Conference Agenda

Introduction, research question, and theoretical framework

To meet the future needs for educated teachers it is essential that newly qualified teachers (NQTs) start and remain in their profession. Since 2017 teacher education in Norway for primary and secondary school has been reformed to a master’s degree, and NQTs graduate with both a specialization in three to four subjects, and a research and development competence (R&D). This change has created both an opportunity and a need to analyze how to support, apply and develop NQTs competence as they transition from students to working life. All the Nordic countries—including Estonia and except for Denmark—offer a five-year master’s level teacher education, consequently, the ambitions and results of this paper reach beyond the borders of Norway.

Regarding support of NQTs, a lack of mentoring is highlighted as a reason why teachers leave their profession (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011), and Thomas et al. (2019) argue that “high quality” collegial support is necessary for both job satisfaction and motivation to teach. In turn, three key factors have been described as necessary to support NQTs: skilled and educated mentors, a variety of learning activities, and contextual factors like professional development, collaboration, and teacher education (Helleve & Ulvik, 2019; Schaefer et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2008). Mentoring is however a contested concept, and Kemmis et al. (2014) outline three main archetypes of mentoring: as supervision, as support, and as collaborative self-development. However, empirical research indicates that induction practices are unpredictable concerning what kind of support and collaboration NQTs can expect (Antonsen et al., 2022), which adds to the findings that there is no clear patterns in the organization and implementation of mentoring in Norway (Rambøll, 2021). These ambiguities indicate a need for clearer principles and guidelines for mentoring, similar to how Finland has embraced collaborative self-development through their practice of “Peer-Group Mentoring” (Pennanen et al., 2020; Tynjälä et al., 2021).

Considering the necessity of mentoring practices that supports, apply, and develops NQTs competence, this paper analyzes key documents regarding Norwegian national guidelines and principles for mentoring NQTs. These key documents provide insight into the political intentions for what kind of profession and practice a new teacher is envisioned to be inducted into, and what the mentoring process entails.

Therefore, this paper’s research question is: How do the documents that comprise the overarching national guidelines and principles for mentoring articulate that schools should support NQTs with a master’s degree?

To analyze the issues outlined above, I will apply the theory of practice architecture as an analytical lens (Mahon et al., 2017), which allows me to assess and understand social realities that are subject to a professional practice.

The theory of practice architecture describes that practices are social, situated and that they are shaped by arrangements (Mahon et al., 2017). There are three mutually influencing arrangements that exist simultaneously in a professional practice (Mahon et al., 2017, s. 9-10): Cultural-discursive arrangements, which describes the space for expressions in a practice (the prevalent language and discourses), which either constrain or enable what’s relevant or fitting to say (sayings). Material-economic arrangements that deal with the resources that shape practice by determining what, when, how, or by whom something is constrained or allowed to be done (doings). Finally, social-political arrangements, which shape how individuals within the practice relate to each other (familial and professional relationships, hierarchies, etc.) and non-human objects (rules, norms, etc.), which shape relationships in a practice.

Summarized, NQTs will encounter practice architectures which will define through their three arrangements which sayings, doings and relatings enable or constrain mentoring that support, apply and develop their subject-specialization and R&D-competence.

Educational quality largely depends on the availability of qualified teachers; consequently, teacher turnover is an important concern internationally (Hanushek et al., 2016). The induction phase – the transition from teacher education into the job – is particularly challenging and vulnerable for teacher attrition (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Kelchtermans, 2017). The case of Vietnam is no exception. In fact, certain distinctive features of the education system may further intensify this, such as existing rigid policies and malpractices in teacher recruitment (Tran & Huynh, 2019), as well as the fact that the Ministry of Education and Training has the ultimate control on “macro-level planning” (Le, 2015). However, empirical research on the issues of teacher induction and retention in Vietnam remains scarce (Tran, 2021). This project seeks to address the research gap by analyzing the experiences of Vietnamese early career teachers (ECTs), with a focus on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teachers, as the outcome of the meaningful interactions between individual ECTs and the dynamic organizational contexts of the schools.

The project builds upon Kelchtermans’ research on teacher induction and ECTs’ needs for support, which calls for moving beyond the “deficit thinking” that depicts ECTs as “lacking essential professional competencies” and “formally qualified, but not yet fully capable” (Kelchtermans, 2019). In addition to the theoretical stance providing an alternative perspective on ECTs’ capabilities and potentials, this research explicitly includes the school’s geographical location as a relevant dimension in the working conditions of ECTs, thus further joining the growing volume of research on the impacts of schools’ physical locations on teacher education and professional development (see e.g. Roberts & Fuqua, 2021; White & Downey, 2021). The professional challenges for ECTs are not only related to the “what” and “how” questions, but are also influenced by the “where”. We will specifically study the impacts of starting one’s career in the remote, mountainous areas of Vietnam, where ongoing inequities in education, a serious shortage of qualified teachers, and a high rate of teacher attrition have been observed (Giacchino-Baker, 2007; World Bank, 2019). Similar to the situation in Australia (White & Kline, 2012) and European countries (Fargas-Marlet & Bagley, 2022), it is challenging to attract, recruit, and retain qualified teachers in understaffed rural, remote regions of Vietnam. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that once assigned to such areas teachers are seldomly permitted to transfer or relocate (Hamano, 2008).

This research, therefore, aims to explore and share the voices of ECTs in these demanding teaching conditions as compared to their counterparts in urban areas. Apart from the geographical perspective, the study’s theoretical framework builds on the concept of teachers’ personal interpretative framework (Kelchtermans, 2009), including their self-understanding and subjective educational theory underlying their professional judgement and agency, and the micro-political perspective (Kelchtermans & Ballet, 2002). As such our study strives towards offering a holistic depiction of the fundamental factors within ECTs’ induction period, the interrelation of these factors, and the context of the school as an organization, with an emphasis on geographical diversity of the schools’ locations (and tentatively cultural and multi-lingual diversities from local ethnic minorities). These objectives lead to the following research questions in the context of Vietnam:

1. How do the experiences of early career TESOL teachers affect their professional self-understanding and subjective educational theory?
2. How do the micropolitics in the school as an organization affect early career TESOL teachers’ experiences?
3. In what way does the geographical location of the school affect early career TESOL teachers’ experiences?
4. What are the critical elements in early career TESOL teachers’ experiences of their induction phase that are to be acknowledged and included in the design for effective support programs?

This presentation reports on an ongoing cross-national PhD research project. The research used an exploratory mixed methods survey design to explore the opportunities for practice available to student teachers in English language pre-service teacher education programmes in Algeria, Finland, Ireland and Scotland. To this end, the study draws on Grossman et al.’s (2009) framework of pedagogies of practice. More specifically, it focuses on Grossman et al.’s ‘approximations of practice’. It also aims to explore how the teaching practice component of pre-service teacher education programmes is organised in the four countries and to identify student teachers’ and teacher educators’ attitudes towards the practice compoent. The present research was guided by three research questions:

• What are students teachers' and teacher educators’ attitudes towards different approximations of practice, and authentic practice, to facilitate student teacher’s professional development?’
• In what ways are teacher education programmes in Ireland, Finland, Scotland and Algeria framing the practice component of language teacher education?
• What possible learnings/adaptations can be made from Irish, Finish and Scottish’s English language teacher education to the Algerian teaching practice design?

The study explores eight approximations of practice: examining English language learners’ work; examining state, national or local curriculum; examining videos of classroom teaching; micro-teaching; roleplays; coached rehearsals; one-to-one simulations of practice and virtual simulations of practice. Based on an extended review of the literature on approximations of practice, these were the most commonly cited approximations of practice used across different contexts.

Research findings suggest that teacher quality is considered one of the main salient determiners of student success (Rivkin et al., 2005, p.449; Darling-Hammond, 2000, p.33) and the success of any educational system (Barber and Mourshed 2007, p.15). As a result, the content and curriculum of pre-service teacher education programmes in many countries are constantly being scrutinised to deliver competent graduates who are well capable of facing the realities of the twenty-first century classrooms.

The importance of practice has been widely acknowledged in teacher education literature. Research highlights that it is seen as hugely significant by student teachers, teacher educators and teachers as well as by policy makers (Tabachnick, and Zeichner 1984; Hall et al, 2018). This growing recognition of the importance of teaching practice has inspired many teacher education providers to revise their teacher preparation policies through extending teaching practice opportunities and strengthening theory-practice links (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017, p. 22). However, despite the wide agreement on the teaching practice effectiveness in developing classroom ready teachers (Batten et al. 1991), the teaching practice is not standardised, and the quality of student teachers’ experience during teaching practice can be effected by many factors (i.e. the length of the teaching practice, feedback, supervision …etc) (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Darling-Hammond et al. 2005). Some researchers also argue that not all student teachers’ experiences during school-based teaching practice are productive or positive (Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann 1985; and Turney et al. 1982).

The implementation of approximations of practice in teacher education programmes, or what Grossman et al. (2009) have defined as ‘opportunities for novices to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practice of a profession’ (p. 2058), has the potential of contributing to the development of student teachers (Grossman et al, 2009) hence advocating their incorporation in the teacher education curricula (Ghousseini & Herbst, 2016). However, there appears to be very scant literature on their implementation and benefits in English language teacher education and more specifically on student teachers’ and teacher educators’ attitudes towards them. This paper seeks to address this gap by reporting on the results of a cross-national research as part of an ongoing PhD project.

The focus of this paper is to describe the potential of school volunteering programmes presenting selected preliminary results of thematic analysis of focus groups conducted with student volunteers. To do so, it is first necessary to briefly define one of the key construct: school volunteering programmes (SVP).

