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This paper has its origins in the EU Comenius funded GeoCapabilities project. From its outset, the project developed and researched the notion of powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK) as an underlying principle of curriculum making in the context of secondary school geography teaching. The work, led from the UCL Institute of Education and involving school teachers, teacher educators and other stakeholders across eight mainly European jurisdictions, was framed by Young and Muller's 'three educational scenarios' (Young & Muller, "European Journal of Education," 45, 2010 and 11). The three futures heuristic is discussed as a means to distinguish qualities of curriculum thought. Future 3 scenarios, which posit teachers as curriculum makers with responsibility to engage in essential 'knowledge work', provide a principled platform on which to develop ambitious educational classroom encounters. Knowledge working with PDK and (as we go on to argue) other powerful ways of knowing the world, is seen as a bridge between social realist epistemological principles and practical classroom content selections. This opens the possibility of responding to Deng's ("Journal of Curriculum Studies," 54, 2022) call for developing practical theories of content with teachers. Although the authors are geographers in education drawing on different international perspectives and traditions, the paper addresses matters of interest applicable to a variety of specialist subject domains across the secondary school curriculum.

There are increasingly frequent calls for school mathematics curricula to be informed by robust research evidence. One approach to achieving this is designing evidence-informed learning and teaching resources for the classroom. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of designing a free and fully resourced complete set of secondary mathematics curriculum materials. We explore in detail the challenges we have encountered in our attempts to apply principles from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. We focus on tensions we have experienced when simultaneously applying multiple principles and balancing these with other educational considerations. Specifically, we consider trade-offs between redundancy versus clarity, seductive details versus richness, personalisation and emotional design versus abstraction, spatial contiguity and signalling versus parsimony, and pre-training and worked examples versus exploration. We examine the choices and dilemmas we faced, and illustrate our emerging attempts to resolve these tensions through presenting multiple examples from our design work. We conclude with recommendations about how tensions among these design principles might be navigated in curriculum design and we suggest possible avenues for further research in this area.

Teachers of English as an Additional Language learners in high schools have long navigated the seemingly intransigent deficit thinking about their learners' capacity to engage fully with the intended or required curriculum. These learners are frequently constructed as the problem, as if the curriculum exists in a vacuum. This gives rise to the need to explore how deficit thinking about students, as core actors in the web of curriculum relations, may be challenged through the curriculum work of specialist English language teachers. In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to explore how the pervasive deficit discourse can be differently construed through language use in two dimensions: power (social hierarchy or low-high) and solidarity (social distance, close-far). Three teachers were interviewed, and their lessons were observed to explore how social relations with diverse learners are rendered in the teachers' language. Findings show that by adopting a more nuanced stance towards their learners, many of whom are refugee-background and have interrupted schooling, the teachers speak back to deficit views, offering alternative ways of positioning diverse learners in relation to required curriculum. Images of curriculum as transmission are disrupted, presenting it rather as complex entanglement with social relations.

Across the world, countries have engaged in different iterations of curriculum change, and one of the common denominators of reform is the proposal of more agency for teachers around curriculum making. This is not an easy task for teachers. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the effects that international ERASMUS+ mobilities have had on the power of curricular agency of teachers from two European countries. This work is based on an empirical investigation of a qualitative nature which collected the testimonies of four school headmasters, a deputy principal and eleven teachers from Ireland and Portugal, teaching different curriculum matters, who were involved in the ERASMUS+ programme. Our findings evidence a very positive impact on secondary teachers' capacity to self-organize and achieve agency in relation to curriculum making by adapting their knowledge and skills, learnt through the mobility, to their own culture and context through collaborative communities of practice.

The Transition Year (TY) programme is an optional, one-year, stand-alone, full-time programme offered in 75% of second-level schools in the Republic of Ireland. Aimed at those in the 15-16 age group, TY has a strong focus on personal and social development and on education for active citizenship. The implementation of TY in schools is seen as a case study in curriculum innovation. Evidence from the programme's history and development, from studies of attitudes to TY in six schools and among policy shapers, suggests ambiguous views among stakeholders towards the programme. Enthusiasm for aspects of the innovation is accompanied by resistance to its more challenging features. Schools' responses to the programme are examined from a range of perspectives. (Contains 9 notes.)

