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This paper explores the transfer, translation and recontextualisation of Laurence Stenhouse's work, as encapsulated in the 'teacher as researcher' metaphor, to the Greek language and in the fields of research and policy in Greece and Cyprus. We first briefly frame action research work as emerging through and within a specific space-time (and in conversation with others in North America, Australia and Europe). We then trace its translation from English to Greek in specific key publications in books and articles (including his 1975 seminal work "An introduction to curriculum research and development"), which have since been central to curriculum studies as an academic field in both countries. We then construct four vignettes as cases of different uses of the metaphor in different fields. The first two refer to the institutional context of a new type of school called 'second chance schools' and a state policy for the professional development of teachers in Greece. The other two refer to an initial teacher education university programme and to the most recent school curriculum change in the Republic of Cyprus. We conclude by discussing certain patterns of constriction across the four vignettes in the recontextualisation of the 'teacher as researcher' to particular aspects of the metaphor as it morphed in two rather centralised contexts with a strong historical presence of a formal, state-mandated curriculum and of teachers as public servants. Despite these patterns of constriction, we also note how other aspects of the metaphor provided conditions for some transformation.

Effective video resources are assumed to promote learner engagement, but the extent to which this occurs is unclear. This study examines learners' engagement with instructor-generated video. It contributes an analytical synthesis of qualitative and quantitative data that provides the basis for investigating the extent to which, and how, learners engage with video resources provided in their courses. Specifically, three dimensions of learner engagement with video are studied: behavioural, cognitive and affective. The study contributes to educational technology research by identifying distinctive patterns of learner control over the use of video which diverges from instructors' assumptions. It shows the complex and nuanced features of cognitive and affective engagement. Videos can have positive effects, but inappropriate use of technical features results in learner disengagement. This study contributes a novel use of signalling theory, suggesting the importance of instructor signals concerning relevance, focus and utility as a feature of video generation, as a prerequisite of cognitive engagement. A research and theory development agenda is developed, locating video-based learning in student contexts as a basis for explaining both engagement and disengagement with video technology affordances.

European Higher Education (HE) systems have been undergoing reforms for quality assurance and accreditation (QAA) in response to the Bologna process. Through the comparative exploration of the recontexualizations of European policy discourse on HE QAA in the Republic of Cyprus and Greece, we illustrate the differentially centralized and increased governmental control over the two HE sectors as well as emerging changes in the relations between HE institutions and the state in the two countries.

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 article focuses on exploring students' understanding of the concept of function concerning three main aspects: secondary students' ability to (1) define the concept of function and present examples of functions, (2) solve tasks which asked them to recognize and interpret the concept of function presented in different forms of representation, and (3) solve function problems. Confirmatory factor analysis verified 4 dimensions comprising the conceptual understanding of functions: definition, recognition, interpretation, and problem solving. Furthermore, the important role of the ability to define the concept on the rest abilities was revealed, leading to important didactic implications.

Against the background of a curriculum change in the Republic of Cyprus, this study focuses on teachers who volunteered to work along with academics and ministry officials in subject-area curriculum review committees to develop official curriculum texts. Teachers' participation in these committees was construed in official rhetoric as a means to acknowledge teacher/classroom expertise, and, by extension, to democratize the curriculum change process. Analysis of teacher interviews indicates, however, that this process was replete with negotiations among people with differentially valued knowledge and expertise: academic expertise, classroom experience and expertise, and a combination of those that produced a hybrid expert-subject. To unpack these negotiations and thus discuss the politics of teacher participation in collaborative partnerships, we utilize the Foucauldian notions of subjectivation, subjection, and resistance, and suggest that (1) teachers were constituted as subjects and were subjected to institutional(ized) power relations that produced and were produced by particular constructions of knowledge/expertise, and (2) teacher participation was further complicated by possibilities for resistance and openings for the destabilization of those institutionalized hierarchical relations. The latter points towards the ongoing politics of teacher participation in curriculum change and of professionalism as a "permanent provocation."