SVP are a novelty in the education system in the European context and are gradually being recognised as a pedagogical innovation in the formal education system. The benefits of these programmes for all stakeholders (community, school, and students) are recognised. Through volunteering programmes, schools become more connected to the local community, creating a network of partners for collaborative solutions to community issues (Šimunković, Forčić, Milinković, Kamenko & Šehić-Relić, 2011). Students who have the opportunity to participate in activities in their local community and propose solutions to their needs in the school show a greater willingness to become involved in their (local) community currently and in the future (Torney-Purta, Lehman, Oswald & Schulz, 2001). In addition, while conducting volunteer activities, they strengthen their relationships with other students and also with teachers. Positive and closer relationships lead to a positive school climate. Students who participate in SVP show greater satisfaction with life and school, and describe volunteering as their lifestyle (Šimunković et al., 2011).

Organising, structuring, and planning SVP is a key factor in the success of the programme itself (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Losito, & Agrusti, 2016), and increases the likelihood that young people will volunteer in the future (Harris & Nielsen, 2013). SVP coordinators play the most important role in the successful operation of the programme, as they have full responsibility for every part of it. In addition, the importance of involving parents and civil society organisations is emphasised in order to set a positive example for young people and, in this way, also increase the chances of young people volunteering in adulthood.

Civil society organisations (CSO) in Croatia play an important role in the implementation of volunteering programmes in school curricula. In the national context, CSOs were among the first to initiate the implementation of volunteer programs with the aim of cultivating elements of sustainability citizenship. CSOs also participate in the realisation of volunteer actions and activities together with the school. Through active participation in various activities of associations, young people become aware and interested in the community in which they live. They also have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to become a competent citizen, i.e., the result of young people's participation in CSOs is empowered, competent and active citizens (Ilišin, 2016).

The outflow of the rural population has become a prevalent phenomenon on a global scale under the influence of urbanization. Rural hollowing out, thereby leading to brain drain and rural decline, is placing small villages in a severe predicament regarding their existence and development (Drozdzewski, 2008; Lall et al., 2006). Currently, China is encountering the same dilemma: the perennial urban priority has become the culprit of hallowing out, acutely pumping the rural labor force empty (Murphy, 2002; Su et al., 2018). To elucidate why rural residents are inclined to pursue urban life rather than stay and serve their homelands, some researchers ponder how subjective elements affect human decision-making processes for migration. They pay attention to individual perceptions and attitudes toward the environment in which they reside (Pretty et al., 2006; Simões et al., 2020). Hence, the concept of place belonging is raised to describe the individual’s affiliation to a particular locale (Hay, 1998; Pretty et al., 2003).

The psychological concept consists of two key elements: membership and connection (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). First, the membership indicates a position in a locale where all in-group members can co-share the belonging consciousness. This membership represents a place-based identity, enabling one to discern in-group members and differentiate from out-group others by recognizing unique indigenous features (Hernández et al., 2007). Second, common connections with the location consolidate a sense of belonging. These connections incorporate similar life experiences, values, and cultures shared by community members. By producing personal and social memories, daily connections consistently endow a particular place with specific meanings (Eacott & Sonn, 2006). Place belonging develops across one’s lifecycle rather than remain unchanged. With the constant accumulation of shared experiences, residents are apt to strengthen their connection with the place and others within it. The process helps natives cement their group membership and shape a firm sense of belonging.

In China, many scholars agree that rural adolescents commonly lose a sense of belonging. The failure to identify with local cultures and values is regarded as one primary factor arousing the individual’s underlying proneness to abandon the rustic membership and out-migrate (Cheng & Qin, 2019; Liao & Wong, 2020; Si, 2009). Nonetheless, existent research portrays a general panorama for the theme of rural residents’ place belonging, most of which tends to be theoretical and descriptive, failing to offer detailed explanations and relevant evidence with first-hand data. The insufficiency of empirical research renders corresponding arguments plausible yet virtually not credible enough. Besides, amid a limited number of empirical studies, more samples involve people exposed to urban life (e.g., university students and migrant workers). In contrast, adolescents remaining in local communities with more rural living incidents are apparently overlooked. Given current research gaps, this empirical study covers two research questions. First, how do rural junior high students elaborate on the status of their village-based belonging? Second, how do rural junior high students construct the place belonging to their place of origin?

This study employs the concept of place belonging to reveal how Chinese junior high students with rural backgrounds cognize and interpret the relationship between themselves and their original dwellings, namely whether and how they feel that they belong to their rural hometowns. Research on rural adolescents is of great importance because they will grow into subsequent rural builders. Relevant findings on their place-based perceptions will facilitate further elaborations on why they choose to stay, leave, or return, thus benefiting the global explanation of rural developmental challenges. Noticeably, due to the word limits, this study seldom discusses the relationship between place belonging and migration intentions of rural students while taking it into future academic consideration.

This study is to investigate student representatives’ perceptions of student voice in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). With Neoliberalism as a leading conceptual framework, it is expected to find out answers of the following research questions: (1) to what degree the student representation systems in HEIs work to promote student voice; (2) and assist HEIs to become more accountable to students? (3) how underlying diversity issues affect representing student voice?

Against the backdrop of Neoliberalism, tensions between managerialist approaches to quality assurance and socio-political commitments to democracy and citizenship, can be witnessed both in educational literature and practice (Carey, 2013; Matthews & Dollinger, 2022). Student voice advocates assume students are competent social agents and have a right to democratic participation in educational settings (Bourke & Loveridge, 2014). However, along with the prevalence of New Public Management, student voice nowadays is much used as a potential contributor to quality improvement in educational settings, rather than prioritising the democratic rights of students as young citizens (Thomson & Gunter, 2006). In other words, the emphasis on student voice currently is driven primarily through imperatives of marketised accountability (Fielding, 2001), which emphasises pre-determined objectives and foreseeable outputs (Blanco Ramírez, 2013).

In this case, engaging student voice has been critiqued as an instrumentalist technology associated with compliance and productivity (Bragg, 2007). This powerful impetus that position students as consumers, data sources, and tools for quality control can miss the emancipatory potential of their voice (Charteris & Smardon, 2019), because the essential characteristics of voice work—"dialogic, intergenerational, collective, and inclusive” (Pearce & Wood, 2019, p.118)—are often difficult to observe from the current voice discourse.

Student representative system, as one important component of the accountability regime in HEIs in the UK, is designed to collect student voice formally by elected representatives and transit voice from students to a multilevel of staff in institutions. It is faced with a number of difficulties in creating the conditions for such a student empowerment (Pearce & Wood, 2019). The responses from institutions (Carey, 2013), the time-bounded nature of dealing with student voice (Flint & O'Hara, 2013), complex motivations of student representatives (Seale, 2016) are all affecting the progress and validity of transiting student voice from students to institutions through representatives.

Moreover, the neoliberal notion of students as consumers is likely to reshape the relationships between student representatives and their institutions (Flint & O'Hara, 2013), where there has been an increasing convergence of the consumerist values and priorities between them (Brooks, Byford & Sela, 2016). Representatives are blamed for regulating themselves to align with existing structures, rather than challenging them (Pearce & Wood, 2019), from which the general student body tend to view their representatives as being co-opted by the institutions (QAAS, 2018), rather than creating a dialogical environment for authentic student voice. The legitimate positions that students should be entitled in this neoliberal environment imply the enactment of a representative role (Lizzio & Wilson, 2009), and this is also an essential question to answer for positioning student voice.

Considerable studies have been conducted in school settings to explore student representation issues in school governance, while there is insufficient discussion about this in the HE context. It particularly lacks investigations of students’ views of accountability, which can inform and deepen our understanding of student voice mechanisms based on their personal experience. In the UK, where there is a diverse student composition, it is also possible to get various insights.

Thus, this research uses questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect student representatives’ perceptions of HE’s accountability to student voice in the UK. Data collection and analysis will be carried out after March 2023.

Over the last couple of decades, higher education has undergone significant changes as a result of intensive globalization processes making the HE sector global, national and local at the same time (Marginson and Rhodes, 2022). The wave of neoliberal globalization associated with marketization and competition in different areas has also influenced higher education policies. One of the such policies in the recent decade has been a quest for ‘world-class university’ (WCU) and/or ‘global research university’ (GRU) among nations and their universities (Liu et al, 2011). With the emphasised importance of knowledge economy, the term ‘world-class university’ has gained the attention of various stakeholders in the higher education systems worldwide as these universities are thought to play a key role “in creating and disseminating knowledge, educating a highly skilled workforce for technological and intellectual leadership, and serving the needs of society” for their nation’s ability to compete in the global arena (Wang et al, 2012, p.9).

Kazakhstan is no exception and in 2010 established Nazarbayev University (NU) to be ‘a national standard of higher education for the rest of the country’ (Nazarbayev, 2010), to be a leader in higher education reform and modernisation in Kazakhstan and also to ‘contribute to the establishment of Astana as an international knowledge and innovation hub’ (nu.edu.kz). Unlike the rest of the HEIs, NU has been given a special status of an autonomous organisation of education which grants the university institutional autonomy and legislative independence from the bureaucratic system of the Ministry of Education and Science (MoES). This paper, based on the PhD thesis done in 2016-2019, aims to understand Kazakhstan’s quest for a world-class university with a focus on an interplay between global aspirations, national policies, and local context. It addresses the overarching questions of what the tensions and connections are between global, national, and local forces in Kazakhstan’s attempts to build a world-class university. Through qualitative case study design with semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, the author specifically explores the extent to which global practices advocated at a western-type elite university can be integrated within the setting of the local public universities as part of the bold policy reforms in the national HE sector. By doing so, the paper also explores the responses of the public universities on the prioritized emphasis on a single university made by the government.

Theoretically, this study uses Marginson and Rhoades’ (2002) glonacal agency heuristic for its relevance in explaining the dynamic of global, national and local dimensions in which HE is said to exist. Moreover, the approach is helpful in the way to interpret “the intersections, interactions, mutual determinations of these levels (global, national, and local) and domains (organizational agencies and the agency of collectivities)” (p.289). Hence, this approach is seen as a tool to understand and uncover how global, national and local forces interact where NU is regarded as a product of the national government to become globally visible while reforming and modernizing the local HE and more importantly, the public institutions' response to internationalizing policy of the government.