This paper reports on research that explored the experiences of secondary Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) professionals' simultaneous negotiation and implementation of the new Curriculum for Wales (CfW) Health and Well-Being (HWB) Area of Learning and Experience (AoLE) and policies focused on the transformation of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Wales. The study was an exploratory case study of PETE professionals working within one university's ITE programme. Data were generated through documentary analysis of PETE and ITE programme materials and semi-structured interviews with staff involved in programme management and delivery. Data analysis employed Ball and colleagues' conceptualisation of policy actors and contexts to critically examine the varied policy positions that PETE professionals adopt in navigating and negotiating enactment of the HWB AoLE within their ITE provision. Attention is drawn to the significance of historical and culturally situated dimensions of secondary physical education and PETE in Wales, and significant changes to the professional culture of ITE, in shaping PETE educators' engagement with the HWB AoLE. The paper concludes by contending that ITE institutions in Wales need to further consider how PETE (and other) educators can be actively supported to engage in sophisticated policy work within their institutions and across policy and professional networks.

This paper analyses the opportunities for presenting knowledge that are created when assessment allows senior high school biology students to draw on linguistic and visual resources when constructing meaning in response to short-answer examination-style questions requiring a sequential explanation. Students within one senior high school biology class were given the opportunity to respond to an examination-style question through both written and visual representations. Analysis of the student responses for high and middle-achieving students, from a systemic functional linguistics perspective, indicates that high-achieving students use a broader range of grammatical forms more often than middle-achieving students to present key understandings of classification and composition within both written and visual representations. Including opportunities within assessment for students to express knowledge through written and visual representations allows for students to elaborate within their short-answer responses and to construct the broader range of representations that is valued within the discipline, but explicit guidance is required to support all students to make use of the complex grammatical patterns within written and visual representation. For senior high school biology students to be successful in the final stages of schooling, explicitness about the complex grammars of visual and written representations is required within curriculum and pedagogy.

This paper explores Indonesian secondary school teachers' conceptions of assessment in the context of assessment reform. Teachers working at different school level were interviewed both individually and in groups and their responses were analysed using the content analysis approach. Detailed examination of teachers' assessment propositions revealed that their perspectives about assessment embrace values, purposes, and understanding, and are marked by conceptions about the learner agency, accountability and improvement orientations. However, despite being considered important, the learner agency and accountability conceptions were often considered irrelevant. In addition, teachers reported tension with regard to their perceptions towards the reform and demonstrated a varied level of conceptual and practical understanding of the reform. The paper ends with a discussion of the complex nature of and tensions in the teachers' conceptions of assessment. Principal implications are discussed.

The last 30 years have witnessed a global 'curricular turn', with curricula increasingly moving from specifying particular content to specifying broad, skill-based 'learning objectives'. This paper explores the implications of this curricular turn through a critical assessment of the current state of secondary school English in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is achieved through a critical discourse analysis of key curricular and assessment documents and a series of semi-structured interviews with English teachers. Biesta's concept of 'learnification', which captures how contemporary schooling can focus on learning in a way which can obscure important questions of what students are learning and why, is used as a lens through which to analyse this data. The paper argues that secondary school English in New Zealand is highly 'learnified', that is, both official documents and teachers are concerned above all else with ensuring 'learning' is happening and 'learning objectives' are being met, rather than with bigger questions of purpose. This problematically decreases the opportunity for what Biesta calls a 'pedagogy of interruption': the opportunity for curricular encounters to challenge and extend students' horizons.

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theorising (particularly habitus and field) to think about position-making of teachers in respect of the early enactment of the Australian Curriculum. Position-making, a concept developed from the analysis proffered, can be contrasted with the more common practice of position-taking endemic in a relatively stable field. Position-making is an ongoing phenomenon in a changing field when the habitus is out of place, here the field of the new Australian Curriculum, creating the effect of what Bourdieu sees as hysteresis. This paper explores the positioning and re-positioning of agents (teachers and school leaders) due to an external change (the Australian curriculum) in the schooling field. Data for this study were collected from a middle-class state high school in Brisbane Australia, which was an early adopter of the new Australian Curriculum. The initial enactment phase of curriculum change was an unsettling one that (re)positioned agents--hence, the concept of position-making, which is a contribution to Bourdieu's theoretical resources and which complements the idea of policy enactment as opposed to policy implementation. Both allow some agency in mediation of mandated changes in the specific contexts of schools and teacher/leader habitus.

Drawing on the concept of agency and teacher agency and engaging with figurational sociology, this paper explores the extent to which teacher agency plays a role in one teacher's enactment of a new school subject (Leaving Certificate Physical Education (LCPE), an examinable subject assessed in a high-stakes environment) in a period of curriculum change and reform in Irish post-primary schools. Through a case study design, one teacher was interviewed regularly (19 times) during their 1st year of teaching LCPE. The findings are presented in three teaching episodes. In analysing the three teaching episodes, the process (and fluctuation) of achieving agency is evident. The achievement of agency should not be conceptualised as a product (achieved) but rather, it should be viewed as something that is processual (achieving). We offer a figurational viewpoint of teacher agency through a constructed Figure in the paper. We argue that it is impossible to link the achievement of agency with one element (including the teacher). It is the combination of interdependent relationships (past and present, recognised and unrecognised) in a teacher's figuration, the overarching social processes, and the contextual and structural factors surrounding and within a figuration. The paper provides considerations in how best to support teachers in their process of achieving agency.

