about the Storymaker Wheel, and classroom observations of the Wheel in use, expose some challenges of teaching creative writing within the current English educational context, which we discuss.

The paper we present is a biographical qualitative study on the school experience and its repercussions on the lives of young people. The paper has two aims: (1) to understand the repercussions of school experiences on the construction of personal identity, and (2) to incorporate the voices of alumni into a reflection on the present and future challenges facing primary education. The study is framed by the movement known as student voice. For this purpose, the interpretations ex-students were collected through in-depth interviews. The conclusions reveal the persistent effects of the school experience over the years as young people establish a sense of identity. The young people explain the attitudes and abilities that make up their way of living, and they relate this to what they learned in their early childhood and primary education.

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low socio-economic status (SES) schools in the Western Cape, South Africa. The paper shows that teachers and school managers have an ambivalent attitude to tests, wary of the reputational costs they can incur, but also curious about the differentiated picture test results can give them as they learn to "read" the underlying codes embedded in the results. The paper concludes that a focus on what tests make visible and a recognition of the pedagogic agency of teachers points to potential pedagogic benefits of systemic tests.

The aim of this paper is to explore further an under-developed area--how drivers of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment conceptions and practices shape the creation and uses of technologically based resources to support mathematics learning across informal, non-formal and formal learning environments. The paper considers: the importance of mathematics learning in informal and non-formal as well as formal settings; how curriculum focuses on pedagogy supporting these needs, contrasting this focus in England and Serbia; and in these contexts, the roles of homework, the potential of technologies and the roles of the teacher. Technological developments to support mathematics learning for 11- to 14-year-old pupils in the two countries are explored and contrasted, and ways that recent developments inform our understandings of formal, informal and non-formal learning through learning activities, learning support and settings are modelled. The conception of "extended pedagogies" is introduced; implications are outlined.

This paper focuses on the implications of the transformative student-centred curriculum being developed in Wales for tackling educational inequalities. Informed by long-standing debates within the sociology of education about the role of school knowledge in social and cultural reproduction, our research outlines some of the challenges that those implementing the new Curriculum for Wales need to address if it is to offer 'successful futures' for all. Drawing on interview and survey data from those schools tasked with developing the new curriculum, and the evaluation of a very similar curriculum reform for early years and primary education in Wales, we outline the demands the new curriculum will place on material and human resources and the risks of increasing flexibility. We argue that there will need to be significant investment and some form of external accountability to ensure that disadvantaged students receive a curriculum experience that opens up avenues to 'powerful knowledge'.

This is an era of significant government involvement in schools in England, despite consistent rhetoric from the Department of Education to the contrary. In such a period, signs can be detected of the juncture between a postmodern identity and post-professional status, two models of teacher professionalism supposed in Hargreaves' work on the fourth age of professionalism. This paper focuses on the former as the nature of the contemporary context. Defining features of postmodernity are considered through a focus on the broad issue of teacher professionalism. For this paper, this is embodied by teachers' involvement with the development of the Primary National Curriculum for England. Evidence will be drawn from just before its 1988 introduction until 2013 in order to critique several of the key tenets of postmodernity as identified by Hargreaves. This is of particular importance in a context where a strong defence is necessary to enable the sustainment, and growth, of teachers' professional autonomy. This paper aims to propose some strategies teachers could enact in the face of postmodern challenges.

Teaching about the nature of science (NOS) is seen as a priority for science education in many national contexts. The present paper focuses on one central issue in learning about NOS: understanding the nature and status of scientific theories. A key challenge in teaching about NOS is to persuade students that scientific knowledge is generally robust and reliable, yet also in principle always open to challenge and modification. Theories play a central role, as they are a form of conjectural knowledge that over time may be abandoned, replaced, modified, yet sometimes become well established as current best scientific understanding. The present paper reports on findings from interviews with 13-14 year olds in England where target knowledge presents theories as "consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world". Student thinking reflected a two-tier typology of scientific knowledge in which largely unsupported imaginative ideas ("theories") became transformed into fairly definitive knowledge (such as laws) through relatively straightforward testing. These results are considered in relation to research into intellectual development which indicates that effective teaching in this area requires careful scaffolding of student learning, but has potential to contribute to supporting intellectual development across the curriculum.