The number of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at universities has increased in the last few years. These students face many barriers that make participation and learning difficult (Bakker et al., 2019; Fabri et al., 2020). Specifically, some research states barriers related to interaction with others, adaptation to university environments and handling changes (Jansen et al., 2017). Other studies describe obstacles regarding the perception of information and executive functioning (Elias and White, 2019; Waisman et al., 2022). Also, there have been detected aspects related to the emotional well-being of students with ASD, who tend to feel anxiety and stress during higher education (Fabri et al., 2020).

Universities have to ensure the right of every person to access and participate in higher education. In the case of Spain, since the creation of the European higher education area (EEES), valuing diversity and promoting quality education are two objectives that universities have assumed. Autism Spectrum disorder symptoms are diverse depending on the person, so, in this way, laws, policies and regulations require students with ASD to be educated in an inclusive environment (Al Jaffal, 2022). In that sense, based on Universal Design for Learning, it is essential to promote the personalization of learning and provide multiple options so that students can choose the most appropriate to them.

It is clear that faculty staff become a key factor in the inclusion process of students in higher education, nevertheless, sometimes they are considered a barrier. Some research identifies many obstacles to inclusion related to teachers, such as the scarce awareness of autism (Cage and Howes, 2020; Fabri et al., 2020; Oliver Kerrigan, 2021) and developing more inclusive practices to attend these students (Moriña and Carballo, 2018; Sarret, 2018; Sullivan, 2021). Interventions often focus on traditional academic accommodations, such as extended time on exams or noiseless locations for taking them (Cox et al., 2020), which sometimes are not what students with ASD need (Jackson et al., 2018).

From the literature review that has been carried out, the need to place more emphasis on studying how faculty staff face the attention to students with autism in university classrooms has been detected. More specifically, an attempt will be made to identify the barriers that current university teaching staff face in relation to their inclusion. On the other hand, and in response to this, we will try to give some suggestions that can help faculty staff to teach inclusively.

Internationalization has become one of the important agendas for countries, higher education institutions, and university students due to global systems which transformed higher education into a more cooperative as well as competitive context. This research investigates the perceptions, expectations, and push-pull factors of higher education students about studying abroad.

Internationalization in universities is performed in various forms, such as branch campuses and joint degree programs, yet student mobility is the most well-known form (Van Damme, 2001). Despite the discussions on the inclusiveness of physical mobility (De Wit & Jones, 2018; Van Mol & Perez-Encinas, 2022); according to OECD (2021) data, international student mobility has been expanding quite steadily in the last 20 years. In 2019, 6.1 million higher education students worldwide went to study in another country, more than double the number of mobility that took place in 2007. In other words, the number of international students in higher education increased by an average of 5.5% per year between 1998 and 2019. Parallel to these developments, there is an increasing demand by higher education students in Türkiye to study abroad.

The push-pull theory was chosen as the conceptual framework for this study which was adapted from migration theories (Li & Bray, 2007; Lee 2014, McMahon 1992) and became important and frequently used to analyze international student mobility (Almeida, 2020). In the relevant literature, push factors are associated with negative conditions in the student's home country, while pull factors are related to positive aspects in the country of destination (Altbach 1998).

There are various studies in the literature that analyze student mobility using the push-pull theory. Most studies in the literature (Chen, 2017; Eder, Smith & Pitts, 2010; Gbollie & Gong, 2019; Kondakcı, 2011; Kondakci et al., 2016; Lee & Stewart, 2022; Maringe & Carter, 2007; Özoğlu et.al., 2015; Wen & Hu, 2019) were carried out with incoming international students. Yet, relatively fewer studies (e.g. Nghia, 2019) used the framework of the push-pull theory to analyze the perceptions of outgoing students. In addition, as stated by Lee and Stewart (2022), studies using push-pull theories were conducted mostly with degree-seeking students performing long-term mobility rather than exchange students’ experience in short-term mobility.

In other words, more studies are needed to be conducted with outgoing and also short-term mobility students. Moreover, there is especially a lack of studies investigating the opinions and perceptions of possible future outgoing students. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the perceptions of first-year bachelor’s degree students about studying abroad and their opinions on participating in international student mobility. The study uses the push-pull theory as a conceptual framework to understand possible push factors related to Türkiye and possible pull factors of other countries.

This presentation regards a Ph.D. project that aims to contribute to knowledge and understanding of whole-child education by asking the research question “What does it mean to educate the whole child?”.

The project analyses the curricula of four school systems at primary and lower secondary levels found within Norway. This is Norwegian public education, Montessori education, Steiner/Waldorf education, and International Baccalaureate education (IB). Also, interviews with teachers in the respective school systems will be conducted to gain an understanding of their notions of what it means to educate the whole child.

The research’s preliminary results show similarities and differences in what “educating the whole child” means. A common theme is a focus on well-being in all development domains. Related to this year’s ECER conference theme of diversity, it is relevant that all four school systems emphasize diversity as a foundational value in their educational models. Other common values among the four school systems are democratic values like equal rights, participation, and inclusion.

In a European and international context, the research is relevant as Montessori, Steiner (Waldorf), and International Baccalaureate education are present in many countries and the Norwegian public education system is part of the North-European pedagogics tradition.

The project’s theoretical framework is based on the field of holistic education. This field has emerged since the mid-1980s (Miller 2019a, p. 5), and the topic of holistic education engages globally. The field of holistic education is an eclectic and inclusive field with impulses from many sources (Rudge 2008, p. 4) and is seen as very diverse (Forbes 2003, p. 2). There is no textbook definition of what a holistic education is (Miller 1997, p. 75). It can be seen as an umbrella term covering different approaches and perspectives (Schreiner 2009, p. 755, 761). According to Rudge (2008, p. 21), many educational alternatives are calling themselves holistic, but a clear definition of what educating the whole child means is often missing.

In reviewing literature for an overview of current research status, many journal articles use the term “whole child”, but mostly concern topics related to physical health or community services for supporting children. Arguments for this type of “whole child” approach is that there is evidence of physical activity reducing obesity, and diabetes, and improving academic performance and cognitive functioning (Savina et. al 2016, pp. 283-286). The literature from the field of holistic education making up the theoretical framework of this project offers a broader view of the “whole child”. One statement exemplifying this position holds that holistic education “addresses every aspect of individual growth and development” (Eaude 2019, p. 61).

This project synthesizes the different definitions and descriptions of whole-child education in the literature of the theoretical framework into four different theoretical perspectives. These are used as categories supporting the analysis of curriculum documents and interviews. The four perspectives are “the whole child”, “the whole world”, “personal growth” and “social change”. The perspectives are recognizable in all the literature to a greater or lesser extent. They are outspoken and discussed in the main literature of the theoretical framework, but also present in the supporting literature from the field of holistic education.
Although the field is eclectic and has many sources of influence it also draws on known educators and philosophers. Often mentioned as historical influences are Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori, Steiner, and Dewey, amongst others (Miller, 2019a, pp. 5-16, R. Miller 1997, pp. 92-101, Mayes 2019, p. 143).

The different curricula analyzed in this project do indicate a concern for the whole child, although different emphases amongst the different school systems. This will be described in the conclusion section below.

The Covid-19 crisis has had and continues to have profound impacts on the continuity of learning of young children. While families and early years practitioners faced unprecedented challenges and demands, the crisis also urged us to explore new approaches to developing early childhood education, especially around parental engagement strategies and practices (Education Scotland, 2020; Ribeiro et al., 2021). As a PhD researcher and an early years practitioner, I became interested in how parental engagement in children’s learning worked in real-life contexts beyond the nursery setting during the pandemic. By understanding better parents’ interactions with young children, new insights can be gained to help us consider effective parental engagement practices that support young children’s learning experiences during crises and beyond.

“Parental engagement” can be considered as the active involvement and interactions of parents with their children’s learning in a variety of contexts, such as early learning and childcare settings, the community, and through family learning in the home (Education Scotland, 2019; Epstein, 2018). However, previous literature and the emerging ones under the pandemic tended to mainly limit the discursive power to practitioners and parents, which means that children, especially those who are at a formative stage in their lives and their growing civic awareness, are rarely consulted in this important debate on parental engagement (Oppenheim et al., 2022). In Scottish early years education, parental engagement has always been an enduring theme that has resonated in an array of policies and guidelines to make efforts to promote children’s learning and development with the engagement of parents and family members (Bryce et al., 2018). This academic and political discourse has been given prominence in the early years even more than ever along with national policies and studies that immediately responded to it after the outbreak of Covid-19, though still without seeking the voices of young children (Bynner et al., 2020). My PhD research is intended to address the absence of young children’s views and experiences in the research literature on parental engagement during the pandemic, which is too often dominated by adults’ narratives (Pascal & Bertram, 2021). Listening to children’s voices is also aligned with the Scottish Government’s initiative to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (2009) into its legislation to ensure that children’s rights are respected and their views are heard over matters that may affect them (Scottish Government, 2020).

Additionally, my research also specifically considers parental engagement through the lens of Froebelian pedagogy. As a prominent discourse in early childhood education, Froebelian pedagogy is distinct as this approach rests upon the idea that parents and families form the basis for a child’s learning (Bruce, 2021). Based on the Froebelian approach that emphasises the integrity of childhood in its own right, parenting and family engagement as well as children's voices are the essential tenets of this pedagogy (Tovey, 2017). Thus, the Froebelian context can be uniquely stimulating for me to rethink in-depth the principles, values, and implications of parental engagement,

Overall, this research aims to explore young children’s learning experience with parental engagement during and after the Covid-19 crisis and examine how the Froebelian principles and practices shape parental engagement with young children’s learning during the pandemic and beyond. The research questions are:

• How do young children from a Froebelian setting experience parents’ interactions with their learning under and after Covid-19?
• How do parents from a Froebelian setting perceive and engage with their children’s learning under and after the Covid-19 crisis?
• To what extent Froebelian pedagogy offers opportunities and challenges for parental engagement with young children’s learning during and after the Covid-19 crisis?