This paper explores the rationales underpinning the introduction of Computer Science (CS) into school curricula and examines the ways in which educational systems have responded to these growing calls. In outlining the possible ways that educational systems can respond to this demand, the paper makes use of a conceptual framework through which the various possibilities for the provision of CS in school curricula can be categorised. The paper analyses and discusses possible modes of provision identifying the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches. Through this development, the paper aims to raise wider questions about the long-term and draws particular attention to the need for greater consideration of provision at lower secondary level.

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.

Whether a broad undergraduate curriculum prepares students well for academic and professional specialization is a much-debated question. This discussion is particularly relevant in the context of European liberal arts bachelor's programmes, which recently re-emerged as an exception to the continental norm of specialized undergraduate curricula. While liberal arts proponents contend that the broad foundation of knowledge and generic skills provided by this educational model facilitate specialization rather than hindering it, critics point to the relative lack of disciplinary depth. To investigate this problem, the paper looks at three specialized master's programmes at Maastricht University--in international business, psychology, and neuroscience. It compares the academic performance of two groups of students in these programmes: graduates from University College Maastricht, a liberal arts institution, and their peers with discipline-focused bachelor's degrees in a matching field. Results from probit and OLS regression models show that there are no major differences between the two groups in terms of dropout rates, GPA, and master's thesis grades. Despite having less subject-specific knowledge, university college graduates proved to be prepared equally well for specialized master's studies as their counterparts with a matching disciplinary background. These findings suggest that an undergraduate curriculum that offers more breadth and flexibility does not represent an obstacle to further specialization.

This paper aims to analyse the concepts of scientific literacy and agency in two official documents of the Chilean science curriculum. We used Fairclough's three dimensional model as critical lenses, based on critical discourse analysis, where every discursive event can be analysed: (1) as a text; (2) as a discursive practice; and (3) as a social practice. The research questions were: 'How are the different visions of scientific literacy operating and being promoted within the Chilean science curriculum?' and 'How is student and teacher agency declared in those documents?' By understanding the curriculum as a dialectical process, as a social event between planning, executing, and evaluating education, we evidence tensions among different visions and paradigms for both concepts (scientific literacy and agency), specifically, in the transition from one cycle to another in secondary education. The first document has a predominantly neoliberal approach to scientific literacy and the second one presents a focus on citizenship, democracy, and social justice. As a social practice, in both documents, teachers appear under the idea of curriculum implementers, to a certain extent, based on a banking model where teachers are containers to receive someone else's curriculum expertise. The preceding imbalance raises potential tensions based on teacher performance and on student agency. Specifically, students must transition from a passive role and then consider themselves as active subjects who question how to produce knowledge, understanding their role within environmental conflicts within current socio-political structures for instance.

This paper presents an argument for aesthetic knowledge in the arts and more specifically, for an aesthetic model of literature to be central in the curriculum. I argue that there are important distinctions to be made between the everyday experiences unique to us as individuals, and the universality of human experience. In the English Literature curriculum, this important difference is manifested in the status of the text because it is through a triadic engagement between educator, text and pupil that the meanings of experience can be evoked objectively. Through changing cultural and policy contexts in the post-war period, the text has been marginalised in the curriculum. This has contributed to two detrimental effects. The first is that direct personal responses and experience have been overvalued in the English Literature curriculum. The second is that the idea of objective knowledge in literature has been misconstrued as knowledge of its linguistic substratum. Consequently, an important form of aesthetic knowledge is largely absent in Britain's secondary curriculum. The paper is organized into three sections. Section one describes main shifts in the cultural and policy contexts. Section two provides a brief empirical example of how shifts at the macro-level have been re-contextualised within the implied curriculum found in examples of national exams. Section three elucidates the deeper significance of these changes in light of a theoretical discussion of Kantian aesthetics and implications for a social realist approach to knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy derived from Durkheim.

This paper explores the question of what is powerful knowledge in school history, drawing on an analysis of secondary school history curriculum documents from South Africa and Rwanda. The paper engages with how these official curricula make selections regarding history topics, and how conceptual relationships are structured, and then interrogates to what extent the curricula might give learners access to powerful historical knowledge. The post-apartheid South African history curriculum chose a disciplinary focus, which aims for learners to develop the skills to analyse historical sources and evidence and to recognise that there are different interpretations of particular events. In contrast, the Rwandan history curriculum takes a collective, memory-history approach which does not focus on historical enquiry and has a strong focus on nation-building and citizenship. I engage with the implications of what this means for the idea of powerful knowledge in school history and argue that the socialisation aspect of school history cannot be ignored.