The notion that future performance can be affected by information about previous performance is often expressed in terms of "closing the gap." Feedback has long been recognised as a mechanism through which teaching and learning may be influenced. The current wave of support in the United Kingdom for assessment "for" learning echoes these sentiments. This paper examines the feedback strategies employed by two experienced literacy practitioners in England. Using data gathered from field observations, interviews and documentary sources, the paper presents evidence of espoused practice associated with feedback, demonstrating that whilst teachers may claim that they make effective use of some feedback strategies to support pupils' learning and motivation, that this is not supported by empirical data. The paper also identifies that whilst some teachers aim to mark every piece of pupils' written work for perceived motivational benefits; such a strategy can undermine pupils' intrinsic motivation and lead to a culture of over-dependency, whereby the locus of control with regard to feedback lies solely with the teacher. The paper concludes by exploring some possible implications for practice with regard to the provision of written feedback in particular.

This paper reports research on the initial teacher training and continuing professional development of teachers in six African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda). The focus of the research was on the teaching of early reading and mathematics. The curriculum of both these areas was analysed in terms of (i) implementation by providers such as Colleges of Education, and (ii) impact in schools. The study found that there were many and deep gaps in the curriculum taught and consequently in teacher knowledge and skills in these two crucial subject areas. The paper sets out a series of recommendations for addressing this problem including an overall alternative approach to teacher education that emerges from the research findings as a whole. (Contains 1 note, 11 tables, and 10 figures.)

In this paper, two case studies of elementary school teachers in the Republic of Cyprus are constructed to discuss how curriculum making relates to teacher biographies and sense of professionalism, as those are shaped at the intersection of their professional history and projections for the future, informed by and informing their constitution as professionals in local institutional and broader social contexts. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency, the two cases are utilised to examine how teachers' narrated professional experiences in past and current schools were at interplay with their general sense of professional role and purpose as teachers. This complex interplay is simultaneously connected to the ways they perceived and constituted their pupils as well as to the ways they themselves were constituted by others as professionals. The examination of the two cases foregrounds the notions of teacher agency and of curriculum making as contingent, negotiated and negotiable, and opens up the space to consider the politics of both as those are permeated by micro-processes of subjection and subjectivation.

This paper addresses the question: How do teachers and school leaders respond to high stakes testing of pupils transitioning from primary to secondary school? It explores how a new test, the Level 6 test, operated with regard to primary/secondary school relationships in England. It draws on an analysis of qualitative interviews with teachers and school leaders in 20 primary schools that took part in the test, 40 school leaders that chose not to and 20 secondary-school leaders. Theoretical work on social boundaries is utilised to develop an argument that this test and its results acted as a boundary signifier, crystallising many of the tensions between primary and secondary schools. These tensions included the role of accountability regimes in requiring schools to demonstrate progress; narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test; and the extent to which test results can provide a true representation of pupil attainment. We conclude by suggesting the potential of the boundary signifier concept in relation to other tests at the primary/secondary boundary and other key transition points in education, and consider whether such tests can act as an ideal boundary object, serving to help overcome, rather than cement, barriers between schools.

In the 2000s, the new national curriculum, dubbed as the "yutori curriculum," introduced a new subject for project-based learning "Integrated Study" as its prominent feature. Comparing curriculum orientations in project-based learning in three historical periods after the WWII including Integrated Study, this paper aims to offer a genealogy of postwar Japanese school curriculum primarily based on a critical reading of the national curriculum guidelines on project-based learning, which is emblematic of the extending power of postwar Japan's curriculum authorities. Although Integrated Study was purportedly child-centered and put emphasis on each child's personal relevance and each school's autonomy, the finding of this study shows that Integrated Study in the yutori curriculum was rather a technology that disciplined schools, teachers, and classroom processes to shape children into morally good and cognitively flexible Japanese nationals. Despite its rhetoric of child-centeredness and personal relevance, the introduction of Integrated Study as part of the yutori curriculum was ultimately part of the state's move to gain further control over schooling.