The rapid progression of technology has altered the technologies used in education, specifically in the education of children. Recently, educational robotics and robots (ERR) are utilized by various research domains to contribute to children’s life and development. For example, some research studies focused on the use of educational robotics in computational thinking (e.g., Atmatzidou and Demetriadis, 2016; Chen et al., 2017; Karaahmetoğlu and Korkmaz, 2019; Tengler et al., 2021), Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics [STEM] learning (e.g., Barker et al., 2014; Ching et al., 2019; Karim et al., 2015; Master et al., 2015; Mosley, 2016; Üçgül and Altıok, 2021), language learning and development (e.g., Kory and Breazeal, 2014; Lee et al. 2011), disabilities (e.g., Begum et al., 2016; Özdemir and Karaman, 2017; Pop et al. 2013; Scassellati et al., 2018; So et al., 2016). While the amount of research studies has increased through the years, some systematic literature reviews were conducted in order to summarize and understand the possible contribution of the studies and possible future recommendations (e.g., Anwar et al., 2019; Benitti 2012; Toh et al., 2016). However, since the systematic reviews mostly include small-size studies for their analysis, it seems difficult to understand a broad view of the studies using large-scale research studies as well as the state of the intellectual structure and recent progress regarding children and educational robotics and robots. That is, despite the published articles related to educational robotics and robots, a broad overview is still needed to make a clear understanding of the population of children. Therefore, the aim of this study is to statistically and visually present the existing work using bibliometric analysis. Moreover, this research aims to bring a comprehensive overview and research trends in the field relating to children and educational robotics and robots (ERR).

The main research questions of the study were formed as below:

What is the contribution of the countries, institutions, and authors to global publications on educational robotics and robots for children?

What is the distribution of years, research areas, and journals to contribute global publications on educational robotics and robots for children?

What is the co-occurrence of the keywords on educational robotics and robots for children?

Children increasingly have access to digital technologies at home from a young age. Despite differing views on the affordances of technology use by young children, research has found that children aged two to six years of age are spending on average 25.9 hours a week using screen-based media, and just over a third of preschool aged children ‘own’ a smartphone or tablet device (Rhodes, 2017). Further research indicates that parents believe technology can be a useful tool for learning, although they generally equated learning with traditional subject areas relating to numeracy and literacy (Huber, Highfield, & Kaufman, 2018). While in education settings, technology is yet to reach a point of integrated ubiquity, the boundaries of digital and analogue are often blurred when it comes to technologies in the lives of children (Edwards, 2016).

This study is situated in the notion that children live in post digital times, where digital technology and media and the worlds they create are not separate, to but are rather part of, our everyday lives (Jandrić et al., 2018). The aim of this research is to investigate family perspectives on learning with digital technologies at home. The research question ‘What are parent/caregiver’s and children’s perspectives on learning with digital technologies at home?’ seeks to address the nuanced ways both parents/caregivers and children understand learning with digital technologies, and explore how perspectives within the same family may converge and diverge.

For this study's purposes, we will not define the terms learning or technologies for families. Instead, we will be led by parents/caregivers and children. As researchers, we recognise that our own understandings of learning and digital technologies may be different to the study's participants. We aim to explore families' understandings of these concepts, noting that this will likely look different between and among family members and families.

This research is founded in sociomaterial perspectives (e.g., Burnett & Merchant, 2020; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). What kinds of perspectives on learning and how they are stabilised or disrupted in the home are of interest. The relationship between the ‘things’ within the home space and how these shape understandings of learning and digital technology is brought into focus, which as Fenwick and Edwards (2011) contend, can invite, exclude and/or regulate participation. ‘Things’ in the home can include people, technologies, space but also extends to things such as technology guidelines or recommendations.

This paper focuses on the research design and methodology. Early findings from selected cases will be presented to highlight initial thinking and how this contributes to the international perspectives of learning at home with digital technologies.

Introduction

The current educational system in Kazakhstan has seen a significant shift in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a tool to facilitate learning. The need has called for this shift to move away from traditional teaching methods to more effective and efficient teaching methods (OECD, 2017). Additionally, ICT-based instruction is seen as a way to improve the quality of instruction and provide students with the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century. As such, using ICT-based instruction has become increasingly common in Kazakhstan (Oralbekova et al. 2016).

Nazarbayev Intellectual School (NIS) is one of the leading educational institutions in Kazakhstan, and it has been at the forefront of the shift towards ICT-based instruction. NIS has implemented a range of ICT-based instructional practices, including the use of online learning platforms and the incorporation of ICTs into the classroom (e.g., Bilimland, Twig, Mektep and iTest). Additionally, NIS has implemented a range of initiatives to promote using ICT-based instruction in teaching chemistry, such as using virtual reality simulations and interactive whiteboard technologies, as well as the provision of specialized training for teachers in using ICT-based instruction (Lewis, 2004). Moreover, according to research conducted by Nechypurenko et al. (2022), "ICT-based instruction can help to create an environment where collaboration and dialogue among teachers and students can be improved, and this can ultimately lead to a more meaningful learning experience." Similarly, ICT-based instruction can also provide teachers with an opportunity to differentiate instruction, allowing them to customize the learning experience for each student (Jung & Lim, 2021). The success of NIS ICT-based instruction is a testament to the potential of technology to improve teaching and learning in the classroom (Krause et al., 2017). As the use of ICT continues to grow and evolve, it is important to continue exploring the potential benefits of ICT-based instruction to maximize its potential to improve student learning outcomes.

The primary objective of this research is to assess the influence of ICT-based instruction on the academic performance and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) literacy of chemistry students at NIS. This study seeks to determine the effectiveness of ICT-based instruction in helping students understand and apply chemistry concepts, as well as its impact on their academic performance and STEM literacy. Specifically, it aims to answer the following questions:

1. How does ICT-based instruction impact the academic performance of Chemistry students at NIS?
2. What is the effect of ICT-based instruction on the STEM literacy of chemistry students at NIS?
3. Does ICT-based instruction improve student engagement and motivation in Chemistry classes at NIS?
4. What are the perceived benefits and drawbacks of ICT-based instruction for chemistry students at NIS?

Within Higher Education (HE) Early Years (EY) undergraduate students are trained using a range of knowledge and experiences to support their learning. This in turn influences how the students support children’s learning. This paper focusses on the experiences of both tutor and student as the collision between the pedagogies of digital technology and outdoor learning and play are explored, in order to support a holistic curriculum.

The focus of this study is a BA (Hons) Early Years Education and Practice undergraduate degree, in a large UK University. Over the three years of the course students engage in a breadth of modules, including “Children Learning through Landscapes” which is a specific module teaching students about the importance of the outdoor environment and how to provide children with regular opportunity to engage with it, connect with nature and learn through the use of all their senses. This experiential, active learning is critical in children’s brain development as well as their holistic development (Palmer, 2006), helping them to make sense of the world around them. This pedagogy is an integral element of EY practice and follows the pioneering work of Montessori, Steiner and Froebel, who first advocated the importance of an outdoor space to play and learn, as well as a rich environment for healthy growth and development (Pickering, 2017). Welsh Government (WG), (2020) expect all children to have regular access to the outdoor environment as part of their curriculum.

Thus, in order for EY students to understand and to be “able” in this teaching pedagogy, they also need regular access to the outdoors. This affords them opportunities to embrace the natural environment in order to promote their own knowledge and understanding, enabling them to become role models for future generations.

However, the introduction of the Digital Competency Framework (DCF), has become a compulsory part of the Welsh Curriculum. This means that EY students also need to be digitally competent to develop their own academic skills as well as to support and develop children’s digital skills; this has become an area of priority within the curriculum. Therefore, as an education professional in HE and as part of “innovative learning and teaching”, the need to present and role model digital practices blended with traditional outdoor pedagogy is now greater, and significantly challenging for ‘digital immigrants’(Sakr, 2020; Edwards, 2016; Prensky, 2001) ,encouraging students to confidently apply the relevant skills in their own practice.

Nonetheless, within the context of the Welsh curriculum the two approaches appear to conflict with one another as it seems that they are competing for the “attentions” of practitioners as well as the children they teach. They each look to develop skills for life as part of a new progressive Welsh curriculum (WG, 2020).

Therefore, blended pedagogies need to be modelled by the HE tutor so that students can confidently demonstrate and apply these skills in their own practices, making them self reflective learners and professionally ready for the demands of the work environment, allowing skills to be transferred and employability to be enhanced.

Thus, the questions that inform this case study are:

(1) Can digital technology be blended with traditional outdoor pedagogies to support a

holistic curriculum?

(2) What are the effects of blended pedagogies on student learning experiences?

(3) What lessons are learnt from the perspective of the HE tutor in attempting to model

the blended pedagogies?

One of the main challenges of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is the development of the teaching digital competence (TDC) of their academic staff. TDC development has been on the European agenda for at least a decade and several frameworks and initiatives have arisen to address it. One example that stands out is the DigCompEdu framework developed by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission to generate a common understanding of what TDC is (Redecker, 2017). The HEIs, for their part, have started to develop multiple digitisation strategies and plans to promote it (Castañeda et al., 2023). However, despite these efforts, the COVID-19 pandemic evidenced that there is still a gap, particularly in the pedagogical aspects of this competence. This is not surprising, given the lack of implementation of evidence-based initiatives that effectively address it (Castañeda, et al., 2023). The development of this competency is a complex process that requires approaches that go beyond the individual perspective, which focuses exclusively on teacher training (Coles, et al.,2020). For this competence to be deployed, it is necessary to generate the institutional conditions that enable it (Esteve et al., 2022).

This paper is part of a research project with the aim of designing a proposal on what a HEI could do to develop the TDC of its teaching staff. This project is carried out at a Spanish public University with about 1700 academic staff. We have designed and iterated the prototypes with different stakeholders during 2021 – 2022 and this prototype has been validated in the local Spanish context in a satisfactory way (Viñoles-Cosentino et al., 2021; Viñoles-Cosentino et al., 2022).