Debates over which historical content should be compulsory for study in the school curriculum are a common feature of education systems across the globe. These debates invariably weigh the perceived benefits to social cohesion of a 'common core' of knowledge against the perceived risks to democracy of government-sanctioned 'official knowledge'. Scotland has, perhaps, taken an extreme position on this debate by specifying no mandatory historical content in its social studies curriculum. This paper uses 21 interviews with Scottish history teachers to explore how schools use this curricular autonomy: which historical periods they choose to teach and why. The paper suggests that, without access to theoretical debates about the nature of historical knowledge, schools fall back on instrumental justifications for content selection within the curriculum. The result in many cases is an extremely narrow and fragmented syllabus in which pupil preference, teacher interests and the logistics of timetabling guide content selection. The paper concludes that the formulation of coherent school-level history curricula is dependent on the fostering agency among a theoretically-informed teaching profession.

This paper makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates over the direction curriculum reforms should take. It challenges claims that progressive pedagogies can exclude disadvantaged learners from gaining access to powerful knowledge and argues that greater attention needs to be given to learner agency and subject didactics. It reports on the findings from the Visible Maths Pedagogy research project, which aimed to develop and evaluate strategies for making progressive pedagogies more visible to mathematics learners. Evidence collected from student surveys and interviews suggests that these novel strategies were successful in heightening students' appreciation of the teacher's pedagogic rationale for employing progressive teaching approaches. They appeared to have a positive impact on students' mathematical engagement and awareness of how to achieve success in the secondary school mathematics classroom, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The findings highlight the potential of progressive pedagogies made visible for establishing an alternative didactic situation based on socio-mathematical norms associated with 'sense making', rather than 'answer getting', which can help develop students' individual and collective agency. We argue that such a didactic situation offers a pathway towards a more equitable mathematics curriculum that enables wider access to powerful knowledge, and which forms an integral part of a school curriculum designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges currently faced by our global society.

In this paper, we identify patterns of subject and qualification choices made at age 14. Much of the previous research on 'subject choice' has focussed on the later stages of educational trajectories, particularly Higher Education. However, the choices made at early branching points can limit pupils' subsequent options, potentially contributing to educational inequalities. This paper identifies the patterns of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects chosen by a cohort of young people born in 1989/1990. We make use of the Next Steps data (formerly the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)) which is linked to the National Pupil Database. We develop an approach to measuring the academic selectivity of subjects and qualifications. We examine the roles of social class, parental education, income, gender and ethnicity in determining participation in these curriculum groupings. Using measures of prior attainment from age thirteen, we address the question of whether curriculum differentials simply reflect differences in prior attainment or whether they actually operate above and beyond existing inequalities. We find clear socio-economic, gender, ethnic and school-level differences in subjects studied which cannot be accounted for by prior attainment.

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.

Recent 'decolonising the curriculum' movements have called for Higher Education to rethink how it engages with diversity and colonialism in its lectures and syllabi. But what can these ideas mean for science subjects in secondary schools? Grounded on a decolonial perspective around the Science and Technology Studies (STS) field, this paper explores the implications from decolonial perspectives for school science by addressing the following questions: how can science teachers decolonise mainstream science curricula such as the National Curriculum in England with inputs from the STS field? And, what can this endeavour bring to the teaching and learning of science? To support this investigation, a collaborative curriculum development endeavour with a science teacher at a comprehensive school in London/UK is explored. This experience involved planning and teaching four science topics from the National Curriculum in England to a year 8 classroom (students aged 12-13) and a qualitative investigation was carried out through interviews, observations and informal conversations over the school year. Findings reveal that rather than competing for space in an already overcrowded curriculum, decolonial ideas can help teachers to enrich and better integrate different science topics, while also addressing contemporary concerns about critical thinking and representativeness in (science) education.

There is a growing agreement among the academic community, in schools and among researchers, concerning the advantages of formative assessment and the limitations of large-scale assessment. In this paper, the school-based assessment reform of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) popularly known in India as continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) is studied in the context of the curriculum policy outlined by the National Focus Group (NFG) on Examination Reforms and the National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF 2005). The necessity, importance and scope of CCE have been a matter of debate among stakeholders. This paper focuses on how curriculum planners have conceived of school-based assessment and how it is implemented by CBSE. Though CBSE makes extensive reference to NCF 2005 in its manual, its scheme of CCE contradicts with the philosophy of that framework. At the same time, CBSE's CCE is more in alignment with the position of the NFG, which formed the basis for NCF 2005 on students' assessment. The author considers that these conceptual differences in policy and implementation framework have created confusion. Furthermore, decentralised decision-making on assessment, less rigid recording and reporting procedures, flexible timeframes, and continuous engagement with teachers are necessary for effective implementation of CCE.