This paper explores the experiences of 14 early years educators who participated in a continuing professional development (CPD) programme coordinated by two of the paper's authors. The programme was part of a three-year research project, which aimed at introducing early childhood educators to an inquiry-based approach to mathematics and science education and involved participants as teacher-researchers and curriculum-makers in cycles of action research. From this CPD experience, teachers appeared to reconceptualize traditional teacher and researcher "roles" in more fluid and equitable ways, leading us to explore characteristics of the programme conducive to this shift. The main data source comprised teacher interviews, supplemented by video-recordings of group meetings, classroom enactment of activities and the facilitators' field notes. Findings suggest that the shift was encouraged by the gradual formation of a community of practice; a reconceptualization of the "practical"; and the epistemology-oriented approach adopted in mathematics and science education. The discussion highlights the implications of these findings for early years educators' professional development, and the problems of the "theory-practice" divide in such development. Furthermore, the discussion stresses the importance of the socio-cultural context in which such projects take place, particularly as these often draw heavily upon international literature.

The accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the European Union in 2004 was anticipated to be a "catalytic" factor in developments towards a solution of the Cyprus problem at the political level. Within education, it was also seen as an opportunity for addressing diversity in a historically ethnocentric educational system through the introduction of a European dimension. Against this background, this article explores Greek-Cypriot children's discourses about national others by drawing upon two sets of data collected in two studies of roughly seven years apart. Despite the different theoretical and methodological approaches of the two studies, and despite the temporal distance between them (almost three and a half years before and after Cyprus's EU accession respectively), the concept of "Europe" was mobilised by children in highly similar ways to distinguish, evaluate and hierarchise various others and to re-produce ethnic, racial, and Eurocentric stereotypes against national outgroups and their immigrant classmates from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

For the past few years, the Republic of Cyprus has been pursuing a major educational reform across all levels of mandatory education, focusing especially on curriculum change, for the implementation of which in-service teachers have undergone a series of professional development seminars. Individual and focus group interviews with in-service elementary teachers, regarding their sense of professionalism within this curriculum change process, revealed that teachers positioned themselves largely onto different points on a continuum. These are conceptualized as positions veering between teachers' sense of minimum and maximum autonomy over their participation in the development and introduction of the new official curriculum. Framed by a traditionally centralized context, these positions were discursively negotiated in contradictory ways which allowed multiple positionings by each teacher. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for understanding teacher professionalism and positioning, as well as for considering how this might relate to curriculum change and implementation processes.

This paper illustrates the application of existing guidelines to develop a test grounded in theoretical perspectives and empirical findings in the area of problem solving. By documenting this process, the paper outlines the challenges test developers face when seeking to construct a theory/research-driven test, discusses the decisions made at different junctures, and emphasizes that the findings from test administration need to be seen in perspective of those decisions. Moving beyond the guidelines proposed in the literature on test development, the paper also suggests that the results of test administration be linked to instruction and explores how instruction could have informed and might be informed by these findings. (Contains 7 tables and 3 figures.)

This article compares discourses on "Europe" in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula and textbooks over approximately the last twenty years, from the early 1990s, when Cyprus applied for European Union (EU) membership, until 2011-12, the school year during which the recently revised curricula were gradually introduced to schools for implementation. This period spans both before and after the accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the EU in 2004, the year when an educational reform was also launched. As this reform has been mainly materialised through curriculum review processes, and as "Europe" has been repeatedly invoked to legitimise and explain its necessity, it renders Cyprus a useful case study, within the "problematique" of this special issue, in terms of exploring the shaping and governing of a European education policy space via "European" curricula. Findings indicate distinct differences and continuities between the two periods; although "Europe" increasingly provides a framework to legitimise curricular innovation towards tolerance and respect for diversity, human rights and democracy, reconciliation and inclusion, it is not systematically addressed in curriculum texts in locally relevant ways to alleviate existing tensions between ethno-national and state identities which have historically fuelled inter-communal conflict and division in Cyprus. Moreover, the construction of citizens seems to increasingly draw from the knowledge economy paradigm and from discourses of efficiency and competitiveness, despite a parallel (and more publicised) agenda for social justice and inclusion in the recent curriculum review documentation. (Contains 6 notes.)

In this paper, we examine sixth grade students' degree of conceptualization of fractions. A specially developed test aimed to measure students' understanding of fractions along the three stages proposed by Sfard ("1991") was administered to 321 sixth grade students. The Rasch model was applied to specify the reliability of the test across the sample and cluster analysis to locate groups by facility level. The analysis revealed six such levels. The characteristics of each level were specified according to Sfard's framework and the results of the fraction test. Based on our findings, we draw implications for the learning and teaching of fractions and provide suggestions for future research. (Contains 4 tables and 7 figures.)