The prototype is structured in 3 main axes: Policy level, Training level and Communication level (Esteve et al., 2022).

Among the aspects that stand out in the policy level: It has been a participatory process, involving groups of teachers, technical experts in teacher training and university managers at all stages: from the diagnosis to the evaluation of the prototypes. Thus, different levels (macro/micro) and perspectives of the main actors involved have been considered (Hostins & Rochadel, 2019). A framework (DigCompEdu) has been integrated to serve as a guide (Redecker, 2017). In addition, the strategic documents have been reviewed and aligned with the digitisation plan and the DigCompEdu framework (Viñoles-Cosentino et al., 2021).

At training level: Broaden the offer to provide open, accessible, flexible courses with different levels of progression (basic, intermediate, advanced). Training topics aligned with teaching needs, taking as a reference the areas of the DigCompEdu framework. Creation of an introductory course on TDC to guide and serve as an umbrella for the training pathways (Viñoles-Cosentino et al., 2022).

At communication level: Working with aspects of building language around TDC and the institutional approach to it, to ensure that the strategy is understood and disseminated to all the actors (Century & Cassata, 2016). Design and deliver of an awareness-raising course on TDC focused on working on attitudinal aspects, beliefs, and knowledge on the subject. A platform to centralise communication and as a space for the exchange of teaching experiences (Spillane et al., 2002).

In this last phase, the objective is to evaluate the prototype proposal and preliminary design principles in the international context.

There has been a strong emphasis internationally on teachers’ professional communities and teachers being reflective practitioners to leverage the quality of education, and subsequently a recent call for a fine-grained analysis of how these relationships may explain teachers’ educational practices. This paper offers a response to this by examining how teachers’ personal reflexivity and ego-networks play a role in mediating curriculum making practices.

Reflexivity enables people to consider themselves and their social environment to navigate their way in their social contexts (Archer, 2007). Although all people practise reflexivity, the kind of internal conversations and the way reflexivity leads to action are not universal. Archer proposes four distinctive modes of reflexivity, which are multifaceted and contextually dependent, to contribute to our understanding of why people act in certain ways. The other key theoretical construct in this study is ego-network which is a personal network that focuses on the individual actors and their connections to other people with a particular purpose (Bellotti, 2015). These two key constructs provide an account of how teachers’ internal and external conversations as well as their interplay act as a mediatory role in curriculum making practices.

The imminent redevelopment of Ireland’s national curriculum promises to promote agency by giving teachers the autonomy to make significant decisions regarding the content, sequence and pace of instruction in their classrooms (NCCA, 2020a). While the explicit positioning of teachers as ‘change-agents’ (Fullan, 2016; NCCA, 2009, 2020) is welcome, international studies which focus on the phenomenon of teacher-agency with regard to curriculum reform are only recently beginning to emerge (Biesta et al., 2017; Pantić, 2017a; Priestley et al., 2013; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015; Priestley & Drew, 2019a; Pyhältö et al., 2018). A review of this burgeoning pool of empirical investigations reveals a tendency to theorise agency at the level of overarching national curriculum frameworks. This is not to suggest that these studies were limited in their own terms but to emphasise the fact that they had a particular focus. A more fine-grained exploration of agency, which embraces the disciplinary-specifics of curriculum reform-measures, awakens the possibility of a more refined analysis of the phenomenon. This therefore presents the next logical phase for empirical study.

Building on the conceptualisation of Emirbayer and Mische (1998), the current work proposes a definition of agency as ‘teachers’ capacity to critically shape their responsiveness to curriculum change’. Set against the backdrop of the recent introduction of the Primary Language Curriculum - the first of a series of major national curricular reforms - the study presented in this paper draws its conceptual framing from both ‘ecological’ and ‘sociocultural’ approaches to theorising teacher agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Pantić, 2017a; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015). Agency is concieved as a situated achievement, an emergent phenomenon, which arises at the confluence between an individual and their particular contexts for action. Three dynamic, interrelated dimensions comprise the conceptual backbone of this theory of agency: the ‘iterative’ (which delineates an orienation towards the past), the ‘practical-evaluative’ (with a focus on the present context within which an individual is 'acting' and the ‘projective’ dimensions (with its focus on the future). Each dimension has a complex internal structure, each with its own orientation towards the past, present and future. Emirbayer and Mische refer to this as the ‘chordal triad of agency within which all three dimensions resonate as separate but not always harmonious tones’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 972). Although analytically separate, each can be found to a greater or lesser degrees in any given instance of action.

The study presented in this paper intends to address the following overarching research question: In what ways do teachers achieve agency in the context of engaging with the new Primary Language Curriculum? This overarching question was supported by a number of subordinate questions:

• How is the phenomenon of teacher agency understood by significant actors in the national policy and practice arena?
• How do teachers describe their engagement with the Primary Language Curriculum?
• In what ways does a professional learning community influence teachers’ agency in the context of engaging with the Primary Language Curriculum

This paper concerns reform to Shanghai’s Gaokao, a university entrance qualification, and its effects on curriculum making by teachers. In 2014, the Shanghai government launched a reform to allow students to complete the geography examination one year earlier than other academic subjects. For those who took geography as a subject for their university qualification examinations, the test took place at the end of Year 11 from May 2016. The sudden reform changed geography’s status from a marginal subject with around 4,800 examinees to a subject with over 34,000 examinees. The numbers of examinees kept rising. Over 52,000 examinees took the geography exam in May 2022. The dramatic rise in students opting for the subject also brought an increased demand for geography teachers.

This study, therefore, asks: How does qualifications change influence teachers’ curriculum making conceptions in Shanghai? This study investigates Shanghai geography teachers in two cohorts: teachers who entered before the 2014 reform, known as the Pre-Reform cohort; teachers who entered after the reform as the Post-Reform cohort. This study uses an existing framework of geography curriculum making (Lambert and Morgan, 2010; Lambert, Solem and Tani, 2015) but applies it to the Chinese context. This framework started off as a product of Action Plan for Geography in England, and travelled to American and European countries through international GeoCapabilities Project partners. It depicts teacher choices, student experiences and school geography as a Venn diagram, and locates them in the context of the discipline of geography, then stressing that discipline-oriented teaching is situated within the context of broad educational aims.

Introduction – Seeking and listening to student perspectives can be worthwhile since it provides unique insights into the complexities of teaching and learning. Despite the fact that students are increasingly recognised as primary stakeholders in education, the majority of studies continues to position students as mere information providers and therefore fails to provide them with more active roles (Pinter, Mathew & Smith, 2016). One of the areas where students have had few opportunities to express their perspectives, let alone be involved in decision-making, is teaching and learning. Especially the curriculum is rarely seen as a suitable arena for student voice initiatives (Brooker & MacDonald, 1999; Rudduck & Flutter, 2000). This systematic literature review provides an overview of studies which have gone beyond positioning students as subjects or information providers by recognising them as knowledgeable partners. Thus far, such studies either targeted traditional student council topics and/or focused on university students. This review, therefore, examines the few existing empirical studies which focus on how secondary and vocational education students are involved in co-creation and decision-making in the context of teaching and learning. We focus on how student voice is embodied as well as relevant factors for implementation and the impact of student voice projects on students’ personal development and school connectedness.

Methods – Relevant studies were identified through a systematic search in ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed. For each included study, references and citations were checked for additional relevant studies. Studies were included which focus on actively involving students in co-creation and decision-making and which go beyond influencing their individual learning processes. We discuss qualitative empirical studies which focus on 12-20 year-old students participating in student voice initiatives in the context of teaching and learning. In order to analyse the extracted data, content analysis in combination with the Action Research cycle and the Theoretical Domains Framework were used.

Results – The 15 included studies indicate that students were involved in various phases and were assigned multiple roles and responsibilities. Although students were involved in the planning phase in almost every study, participation was predominantly limited to advising. During the acting/observing phase, students had more profound roles and responsibilities. Many studies organised activities with the aim of engaging students as co-researchers. Students were least involved in reflecting and if they were involved at all, their role was limited to sharing their perspectives and experiences at the end of the project. Knowledge and skills were important factors for implementation. We also found that provoking radical shifts in social/professional roles and identities is not only a time consuming endeavour, but may result in all kinds of emotions. Many teachers had low levels of optimism or even concerns about inviting students to participate in educational development. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that initially student participation activities led to anxiety and chaos among teachers. Students were often hesitant at the start and lacked beliefs about their capabilities. However, as they got used to being more involved, their confidence grew. Teachers were vital in increasing students’ perceived competences by offering guidance, support, encouragement and insights. Apart from learning and practicing a wide range of skills, students’ sense of confidence, ownership and empowerment grew, which resulted in increased beliefs about their capabilities. Lastly, relationships between students and teachers improved.

Conclusions – We should look for ways to expand and improve the intensity, nature and quality of student voice activities. Students should be presented with various opportunities for taking diverse roles in each research phase. Future research should include working collaboratively with students in vulnerable positions as well as in more diverse school settings.

This conference paper is part of an ongoing investigation (The Fourth Impulse of Pedagogical Renewal in Spain: A case Study in Infant-Primary Schools in the Autonomous Communities of Andalusia, Madrid, Catalonia and Valencia, project I+d+i, PID2019-108138RB-C21, 2020-2023) whose objective is to study the processes of educational transformation of schools that, in an integrated and integral manner, propose a renewal of fundamental aspects that define them (Tyack and Cuban, 1995). The paper focuses on studying some issues related to democratic practice in a unique innovative school: a private (non-elitist) school self-managed by a group of teachers who have the occasional support of the families.

In this paper, we first explain what we mean by innovative schools, we then address some basic issues focused on the conceptualization of democratic practice in schools and, finally, in the conclusions, we analyse how this practice is implemented in the school under study.