This paper examines whether Hong Kong teachers and students perceived Liberal Studies and its ongoing curriculum review as politically driven during and after the Umbrella Movement, a large-scale civil disobedience campaign that took place in September 2014. The findings presented herein show that both groups disagreed with the claim that Liberal Studies was used as a political instrument to instigate students' participation in the protest movement. Moreover, they also reveal that teachers have maintained their neutrality towards controversial issues related to politics during Liberal Studies lessons. Whilst the participating teachers and students considered the government's proposed reform of Liberal Studies to be politically motivated, they held differing attitudes towards the addition of more China-related elements to the subject. On the basis of these results, this paper analyses the potential role of Liberal Studies in the democratisation of local society. It also provides an indication of the curriculum's dynamic nature, explanation of students' resistance to the review policy and suggestions for the subject's future development.

Research in teacher education repeatedly suggests that the background and underlying beliefs held by pre-service teachers about teaching and assessment act to shape their interpretations of ideas, powerfully influencing their praxis and their developing teacher identity. This paper explores how a young New Zealand secondary science teacher, raised and educated in Maori-medium and then English-medium New Zealand schools, develops his identity as a teacher as he navigates a range of educational contexts and experiences. His views on assessment provide a focus. The paper presents a case study drawn from a two-year longitudinal study, comprising a series of interviews with the teacher, as he transitioned from a university graduate to a qualified science teacher working in his first school. The complexity of teacher identity development is highlighted, particularly for teachers for whom cultural identity and indigenous world view is important. It suggests that beginning teachers need more time in their pre-service teacher education to reflect on the influence their formative educational experiences have on who they are becoming as a teacher.

This paper presents findings on physical education (PE) trainees' and teachers' attempts to design and implement authentic curricular experiences, within the constraints of a neoliberalist context. It involved adopting a principle-based approach to promoting active lifestyles designed to align PE trainees' and teachers' health-related philosophies and pedagogies. The promoting active lifestyles (PAL) project was framed by social cognitive theory and the social ecological model and adopted a qualitative explanatory case study approach. Participants were secondary school PE trainees and teachers involved in a University-based Initial Teacher Education partnership in the East Midlands in England. The 32 participants were involved in professional development which included co-constructing and implementing PAL principles in the schools in which they were employed or undertaking their placement. All participants viewed the PAL principles positively and were able to implement at least some of them. Participants experienced unanticipated benefits beyond increased physical activity such as improved pupil behaviour. Many participants described transformative and enduring changes to their health-related philosophies and pedagogies. This low cost, flexible principle-based approach to pedagogical change addresses calls for evidence-based PE-for-health pedagogies and the development of possibilities that acknowledge the complexity of supporting physical educators to become more effective promoters of physical activity.

This paper reports on research conducted as part of the International Instructional System Study that explored five subject areas across nine jurisdictions in six high-performing countries. The Study's overall aim was to understand what, if anything, there is in common in the curricula and assessment arrangements among the high-performing jurisdictions to see if there are aspects of instructional system design that might account, in part, for high performance. This paper focuses on social studies which in most jurisdictions includes elements of history, geography and citizenship and highlights a number of emerging issues. These include the advantages and disadvantages of teaching history and geography separately or within a social studies programme; the extent to which key concepts are embedded within the social studies/history/geography curricula; whether the level of demand should be considered in terms of a generic taxonomy or in terms of subject specific models; how progression might be defined and considerations of an appropriate balance between teacher assessment and external assessment.

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 school's focus is on developing the dispositions and competencies of students through thematic, intersubject, inquiry-based learning. While these twenty-first-century ideas appear widely accepted worldwide, there is little research on the impact of these ideas on student learning. This study considers the challenges faced by the school in moving from aspirational vision to curriculum enactment during its first 18 months of operation. The focus of this paper is the curriculum design and development process. The issues faced by staff in this twenty-first-century school will be of interest to educationalists worldwide who are involved with the planning of new schools and curricular innovation within existing schools. Four key questions that arise from the study and that will form the focus of future research are identified.

In a time of strong focus on school development, teachers' work is increasingly linked to a variety of actors, organisations and stakeholders with different agendas and suggestions for school improvements. This paper explores the different actor constellations that teachers engage with in collaborative knowledge work and the opportunities and constraints such engagements entail. By drawing on ethnographic methods, teams of teachers from one lower secondary school in Norway assigned to developing a local curriculum were followed closely across sites over a year. The analysis, which employs resources from assemblage thinking (AT), shows how new actor constellations spatially relocate teachers' work in ways that extend their professional roles and responsibilities. The findings also reveal that such work is epistemically demanding because it requires comprehensive collective negotiations and investigative activities from the teachers. The analysis foregrounds insights that contribute to our understanding of changing conditions for knowledge work in the teaching profession.