Predicting item difficulty is highly important in education for both teachers and item writers. Despite identifying a large number of explanatory variables, predicting item difficulty remains a challenge in educational assessment with empirical attempts rarely exceeding 25% of variance explained. This paper analyses 216 science items of key stage 2 tests which are national sampling assessments administered to 11 year olds in England. Potential predictors (topic, subtopic, concept, question type, nature of stimulus, depth of knowledge and linguistic variables) were considered in the analysis. Coding frameworks employed in similar studies were adapted and employed by two coders to independently rate items. Linguistic demands were gauged using a computational linguistic facility. The stepwise regression models predicted 23% of the variance with extended constructed questions and photos being the main predictors of item difficulty. While a substantial part of unexplained variance could be attributed to the unpredictable interaction of variables, we argue that progress in this area requires improvement in the theories and the methods employed. Future research needs to be centred on improving coding frameworks as well as developing systematic training protocols for coders. These technical advances would pave the way to improved task design and reduced development costs of assessments.

In the past 20 years, creativity has increasingly been recognised as an important aspect of young people's education around the world. The global interest in creativity is fuelled by various economic and social considerations. One concern of the approach to creativity in education is the curriculum. The research reported in this paper aimed at identifying the curriculum-level enablers and barriers to nurturing creativity in Hungarian public education by investigating the place of creativity, as well as that of creative pedagogy, in the Hungarian National Core Curriculum (HNCC) using content analysis. Findings revealed that creativity and the components of creative pedagogy were recurring elements of the HNCC. In Arts and Mathematics, the high importance of creativity was also supported by the strong presence of the elements of creative pedagogy. The barriers identified include the lack of clear and consistent definitions of creativity, the varied incidences of creativity and components of creative pedagogy, with extremely low attention to nurturing creativity in Foreign languages, Man and nature (science), and The Earth--our environment (geography). It has been concluded, therefore, that a more coherent and consistent approach to creativity across the HNCC is required.

Fidelity of curriculum implementation (FOI) is an important area of research because of the critical role it plays in understanding how and why curriculum materials work and how they can be improved. This analysis explores written features within the Math Trailblazers curriculum that may influence the ways teachers implement mathematics curriculum materials. In particular, we examine FOI data from prior research in order to identify features within the materials themselves that may influence why teachers adhere to the intended curriculum to varying degrees. This paper reports on our analysis of examining five whole number lessons previously analysed for level of FOI alongside an analysis scale of written curriculum features. Our purpose in this analysis is to examine features of the written curriculum that potentially mediate teachers' implementation of the materials in line with the intended curriculum. In doing so, our analysis further emphasises the critical role teachers play in curriculum implementation, and thus may provide some insight for curriculum developers as they consider ways in which to design the written curriculum that increase the likelihood that teachers will adhere to the intended curriculum.

Assessment for Learning practices with students such as feedback, and self- and peer assessment are opportunities for teachers and students to develop a shared understanding of how to create quality learning performances. Quality is often represented through achievement standards. This paper explores how primary school teachers in Australia used the process of annotating work samples to develop shared understanding of achievement standards during their curriculum planning phase, and how this understanding informed their teaching so that their students also developed this understanding. Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device is used to identify the ways teachers recontextualised their assessment knowledge into their pedagogic practices. Two researchers worked alongside seven primary school teachers in two schools over a year, gathering qualitative data through focus groups and interviews. Three general recontextualising approaches were identified in the case studies; recontextualising standards by reinterpreting the role of rubrics, recontextualising by replicating the annotation process with the students and recontextualising by reinterpreting practices with students. While each approach had strengths and limitations, all of the teachers concluded that annotating conversations in the planning phase enhanced their understanding, and informed their practices in helping students to understand expectations for quality.

Research has shown that how principles and tools related to Assessment for Learning (AfL) are taken up by teachers can significantly impact how assessment initiatives are realised. However, questions remain about how teachers develop new resources for use in local contexts, and what these processes entail. This article examines such processes in the context of teacher teams, using the notion of "knowledge work" to denote the creative and constructive work that teachers carry out when they work together upon AfL-related principles and tools. The analyses contribute to existing research by illuminating the micro-dynamics of teachers' work with assessment resources, and examining different forms of epistemic actions that constitute this process. In conclusion, the paper discusses how teacher collaboration may inform AfL initiatives in significant ways, and argues that teachers' constructive and collaborative knowledge work needs to be more fully recognised in the context of AfL initiatives.