The term “pedagogical renewal” is, as has been shown on several occasions (Costa, 2011; Esteban, 2016; Pericacho, 2016) is a complex and polysemic term that has a long history in Spain and that, internationally, has many similarities with the concept “educational renewal” (Goodlad, 1994; Carlson,2005). Our research team (Demoskole) has decided to define it as the direct opposite of traditional education in its classical conception (disciplinary and authoritarian with differentiated and hierarchical roles and a system of teaching based on pure transmission and the textbook) and of aseptic innovation that changes the forms and appearances but not the substance since it only hides the harsher expressions typical of uncomplicated] traditional pedagogy, replacing them for more friendly guises. In any case, innovative schools are characterized by: i) being centres with progressive educational goals (opposed to what is imposed by the market and the neoliberal way of thinking); ii) making use of active methodologies (opposed to fundamentally rote and acritical methodologies); iii) having an open and flexible organization of time and spaces; iv) teaching a curriculum that is as little compartmentalized as possible and conveyed through methodologies that integrate diverse knowledge; v) embodying educational roles that, despite being different, are not hierarchical, facilitate participation and foster trust; vi) implementing a transversal, qualitative, formative and continuous evaluation of the learning processes; vii) having shared leadership; viii) being clearly committed to participation and democratic practice; and ix) having a close relationship with the physical and social environment (Feu and Torrent, 2020; Feu et al., 2021; Feu and Torrent, 2021a; Feu and Torrent, 2021b).

The democratic and participatory issue, despite being presented as the eighth characteristic, is central to any innovative school – a democracy and participation that, like the other elements previously mentioned, can be graduated. In the case at hand, and following authors such as Fielding (2012), Mabovula (2009) and Santizo Rodall (2011), this graduation can be done through three key variables: a) frequency of the democratic practice (regularity of meetings aimed at making decisions on collective issues); b) democratic intensity (type and relevance of the aspects to be debated and agreed upon); and c) agents who are called on to participate (students, teachers, families and local agents or institutions), among others.

Abstract

Research indicates student voices are largely under-represented in the processes of curriculum reform (Flynn, 2021). When school students are invited to share their views on their experiences of curriculum, they often do not respond in large numbers or are only invited to do so from within classroom contexts, which may constrain their responses. This paper reports on our success using social media (SM) as a method to recruit Australian senior secondary student participants for a national online survey about their experiences of school history. Finding that this method attracted a high level of student participation, a demographically diverse sample and generated rich data, we advocate for using social media as a key element of survey methods for adolescents. In Australia, as in other international settings, the role of students is often seen to sit within the nano site of curriculum making, that is within the context of classrooms or other learning spaces and in relation to teachers (Priestly, 2021). Accessing students and giving them a platform to have conversations about their experiences of curriculum outside of this nano site, expands possibilities for including students as curriculum actors across the macro and meso sites of curriculum making (Priestly, 2021)(Priestley et al., 2021). Through the dissemination of research findings that foreground their voices, students are valued as curriculum actors that contribute to curriculum discourse at the state and national levels, which can encourage other curriculum actors to engage students in a wider range of curriculum making activities across sites. The paper explores how this student-centred approach opens the possibilities for curriculum inquiry researchers in other learning areas and jurisdictions, as well as across education research more broadly.

It also engages with a topical area emerging from research methods literature worldwide. The popularity of the student surveys to capture student perspectives has been widely documented, both in Australia and internationally, as an effective way of measuring student engagement to inform whole school and curriculum reform (Campbell-Phillips, 2020; Jensen, 2011; Mayes, 2020). The global crisis in education, exposed by the impact of the pandemic across the world made it more urgent for researchers to recognise a significant shift in the nature of student-centred research and develop the capacity to access curriculum conversations with an already difficult to reach group (Dusek, Yurova, & Ruppel, 2015). Research that values and responds to student voices is also vital at a time when young people are feeling isolated and disconnected from their schooling following Covid-19 related disruptions.

Recruitment via SM is increasingly popular, however, a lack of ‘empirical literature investigating the ethics of engaging participants via SM’ (Hokke, Nicholson, & Crawford, 2020, p. 12) deters researchers from taking up the opportunity, particularly for the recruitment of young people (Mackenzie et al., 2021). Not without its challenges and limitations, the generative experience we had using SM to recruit young people of their own volition prompted us to ask: What methodological diversity can the use of social media bring to educational research that looks to represent student voice? We address this question by using our online survey project that investigated possible reasons for declining enrolments in senior secondary History subjects as a case study. The paper outlines the methodological approach taken and evaluates the efficacy of utilising Instagram and Twitter as sites for both recruiting and reporting back to students. Despite the context being Australian, we argue SM has potential to support student-centred methodological approaches in ways that are globally relevant, innovative and inclusive. We contribute to literature that assesses the potential of recruitment via SM while offering unique insight into the possibilities for empowering students as research participants.

Contemporary societies face significant challenges in dealing with issues such as climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic as well as disinformation and pseudo-science. Within the European context, the importance of scientific literacy as a component of curriculum innovation has been identified as a means to deal with such challenges, for instance through equipping learners with the tools to navigate and critically address the vast amounts of information exchanged in public debate, and support democratic processes (Siarova, Sternadel & Szőnyi, 2019). Understanding different aspects of NOS has been argued to contribute to scientific literacy (Matthews, 2016). NOS is about different aspects of science such as the aims, values, methods, practices and social context of science. Aspects of NOS have been included in policy documents from the European Commission as part of particular scientific competences (O’Carroll et al., 2017). As an area of research in science education, NOS has gained much attention (Abd-el-Khalick, 2012; Allchin, 2011; Lederman et al., 2002). The paper presents an empirical investigation into the coverage of nature of science (NOS) in the physics, chemistry and biology curricula in England. It is important to investigate the curriculum content on NOS because curricula are important resources that teachers use when making these plans and preparing the lesson content. In previous curriculum analyses, researchers have used various frameworks on NOS to trace its representation in science curricula. For example, Kaya and Erduran (2016) used the Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) which is the current framework on the nature of science (e.g. Erduran & Dagher, 2014; Irzik & Nola, 2014). This framework considers NOS as a cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional system, and as such it is fairly broad and it can capture a wide range of aspects of science. It has been applied as an analytical framework, for example in the analysis of assessment documents (e.g. Cheung, 2020). RFN has not been applied to the analysis of physics, chemistry and biology curricula (DfE, 2013; 2014) in England. Tracing how NOS is represented in physics, chemistry and biology curricula can shed light on how such different fields of science are conceptualised in science curricula. The study was guided by the following research questions: (a) How is NOS covered in the physics, chemistry and biology curricula at Key Stage 4 level in England? (b) What are the similarities and differences in how NOS is represented in the curricula of different sciences of physics, chemistry and biology? In order to address these research questions, a content analysis method proposed by Elo ve Kyngäs (2008) was used. This method consists of 3 steps: preparation, organizing, and reporting. In the preparation step, the unit of analysis and theoretical framework are selected. The unit of analysis was selected as sentences in the curricula in this study. Furthermore, Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (RFN) (Kaya & Erduran, 2016) was selected as the theoretical framework of the analysis. The organizing step includes creating the analysis matrices and coding based on the categories. RFN consists of the following categories: (a) cognitive-epistemic: aims and values, methods, practices and knowledge, and (b) social-institutional: social values, scientific methods, social certification and dissemination, social organisations and interactions, financial systems and political power structures. Results and findings for each curriculum analysis is presented highlighting the trends in the coverage of the key RFN categories. A significant finding is that the social-institutional categories were underrepresented in all curricula. Furthermore, only the introductory sections of the curricula included the majority of the RFN categories which were mainly about the cognitive-epistemic aspects of NOS. They were not integrated into the sections that covered the content knowledge.

Research question: What can Ireland offer to the wider European debate on curriculum reform in science education?

This paper will provide evidence of how changes to STEM policy documents internationally, which are grounded in current academic research around best practice in science education, have failed to translate into practice among the wider science education community (Scientix, 2018). Policy occupies one epistemological stance (that of enquiry) while practice remains firmly in another (that of knowledge-as-transmission). Teachers are expected to navigate a landscape of policy reform that does not offer pedagogical guidance or a clear definition of enquiry (Osborne, 2015), and is at odds with the cultural and epistemological beliefs teachers hold of how practical work should be taught in schools (Loughran, 2014). Indeed, there are reports of teachers believing they are teaching enquiry-based lessons, when they are actually not (Capps et al., 2013). Irish senior cycle STEM curricula are currently under review after a series of reports that have deemed learner participation in STEM education as “less than satisfactory” (DES, 2020; 2017). Unsurprisingly, one of the main issues is an over-emphasis on propositional knowledge and an under-emphasis on epistemic and procedural knowledge (NCCA, 2019). In terms of practical activities, the lack of formal training around enquiry practices during initial teacher training and in-service professional development compounds the issue and has led to a situation where practical activities are taught by recipe and examined by rote (Hyland, 2011; Burns et al., 2018).

This research study, focuses on the enactment of enquiry-based practical activities at secondary and tertiary level and identifies how curricular reform cannot occur without epistemological reform. This type of complex reform requires the development of all three outputs of DBR; thoery, professional development and design of an educational artefact:

Theoretical Framework:

1. Theory:

A theory of enquiry, specific to practical activities, is grounded in the work of Dewey’s complete act of thinking. This offers a view of knowledge as a dynamic end-in-view, constantly reaching into the unknown as an act of inference, “going beyond what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant” (Dewey, 1910/2012). The mind/body dualism that is recognised within recipe teaching dissipates through this lens and is replaced by a focus on consciousness, which supports the process of enquiry. An inductive and deductive process of thinking is essential, where what is learned in one situation is put to an applied use in another, leading to a learning continuum that promotes a conscious search for knowledge.

2. Professional Development:

In addition, Wenger’s (1998) concept of a Community of Practice is employed as a lens through which professional development takes place. Teachers (pre-service and in-service) are gradually brought into a community of enquiry practitioners, firstly through involvement in the three modes of learning (mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire), followed by exposure to a nexus of perspectives (student, teacher, designer) focused on creating a sense of belonging (hence identity) to the enquiry community.