Throughout the past 40 years, a number of terms have been used in the UK to refer to competency-based pedagogies that focus on preparing students for everyday 'life' and employment. The evolution of these generic forms of knowledge in official curricula has been accompanied by harsh practical realities when it comes to teaching, assessing and certifying them. These practical realities counterbalance the strong support "genericskillism" enjoys in policy discourses that centre on employability and universalism in upper-secondary education. By drawing upon Bernstein's sociological insights and data collected and analysed as part of a study that sought to examine the compulsory integration of Communication and Application of Number into the Welsh Baccalaureate Advanced Diploma (legacy qualification), this paper offers new empirical observations into the persistent peculiarities and challenges of teaching and assessing generic forms of pedagogised knowledge. The discussion takes into consideration practical and policy dimensions that extend beyond individual education sites in Wales and are also relevant to the 2017 review of the new Essential Skills Wales qualifications, ongoing developments following the 2018 review of the Welsh Baccalaureate Skills Challenge Certificate, and the Council of the EU 2018 Recommendation of Key Competences for Lifelong Learning.

This paper reports teacher and learner perspectives on how assessment and reform influences pedagogical practices and behaviours. The research was conducted in a context of policy reform, at a time when Wales' revised General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) specifications had been implemented, and learners were preparing for their assessments; but, also during the period of debate on the development of Wales' new curriculum, which has taken a distinct and contrasting position on assessment to the assumptions underlying the reform of Welsh GCSEs implemented from 2015. These data, therefore, offer unique insights into the affordances and limitations of two sharply contrasting systems at a time of considerable change, offering reflections on the current curriculum and its attendant assessment practices, and also a prospective analysis of how the principles embedded in the new curriculum could challenge these existing assumptions and conventions. Findings suggest that teachers and learners currently inhabit an assessment-driven system, which encourages performative practices in pedagogy and is governed by external accountability; and that these practices are at odds with the principles of assessment articulated in "Successful Futures." Consequently, teachers in this study expressed uncertainty about how assessment for certification purposes at GCSE could be compatible with the principles of the Curriculum for Wales.

Teacher autonomy and teacher agency are positively related to teachers' motivation and engagement in teaching. This paper combines the concepts of teacher autonomy and teacher agency to study how Brazilian and Norwegian lower secondary teachers respond to an accountability system marked by a centralised outcomes-based curriculum and testing. Teacher autonomy concerns the relations between teachers' scope of action and the state's role in providing resources and regulations that extend or constrain this scope of action. Teacher agency refers to teachers' professional action based on their perceptions and experiences of their scope of action as they navigate accountability to respond to educational dilemmas at hand. The findings show that teachers navigate policies in a variety of forms to fit their needs and beliefs and those of their students. Brazilian teachers have a constrained scope of action and possibilities for achieving agency in comparison with their Norwegian counterparts. Norwegian teachers also have their individual autonomy constrained by extended state control over the curriculum and testing. However, the practice of collective work opens up for the exercise of agency because of the possibility of reflection and collective construction of teaching plans and strategies that frame and legitimise teaching work.

Evidence from an ethnographic study of three secondary school geography departments in England is drawn on to describe aspects of the relationships between examination boards and school subjects. This paper focuses on one department, in "Town Comprehensive", and the argument is illustrated through a discussion of observed lessons with a teacher in this department. Ofqual (Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) have recently announced that examination boards may continue to endorse commercially available teaching resources. The argument presented in this paper extends possible areas of "risk" identified beyond those they currently consider. Specifically, it is argued that chief examiners play multiple roles in the recontextualisation of knowledge, holding substantial power over school subjects. The strong role of accreditation as a rationale is argued to restrict knowledge taught in school geography to horizontal discourses, limiting students' access to powerful knowledge.

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.

In England, pupils aged 16 take the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for a range of subjects. The current assessment models for GCSE include a two-tier structure for some subjects and a non-tier model for the others. The tiered subjects have a higher tier designed for high achieving pupils and a lower tier for low achieving pupils. The higher tier paper is targeted at grades A*-D (with A* the highest grade available), while the lower tier paper at grades C-G (with G the lowest grade). The UK government has proposed a comprehensive reform of GCSEs. It suggested that, with tiered papers, pupils are forced to choose between higher and lower tier papers, which will place a cap on the ambition of those entering for the lower tier. The government therefore suggests avoiding tiering in the reformed GCSEs when possible. This paper discusses the technical and equity issues with the use of tiered examinations in current GCSEs and reviews potential alternative assessment approaches for effective differentiation between pupils for the reformed GCSEs.