The phrase "curriculum making" has recently been used to describe medium-term planning and teachers' enactment of such planning in the classroom. This narrows the term's initial use from that in the first half of the twentieth century when it was employed inclusively from national programmes to lesson planning. While considering related studies about curriculum making, this paper focuses on the interpretation described and used by the Geographical Association (GA) to encourage more open approaches to medium-term curriculum planning in England by teachers. It reports the outcomes of a small-scale study of primary teachers' perspectives on their experiences of curriculum making during one GA project, "The Young Geographers Project". It identifies a number of "curriculum dynamics", including teachers' feelings of liberation, children's agency in curriculum making, the importance of subject knowledge, engaging with children's everyday experiences and interests, and purposefulness for curriculum topics while retaining flexibility and openness. Reflecting on these findings, 10 features pertinent to curriculum making are noted.

Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers' professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused by such strategies; others warn that if outcomes are defined by mechanical techniques that are practised and imposed rather than constructed and negotiated then there is a danger that teachers will be re-shaped as technicians. A number of debates discuss de-professionalism, the erosion of status and new definitions of the role of the teacher. This ethnographic study examines how the implementation of policy requirements for writing student reports, stipulated by two levels of government, emerged through the practices of the teachers in an Australian non-government school. The analysis of the data is located within the policy in/as practice literature. The evidence illustrates that, despite the strategies of performance, accountability and control mechanisms in policy text, the presence of strong collegial relationships enabled the teachers to construct their professional agency by adaptation and adoption of policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others. (Contains 1 note.)