Conceptual Framework:

3. Artefact

A Framework for Teaching Enquiry Activities (FTEA) was developed for teachers to use as a sense-making artefact around which to design and teach practical activities. It’s use an inductive/deductive tool for practical activities is designed to portray the specific theoretical view of enquiry as a pedagogy of uncertainty. When used as a boundary object within a community of practice it leads to an epistemic shift in teachers’ beliefs about knowledge and fosters the “Design Mind” that is required for teachers to engage in curriculum making.

Study switch (Biemans et al., 2020) and isolation due to corona (Van Mol et al., 2021) can lead to difficult intake in and transitions within education and poor future prospects for students. The twofold focus of this research project, carried out at institutions of secondary vocational education (EQF levels 3-4), higher professional education (EQF-level 6), and academic higher education (EQF-level 6), is on guidance practices and on study and work-related interests of students. The research goal is to gain insight into guidance practices with regard to study choice, study career and future orientation, so that more students can find perspective in education and work. This research builds on existing knowledge on this area with extra attention to psychological and social capital, and, additionally, the consideration of future images, interests and skills of young people themselves. In line with the need for more research on this topic, existing insights are validated with student groups from different programs at different educational levels (Slot et al., 2020; Vulperhorst, 2022).

Issues of student dropout, progression and study success have been requiring attention for some time now (Brand-Gruwel et al., 2019; Van den Broek et al., 2020). Less physical education during the covid pandemic led to study delays or feelings of isolation for some students (Van Mol et al., 2021). Although there are many job opportunities nowadays, there is also social and economic uncertainty and many students have doubts about their future. Psychological capital and social capital are important for the well-being of students (Nielsen et al., 2017) and are also positively related to future images of students about themselves as a professional and the possibilities they see for realizing their ambitions related to education and work (Keijzer et al., 2020; Weiss et al., 2019).

Learning experiences with regard to study career guidance, the support experienced and the acquisition of career competences are relevant to the extent to which students experience what they have learned as valuable and applicable (Kuijpers et al., 2011; Mittendorff et al., 2017; Wigfield et al., 2020). Skills such as curiosity, flexibility and risk-taking can help students deal with uncertainties regarding their future orientation and take action at the right time (Yang et al., 2017). In order to find perspective in education and work and to strengthen the well-being of students, it is crucial to connect with the interests of students (Draijer et al., 2020; Quinlan & Renninger, 2022). After all, experiencing interest is beneficial for well-being, learning performance and appreciation of activities at school or elsewhere (Hidi, 2006; Slot et al., 2020). Students often have broad interests, for example with regard to favorite activities and subjects they follow, which also influence their considerations for a profession or further education (Draijer, et al., 2020; Vulperhorst, et al., 2020; Quinlan & Renninger, 2022). Meaningful activities and group work can play a role in this (Renninger, et al., 2019), but also, for example, wanting to achieve a certain goal, focus on personal development, or wanting to participate substantially in a certain practice (cf. Slot, et al., 2020). Existing insights into the development of interest of students in relation to education and work can be better utilized in guiding students in their study choice and study career and can be validated with more target groups (Slot, et al., 2020; Vulperhorst, et al., 2020).

This research builds on existing knowledge with regard to guidance and support with study choice, study career and future orientation, with extra attention to the psychological and social capital of students and to their interests related to education and work, as experienced in the various contexts of their daily life.

Curriculum making is defined as a multi-layered social practice that incorporates the professional selection of knowledge, key skills, values and understanding. It includes pedagogical approaches to learning, teaching and assessment, the production of resources and activities for an inclusive and transformative education that serves the diverse needs of all students in their specific context (Priestley, Alvungar, Philippou & Soini, 2021). Curriculum making takes place across multiple sites of practice (Priestley et al., 2021). At the Supra level, the EU, OECD, World Bank and UNESCO all endeavour to propose a range of curriculum policies, which are often enacted at the macro level by different national agencies who wish to secure curricula promoting the richness of education but also its competitive component (Sahlberg, 2012). Curriculum agencies and schools (Meso and Micro levels) are then tasked with translating these policies into a particular context. Finally, the teacher must employ their judgement and agency to this curriculum by responding to the needs of a diversity of students in their classroom (Nano Level). This research recognises the dynamic interrelationship of all these levels. In curriculum literature, there is a paucity in the role that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) plays in preparing the pre-service teacher for the role of curriculum maker. This research proposes a new level in the strata proposed by Van den Akker & Thijs (2009). The “Pico” level, which on the measurement scale is smaller than Nano, focuses on the pre-service teacher in their preparation of becoming a curriculum maker. This research asks, “How does ITE prepare pre-service teachers in their theoretical, pedagogical and technical knowledge and agency to become a curriculum maker?”

Theoretical Framework

The choice of a theoretical framework takes advice from Deng (2018) who argues that “curriculum theorizing requires the use of theories in an eclectic, critical and creative manner” (p. 705). This eclectic mix of educational theories assist in shedding light on the complex process that builds the pre-service teacher’s identity as a curriculum maker. Our framework uses a Venn diagram, which offers three important pedagogical overlapping and interrelated concepts: Learning, Assessment and Teaching. The theory of learning works from Enactivism (Begg, 1999), which draws from a number of discourses, among them phenomenology, constructivism, ecology, and systems and complexity theories. Enactivism views learning and knowing, as complex, emergent processes by which dynamic agents maintain fitness with one another and within dynamic contexts. (Davis, 1996).

Xu and Brown’s (2016) conceptual framework of teacher assessment literacy in practice, frame the theory of assessment. This six-component framework recognizes that the agency of the teacher to make assessment decisions in practice moves beyond the knowledge base of assessment to “consideration of a situated, dynamic, and evolving system in which teachers constantly make compromises among competing tensions” (p.27). The theory of teaching draws on Biesta and Osberg’s (2010) “logic of emergence” which sees the encounter between student and teacher as the opening up of existential possibilities in education. Biesta (2015) suggests it is less about seeing the subject as that which grasps and comprehends the world, and is more about offering the time and space to situate the subject differently in relation to the world (Biesta, 2013).

At the centre of this Venn diagram is the concept of curriculum making which is a highly dynamic process of interpretation, mediation, negotiation and translation” (Priestley et al., 2021). This research explores and unpacks this complex process and considers how ITE can prepare pre-service teachers, not only for their future identity as curriculum makers, but to become creative innovators as they respond to the multitudinous diversity of the school and classroom culture and context.

This paper explores the place and nature of substantive teacher-teacher, cross-disciplinary dialogue in a time of intensive curriculum development in Wales. It focuses in particular on teacher dialogue across traditional subject boundaries in a curriculum where disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are encouraged. Teachers in different subject disciplines can have diverse views about the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is constructed and how pupils best make progress within that disciplinary tradition. If a curriculum is to be interdisciplinary, teachers from diverse disciplines need to come together and discuss their different approaches to knowledge in order for pupils to have a coherent curriculum experience. Within current debates on the place of knowledge in the curriculum in England and beyond (Muller & Young, 2019; Niemela, 2020), less is known about how knowledge works across disciplinary boundaries. Rigorous interdisciplinary education is of increasing interest in educational contexts beyond England. The OECD Education and Skills 2030 project (OECD, 2019) recognises disciplinary, interdisciplinary, epistemic and procedural as four different types of knowledge. Priestly and Biesta (2013) have pointed to the emergence of a “new curriculum” across Europe and beyond which has emphasised the autonomy of schools and teachers in making the curriculum. Almeida, Sousa and Figueirdo (2022), in their study of European curriculum autonomy, have pointed to growing evidence of the importance of the empowerment of teachers in the curriculum design process.

This paper builds on research from a large-scale project funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation exploring beginning teachers confidence and competence in experiences of science/religion encounters in the classroom. This project revealed some of the processes necessary to effect meaningful encounters between two contrasting curriculum subjects, for example an understanding of the purpose of the other subject. In focus groups and an online survey, teachers of science and religious education revealed some misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of the other curriculum subject (Woolley et al., 2022). This raised questions about whether and how secondary school teachers can gain an up-to-date understanding of other subjects on the curriculum in order to provide a coherent educational experience for pupils. Teachers were also asked to describe the relationship between departments of science and religious education, using an adapted version of Barbour’s (1990) typology and the words conflict, independence, dialogue, collaboration and integration (Woolley et al., 2023). Findings showed that departments were overwhelmingly independent, with little dialogue or collaboration taking place.

This finding is not surprising in English schools, where disciplinary knowledge and discrete subjects are valued by government policy and the inspectorate. However, in Wales, Scotland and other countries across Europe, interdisciplinary learning is more valued. It is our contention that disciplinary study should provide the structure for the curriculum, but that interdisciplinary understanding is also necessary, whether through critical overarching topics such as climate change or points where curriculum subjects intersect, such as origins of the universe or gender identity. Pupils need to have a coherent experience of the curriculum, and that involves teachers being aware of how their subjects intersect and interrelate with other subjects on the full curriculum.

Two research questions guide this paper. The first, what research exists on teacher-teacher dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and how is ‘deeper’ dialogue encouraged? The second, what place is there for teacher-teacher dialogue across curriculum boundaries in the Curriculum for Wales and how might this be best supported? Questions of teacher autonomy underpin curriculum development and enactment, but curriculum innovation is also a critical site for teacher professional learning. As Curriculum for Wales is embedded, it becomes a vital site to explore the intersection between teacher dialogue and interdisciplinary curriculum innovation.

For the past three decades Kazakhstan has undergone many transformations in the higher education system (Ahn et al., 2018). In particular, Kazakhstan’s universities have witnessed significant changes in the content of curriculum (Kerimkulova & Kuzhabekova, 2017). For example, Kazakh education policymakers asked the teaching body to modernise the content of the curriculum and change the way in which faculty work by aligning it more closely with the Bologna process (Maudarbekova & Kashkinbayeva, 2014). However, no studies have been done on how faculty members enact curriculum reforms in practice in Kazakh higher education system. Therefore, the purpose of this ethnographic study is to explore how faculty members of one foreign languages department are enacting the changes in curriculum and teaching policy implemented in Kazakhstan’s public higher education system and their experiences in changing their teaching and learning practices. This research analyses the reaction and response of faculty members to the ambitious goals laid out by Kazakhstan’s policymakers, and how educators interpret and work in response to these aims.