Recent public discussions of curriculum and pedagogy that have accompanied the English National Curriculum review have been structured around clichéd dichotomies that generate more heat than light and that, as Robin Alexander has argued, reduce complex educational debates to oppositional and incompatible slogans. This paper begins by exploring the ways in which these dichotomies have structured recent debates and goes on to critically explore arguments in two contemporary debates, in the fields of history education and music education, assessing how these debates have been framed and the extent to which the debates can be considered fruitful and progressive. In the first case, we seek to show, through a discussion of "knowledge" and "skill" in history, that bipolar thinking is both inadequate and dysfunctional in relation to the matters under discussion. A third term--disciplinary understanding--is advocated and explored. In the second case, we demonstrate that dichotomous thinking about formal and informal music education has generated a debate that has become more sophisticated as various authors have problematised and critiqued informal learning. Analysis of these debates suggests that dichotomous thinking is pernicious when dichotomies are used only as slogans, although dichotomies can be generative when they are used as starting points to open discussion, not to close it. The paper suggests that the difference between the debates might be explained by the varying degrees of political involvement in them.

The question of where to locate teaching about the relationships between science and religion has produced a long-running debate. Currently, science and religious education (RE) are statutory subjects in England and are taught in secondary schools by different teachers. This paper reports on an interview study in which 16 teachers gave their perceptions of their roles and responsibilities when teaching topics that bridge science and religion and the extent to which they collaborated with teachers in the other subject areas. We found that in this sample, teachers reported very little collaboration between the curriculum areas. Although the science curriculum makes no mention of religion, all the science teachers said that their approaches to such topics were affected by their recognition that some pupils held religious beliefs. All the RE teachers reported struggling to ensure students know of a range of views about how science and religion relate. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for curriculum design and teacher training.

There is debate internationally about the production of curriculum texts and the epistemologies underpinning the knowledge legitimated in national curricula. National History curricula in particular are a source of contention bounded by calls for coherent and unifying national narratives that are inclusive and reflect the complexity of the discipline and historical consciousness of the nation to which they are bound. This paper uses critical spatial theory to highlight the 'spaces' and 'places' of the Australian Curriculum History (years 7-10) which organise and disorganise representations of identities in and out of the centre of the national narrative. Interrogating the impact of these representations within purported inclusive and cohesive national narratives draws attention to the notions of belonging presented to Australian citizens. We argue that resistance to normative national narratives and colonial legacies presented with place-based identities can reinhabit the curriculum. This reinhabiting and decentring seeks to engage History students with alternative perspectives and articulations to the national narrative, and foster meaningful connections to place and citizenship. Finally, critical place-based education approaches invite an embodied local/global citizen through local and marginalised knowledges.

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on 'good teaching' in this area. If 'literary studies' (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education.

This paper draws on doctoral research exploring the lived experiences of secondary school students during their first year of A-level study, through the theoretical lens of the Threshold Concept Framework. A longitudinal design frame based on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is employed, thus providing an original use of this methodology in education research to address the paucity of inquiry exploring the difficulties experienced by students as they transition from the General Certificate in Secondary Education (GCSE) to A-level. In this context, I argue that students' encounters with threshold concepts (TCs) are significant for them, posing a degree of cognitive and affective challenge which serves to exacerbate the difficulty of transition already caused by increased workload and pressure. The findings offer insights into students' struggles adjusting to shifting identity and membership of communities further intensified by the integrative, discursive and transformative nature of TC acquisition. The longitudinal research design also surfaces positive aspects of growing awareness of the integrative power of TCs. Recommendations are made for further research involving students, teachers and academics to explore TCs in a range of other subjects and settings in secondary schools in the context of recent and significant changes to GCSE and A-level curricula.

This paper explores the possibilities of using a pedagogical model for working with adolescent girls in physical education as a means of balancing the challenge of external prescription from outside the school with teacher and pupil agency. We report data from a study involving four schools in Glasgow. We note that the national curriculum for Scotland, Curriculum for Excellence, is a broad and bold type that provides teachers with 'spaces for manoeuvre' in order to shape local curricula that best meet the needs and interests of girls. This is particularly the case in physical education, which in the Basic General Education phase for 12-15 years olds there is no well-established assessment regime. We identify four spaces for manoeuvre for teachers and pupils within an activist model: new forms of communication based on authorising pupil voice; offering choices and opening up learning possibilities; the co-construction of a safe class environment; opportunities to rethink traditional structures based on the multi-activity curriculum form. We conclude that an activist pedagogical model provided teachers and pupils with spaces to explore alternative practices to traditional forms of physical education.