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

This is an era of significant government involvement in schools in England, despite consistent rhetoric from the Department of Education to the contrary. In such a period, signs can be detected of the juncture between a postmodern identity and post-professional status, two models of teacher professionalism supposed in Hargreaves’ work on the fourth age of professionalism. This paper focuses on the former as the nature of the contemporary context. Defining features of postmodernity are considered through a focus on the broad issue of teacher professionalism. For this paper, this is embodied by teachers’ involvement with the development of the Primary National Curriculum for England. Evidence will be drawn from just before its 1988 introduction until 2013 in order to critique several of the key tenets of postmodernity as identified by Hargreaves. This is of particular importance in a context where a strong defence is necessary to enable the sustainment, and growth, of teachers’ professional autonomy. This paper aims to propose some strategies teachers could enact in the face of postmodern challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two case studies of elementary school teachers in the Republic of Cyprus are constructed to discuss how curriculum making relates to teacher biographies and sense of professionalism, as those are shaped at the intersection of their professional history and projections for the future, informed by and informing their constitution as professionals in local institutional and broader social contexts. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency, the two cases are utilised to examine how teachers’ narrated professional experiences in past and current schools were at interplay with their general sense of professional role and purpose as teachers. This complex interplay is simultaneously connected to the ways they perceived and constituted their pupils as well as to the ways they themselves were constituted by others as professionals. The examination of the two cases foregrounds the notions of teacher agency and of curriculum making as contingent, negotiated and negotiable, and opens up the space to consider the politics of both as those are permeated by micro-processes of subjection and subjectivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fidelity of curriculum implementation (FOI) is an important area of research because of the critical role it plays in understanding how and why curriculum materials work and how they can be improved. This analysis explores written features within the Math Trailblazers curriculum that may influence the ways teachers implement mathematics curriculum materials. In particular, we examine FOI data from prior research in order to identify features within the materials themselves that may influence why teachers adhere to the intended curriculum to varying degrees. This paper reports on our analysis of examining five whole number lessons previously analysed for level of FOI alongside an analysis scale of written curriculum features. Our purpose in this analysis is to examine features of the written curriculum that potentially mediate teachers’ implementation of the materials in line with the intended curriculum. In doing so, our analysis further emphasises the critical role teachers play in curriculum implementation, and thus may provide some insight for curriculum developers as they consider ways in which to design the written curriculum that increase the likelihood that teachers will adhere to the intended curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2004, the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus has launched an educational reform. The Ministry highlighted Cyprus’ participation in the European context and, by extension, the turning-into-multicultural character of the Cypriot society as the most important reasons, which necessitated such a reform. This paper seeks to examine the perceived curriculum of intercultural education in Cyprus. To this end, we explore how the conceptual and theoretical framework of the ‘new’ national curriculum influences key stakeholders’ understandings of intercultural education. Do they share similar understandings? Do they use the same terminologies? How consistent is their knowledge with the contemporary literature on Intercultural Education? All these questions will help us establish an understanding about the next level of curriculum development – the implementation level – and illuminate their possible tacit assumptions concerning the role of the teachers in carrying out of the declared policy on Intercultural Education. Most importantly, we will discuss the tacit assumptions that come to light through their expressed perceptions, addressing not only to the practises but also the essence of the term intercultural education and its originating interest in terms of human agency. Within this context we will deliberate how a broadly accepted policy, namely intercultural educational policy, becomes a vehicle that can be used to control, interact with or empower people and in particular those delegated with its implementation-in our case the teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will investigate the place of language learning in the new Curriculum for Wales and the value of a multilingual approach and ethos. The article will begin by setting out the historical context for modern foreign language teaching in the United Kingdom. It will then discuss the context for language learning in Wales, focusing on the Welsh Government's Global Futures five‐year strategy for modern foreign languages (2015–2020). It will evaluate the success of this languages' strategy in addressing the attrition rates for modern foreign languages in Welsh schools. The article will then proceed to analyse the assumptions underpinning language learning in the Draft Curriculum for Wales 2022, as demonstrated in the Languages, Literacy and Communication Area of Learning and Experience (AoLE) which brings together Welsh, English and international languages. This article will argue that this reconfiguration offers a unique position from which to create a sustained partnership, working between historically separate language teaching and learning communities. Finally, this article will focus on a modern foreign language mentoring project as an example of a multilingual approach to language learning. Ultimately, this article will advocate for an ambitious rethinking of how we conceive, teach and value language learning for twenty‐first century Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This narrative inquiry of a lesson intended to develop perspective-taking links our understanding of teachers as curriculum makers with a sociomaterial attunement to the ways that materials, forms, and time are also actors in producing curriculum. We offer a close reading of three classroom enactments of the same lesson and discuss ways that these instances of curriculum-making expanded or diminished opportunities for elementary pupils to communicate shifts in perspective through personal narrative writing. We find temporal, spatial, and material resources, including schedules, technologies, and forms of assessment, to play key roles in shaping relations in curriculum making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The curriculum is the totality of experiences which are planned for young learners through their education, wherever they are being educated. It determines the ethos of the school as a learning community, curriculum subjects and areas, interdisciplinary learning, and opportunities to attain personal and learning goals. An effective curriculum, which meets the needs of the twenty-first century learner improves numeracy and literacy, promotes health and well-being, and supports the social and technical skills required for learning, life and work (lifelong learning). Relatively recent developments in the policy frameworks of numerous nations have seen the implementation of an interactive style of teaching and learning called formative assessment. Formative classroom assessment is a potentially powerful instructional process because the practice of sharing assessment information that supports learning is embedded into the instructional process by design. This article uses a range of sources, including policy and framework documentation relating to the development and implementation of a curriculum which drives interactive assessment practices designed to make evidence of learning visible as assessment data with potentially lifelong effects. The purpose of this article is to delineate a ‘formative curriculum’ designed to drive classroom practices that create responsible citizens, confident individuals, effective contributors, and successful learners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scotland's Assessment is for Learning initiative (AifL) seeks to introduce a co-ordinated national system for assessment in schools. Formative assessment is a major plank in this. The initiative has moved beyond its pilot phase and it is intended that it will be adopted by all Scottish schools by 2007. This article draws upon the case-study of a primary school that has adopted a whole-school approach to enacting the formative assessment principles of AifL since 2004. It utilizes Margaret Archer's social theory to analyse and explain the processes of change that have underpinned the development of formative assessment in the school. The article argues that meaningful change in schools can be stimulated by encouraging socio-cultural interaction among practitioners, via the impetus provided by a central initiative combined with the creation of spaces for dialogue and the extension of professional trust and autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]