This study brings together two lines of research on teachers' affective responses toward mathematics curriculum reforms: their concerns and their efficacy beliefs. Using structural equation modeling to analyze data on 151 elementary mathematics teachers' concerns and efficacy beliefs 5 years into a mandated curriculum reform on problem solving, the study provides empirical support to a model integrating teachers' concerns and efficacy beliefs. This model suggests that teachers' concerns of preceding stages inform their concerns of succeeding stages; that teachers' efficacy beliefs about using the reform affect their task and impact concerns and are, in turn, informed by their self concerns; and that efficacy beliefs about employing pre-reform instructional approaches influence all types of teacher concerns. A qualitative analysis of data from 53 teacher logs provided additional insights into teachers' concerns about the reform. We discuss the policy and methodological implications of these findings and offer directions for future studies.

Scholars and teacher educators alike agree that teachers' beliefs and attitudes toward mathematics are key informants of teachers' instructional approaches. Therefore, it has become clear that, in addition to enriching preservice teachers' (PSTs) knowledge, teacher education programs should also create opportunities for prospective teachers to develop productive beliefs and attitudes toward teaching and learning mathematics. This study explored the effectiveness of a mathematics preparatory program based on the history of mathematics that aimed at enhancing PSTs' epistemological and efficacy beliefs and their attitudes toward mathematics. Using data from a questionnaire administered four times, the study traced the development of 94 PSTs' beliefs and attitudes over a period of 2 years. The analysis of these data showed changes in certain dimensions of the PSTs' beliefs and attitudes; however, other dimensions were found to change in the opposite direction to that expected. Differences were also found in the development of the PSTs' beliefs and attitudes according to their mathematical background. The data yielded from semi-structured follow-up interviews conducted with a convenience sample of PSTs largely corroborated the quantitative data and helped explain some of these changes. We discuss the effectiveness of the program considered herein and draw implications for the design of teacher education programs grounded in the history of mathematics.

Increasing European integration and European education policies are fuelling political and academic debates over the meaning of a "European identity" and a "European citizenship" and their potential relationship(s) to national and/or state identities. These debates are especially fraught in a case such as Cyprus, a case characterized by an intractable socio-political problem of ethnic conflict and war that stems from identity, citizenship, and the politics of recognition. Cyprus must respond to demands of revisiting citizenship and identity as a condition of EU membership and as a response to increasing international and internal pressure for resolving the existing division. This paper explores how European citizenship is constructed in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula, and textbooks for civic education, and how citizenship is positioned in relation to national and state identities. Although "Europe" provides a framework from which policy documents increasingly draw to introduce curricular innovation, European citizenship is not substantially addressed in the syllabi and textbooks analysed. Nationalistic discourses of citizenship "appropriate" "Europe" in ways which legitimize both ethno- and Euro-centrism and which fail to alleviate existing tensions between ethno-national and state identities in Cyprus. (Contains 1 table and 11 notes.)

Citizenship education has been the subject of growing attention in policy and academic circles over the past 20 years. Citizenship education curricula have typically focused on national institutions, issues, and ties. Citizenship education has been closely bound up with the legitimacy of the nation-state, and alternative institutions and citizenships thus present a significant challenge not only to the contents of national curricula, but also to the traditional purpose and assumptions of citizenship education. The articles in this special issue seek to explore how nation-states have responded to this challenge by exploring, from a comparative perspective, the ways in which one supra-national, regional citizenship (namely European citizenship) has been defined in the citizenship education curricula of states from across Europe. This Introduction describes the supra-national policy developments that have led European states to consider reforming their citizenship education curricula. (Contains 2 tables and 8 notes.)

This special issue of "JCS" has examined the changes and challenges facing citizenship education policy and curricula by way of case studies from Europe and beyond. It is indicated that European and/or global integration have had an impact on all of the citizenship curricula examined. However, it is also noted that each case conceptualizes supra-national citizenship and its relationship to national citizenship and other groups in differing ways. It is argued that these ways present issues of exclusion, as curricula often remain centred on the nation-state and use European citizenship as a means to exclude "non-Europeans". The article concludes by discussing the research implications of these findings within the context of discussions over supranational and cosmopolitan modes of creating, and educating for, citizenship. (Contains 5 notes.)