Fieldwork has always been an important component in the teaching of ecology in England's secondary schools where it has been delivered almost exclusively as part of the biology curriculum for nearly 70 years. However, historical evidence shows that both the quantity and quality of ecology fieldwork has been declining in recent decades at a time when the scope, complexity and interdisciplinarity of ecological science has been growing. This paper presents evidence of a continuing decline in ecology fieldwork over the past 15 years, discusses some possible causes and reviews solutions to reverse the trend. In particular, it argues that teaching scientific ecology through geography fieldwork could overcome several of the fundamental obstacles encountered in biology education. Trends in biology and geography fieldwork are compared. These show that the risks to ecology in forging a strong relationship, and increased dependency, with geography teaching are likely to be outweighed by reciprocal benefits.

This paper examines Young and Muller's elaboration of Michael Young's concept of powerful knowledge and considers music's alignment with the characteristics theorised as distinguishing this type of knowledge. Consideration of the concept in relation to music may be timely as music teachers continue to grapple with the problem of knowing what knowledge to include within the parameters of a school curriculum. The concept of powerful knowledge may provide us with a fresh way of considering what school music may have to offer in such a noisy and musically heterogeneous world. This curricular challenge, however, is by no means unique to music, even though it may be exacerbated in music which is so open to the forces of cultural change. I argue that access to this knowledge occurs by placing abstract concepts at the centre of curriculum conception as the means to mediate the space between everyday knowledge and the more vertical discourse of school knowledge. It is in this "academic" space that students can come to understand and utilise music as a form of powerful knowledge, when epistemic understanding illuminates the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of musical experiences.

Teachers' attitudes and beliefs about students in a particular grouping hierarchy are shaped by their ideological views. Within education systems that have high international profiles, such as Singapore, what has been less explored is how teachers think about and interact with students who are seemingly positioned as being "low-ability" or "low achieving" within disadvantaged education contexts. This paper accordingly examines teachers' perceptions of "Normal Technical" students in Singapore. The findings underscore the need to understand teachers' interpretations and thinking about teaching and learning processes that influence classroom practice. This is a necessary starting point for pedagogical innovation and change in schools.

In England, pupils aged 16 take the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for a range of subjects. The current assessment models for GCSE include a two-tier structure for some subjects and a non-tier model for the others. The tiered subjects have a higher tier designed for high achieving pupils and a lower tier for low achieving pupils. The higher tier paper is targeted at grades A*–D (with A* the highest grade available), while the lower tier paper at grades C–G (with G the lowest grade). The UK government has proposed a comprehensive reform of GCSEs. It suggested that, with tiered papers, pupils are forced to choose between higher and lower tier papers, which will place a cap on the ambition of those entering for the lower tier. The government therefore suggests avoiding tiering in the reformed GCSEs when possible. This paper discusses the technical and equity issues with the use of tiered examinations in current GCSEs and reviews potential alternative assessment approaches for effective differentiation between pupils for the reformed GCSEs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

A stream of debate (including a previous special issue of this journal [25(1) 2014)] has made claims not just for "bringing knowledge back in" as the framing underpinning of the school curriculum, but that subjects associated with disciplinary and disciplined knowledge forms have a particular power and that these characteristics are important to preserve in curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on a major Australian research project studying school and university physics in the context of these arguments to revisit the issue of the "discipline" of physics and the curriculum logics for physics. Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, can school curriculum be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Does a focus on disciplinary knowledge mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does? The findings from the project are used both to illustrate and test these questions, and to challenge some over-simple assumptions about the verticality of this form of knowledge for education purposes.

The New Zealand education system is recognised internationally for its overall high quality. At the same time, there is a persistent gap in achievement between students in low socio-economic status (SES) schools in which there is an over-representation of Maori and Pasifika students, and students in more affluent communities. In this paper, we present the findings of a study that explored the participation and achievement rates of secondary school students in selected literacy standards, and used classroom observations to record practices and resources used in literacy teaching. Our findings show the extent to which unequal opportunities to learn (OTLs) for Maori and Pasifika and other students from low SES communities exist at the systems level as well as at the level of classroom instructional offerings. We discuss the factors specific to the New Zealand curriculum and assessment systems that contribute to the current situation and suggest possible ways to achieve a more equitable outcome for all students.

A common claim about mathematics education is that it should equip students to use mathematics in the "real world". In this paper, we examine how relationships between mathematics education and the real world are materialised in the curriculum across a sample of eleven jurisdictions. In particular, we address the orientation of the curriculum towards application of mathematics, the ways that real-world contexts are positioned within the curriculum content, the ways in which different groups of students are expected to engage with real-world contexts, and the extent to which high-stakes assessments include real-world problem solving. The analysis reveals variation across jurisdictions and some lack of coherence between official orientations towards use of mathematics in the real world and the ways that this is materialised in the organisation of the content for students.