The following research questions will be addressed:

1. What are the perspectives of faculty members in one public university in Kazakhstan on curriculum and teaching policyreform?

2. How do faculty members enact curriculum and teaching policy in practice?

3. What are the factors that facilitate or impede the adoption of curriculum and teaching policy?

The theoretical framework of policy enactment into practice will guide this study (Ball et al., 2012). This theory will help to understand how curriculum and teaching policies work in practice. The significance of this theory in this study is that it has not previously been applied in post-Soviet higher education contexts, and so potentially will make an original contribution to knowledge by gaining insights and knowledge how faculty are enacting changes in curriculum and teaching policy. This theory will enable me to study this particular issue in all its complexity and gain some valuable insights into how policies work in practice.

The research findings of this study will contribute to existing knowledge by contributing to the limited literature on higher education curriculum and policy enactment in Kazakhstan. The findings of this study may serve as a recommendation for policy makers to facilitate the enactment of teaching policy in practice. Also, research-based evidence of the enactment of teaching policy might be useful for faculty to reflect on their own experiences and practices, by improving their program and teaching practices.

This paper examines the contribution of a group of critical curriculum scholars – among others, Michael Apple (1990), Henry Giroux, 1981), and Peter Mclaren (1986) - in the struggle for a U.S. curriculum and their commitment towards a more just society and education. The paper situates such a group of critical thinkers within a radical critical curriculum river framing a particular generation of utopia (Paraskeva, 2022; 2021). The paper frames such a generation as a substantive part of a great legacy of struggles in the field against inequality, segregation, poverty, and oppression. In so doing, the paper scrutinizes the accomplishments and frustrations of such a generation in the struggle against the epistemological privilege of positivist and functionalist curriculum impulses (Walker, 1985). In this regard, the paper highlights how such a generation coined the field politically and championed a new vocabulary, as well as their erroneous persistence in laboring fundamentally within a Modern Western Eurocentric platform to smash curriculum as a eugenic sorting machine (Selden, 1999). The paper also underlines how the wrangles between dominant and counter-dominant traditions not only could not avoid the epistemicidal nature of the curriculum but also drove the field into a theoretical involution, a regression, a dead-lock (Paraskeva, 2016; Schubert, 2017; Jupp; 2017). To address such regression, the paper argues for the need to decolonize Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant approaches and advances the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a new influential discourse (Pinar, 2013), a just approach to champion the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide; the paper places ICT as a decolonial curriculum theory turn (Andreoti. 2022). The paper ends by questioning some of the ‘silences’ produced by the critical curriculum hemisphere and calling for ‘the death’ of traditional/conventional ways to produce critical curriculum theory - Eurocentrically fully saturated - to de-link the critical theoretical out of the coloniality matrix. While honoring the rich legacy of the generation of utopia, the paper advocates the itinerant curriculum theory as a just path capable of responding to the world’s epistemological different differences (Paraskeva, 2022)

Education systems across international contexts are currently challenged with requirements to include representation of diverse perspectives, understandings and knowledges into their school curriculum and pedagogy. These calls result from insights about the importance of ensuring that equity initiatives are not just focused on redistribution of resources, but also foreground the recognitive and representational dimensions of an equitable, socially just education system (Fraser, 2008). In Australia this is playing out within the national curriculum space, with the call to include content about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and knowledges supposedly being met by their inclusion as cross curriculum priorities within Australia’s national curriculum. Despite these inclusions, public and political debates about Indigenous content in the curriculum continue to swirl within the media, and research suggests that few teachers are engaging their students in this dimension of the curriculum. These same curriculum contestations are evident in education systems across the globe, where traditionally marginalized groups are voicing their expectations for the curriculum to represent a more diverse range of knowledge systems, languages, social, cultural and religious practices than has occurred until now.

There is currently limited empirical understanding of secondary school teachers’ approaches, attitudes, and capabilities for teaching the curriculum content that is not from the dominant culture of a society, and the disciplinary structures that underpin these. In this paper we report on a study of these relevant issues, where the focus was on the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content into the national curriculum. While the study looked closely at the Australian context, these issues have global relevance in policy landscapes of hyper diversity. Prior research has considered the barriers to teachers taking on more inclusive curriculum practices as relating to curriculum structures (Beresford & Gray, 2006); lack of confidence on the part of teachers (O’Keeffe, Paige & Osborne, 2019) and their fears of ‘offending’ community sensibilities (Burgess & Evans, 2017); and the impact of the disjuncture created for teacher practice by the socio-political, epistemic and cognitive constraints built into the curriculum (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013) and the curriculum design (Maxwell, Lowe & Salter, 2018). This systemic, socio-political work of the curriculum foregrounds the dominant, disciplinary knowledges and their structures and delegitimises other ways of knowing and being.

The study aims to answer the following research question. How, why and what issues affect the development and impact of teachers’ meaningful engagement with curriculum content from diverse perspectives?

To do this, the study brings together ideas about epistemic cognition to understand how teachers assess the validity, certainty, reliability and limits of their own knowledges, with a focus on the development of the secondary subject orientated curriculum and its adherence to the core knowledge claims of the disciplines (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). The focus on Indigenous ways of knowing requires a third conceptual element to unpack what Nakata (2007) has termed the cultural interface. Within this framing, the tensions between Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and the claims of western schooling systems play out as alternative knowledge systems that vie for attention in the curriculum and in classroom settings. Nakata’s framing of the cultural interface acknowledges the damaging impact of western disciplinary knowledges on Indigenous thinking and identity, but also provides insights into understanding the socio-cultural potentialities and limitations of the teaching and learning content that is other than western disciplinary content within the current curriculum structures. The positive potentials frame a context where two or more knowledge systems might exist in the official curriculum in ways that create new knowledge without the dominant disciplinary knowledges making all other knowledge systems subservient.

Since the introduction of public schooling, Bildung has been and still is a central concept in education theory and curriculum policy in Continental and Nordic Europe. Presently, for example, the concept appears in the latest Norwegian, Swedish and Danish curriculum frameworks. In this article, we rely on ongoing systematic review of educational research on Bildung to explore different and evolving conceptions of Bildung in educational scholarship published in English over past 30 years and what implications those conceptions have for present day curriculum theory, policy and practice. The main research questions are: (1) What are the main themes and topics elaborated in literature regarding Bildung and curriculum? (2) What are main arguments and conclusions of the scholars regarding Bildung and curriculum? And (3) How do Bildung and curriculum shape curriculum theory, policy and practice nationally and trans-nationally?

Theoretically, the paper draws on Bildung-based Didaktik to frame the discussion on Bildung more generally (Hopmann, 2007; Klafki, 2000, 1998), but it will also build up from the conceptions and frames found in the articles included in the final pool for analysis that specifically address Bildung in/and curriculum.

This paper introduces and offers an analytical framework for systematic research reviews and analyses of curriculum in policy and practice, applied on Swedish research on vocational education and training (VET) over the last 20 years. VET is a sprawling, interdisciplinary and eclectic research field. Following the debates on the ‘curricular turn’ towards what is referred to as 21^st century skills curricula (Priestley & Sinnema, 2014), VET has been a recurring theme in discussions within the field of curriculum studies over the last decades (Bathmaker, 2013; Boutseleng-Allais & Shalem, 2018; Hordern, 2014; Kemmis & Green, 2013; Muller & Young, 2019; Wheelahan, 2015).

In recent years, scholars of curriculum – myself included – have explored constructive ways of grappling with questions regarding curriculum in policy and practice by viewing curriculum as multi-layered social practices. From that point of view teachers are considered as makers—and not deliverers—of curriculum together with other actors in their contexts (Doyle, 1992; Priestley et al. 2021). The analytical framework for the research review in this paper draws from an understanding of curriculum making across intertwined ‘sites of activity’, which seeks to expand beyond institutional models and conceptions of curriculum (Priestley et al, 2021):

• On the supra site of activity, curriculum making occurs through transnational curricular discourse generation, policy borrowing and lending, policy learning mediated through actors like the OECD, World Bank, UNESCO and the EU.
• National governments and curriculum agencies develop curriculum policy frameworks and legislation to establish agencies and infrastructure on the macro site of activity. These processes of interpretation and formulation of curriculum might be influenced by, for example, actors on the supra site or the micro site.
• Depending on the character of the education system, national governments and curriculum agencies might act on the meso site of activity. However, on this site we commonly find actors such as district authorities, textbook publishers, curriculum brokers, subject-area counsellors, and expert teachers. Common activities comprise production of guidance, leadership of and support for curriculum making and production of resources.
• Official curriculum documents are products of interpretation and translation. When adapted to local contexts in schools on the micro site of activity, they are again transformed and recontextualised in cycles of interpretation through school level curriculum making, programme design and lesson-planning by principals, senior leaders, middle leaders and teachers.
• In classrooms – the nano site of activity – teachers and students negotiate and produce curriculum events via daily pedagogic transactions.

The metaphor of curriculum making as what actors do is helpful in many ways. Firstly, it embraces perspectives and conceptual distinctions between the Anglo-American curriculum tradition and the northern and continental European tradition of Bildung-centred didactics (Hopmann, 2007; Klette, 2007). Secondly, it allows for seeing beyond institutional levels and instead focusing on the specific texture and granularity of processes and actors on sites of social activity across education systems (Alvunger et al., 2021). Thirdly, with the focus on practices associated with the curriculum, it provides an analytical tool for studying the complexity of VET. Against this backdrop, I will use curriculum making as social practice as developed by Priestley et al (2021) to explore and discuss potential gaps in Swedish VET curriculum research.Three sets of questions are asked: Which dominating sites of activity, actors and processes emerge in Swedish research on VET curriculum making? What are main themes and emphases in the research? What potential gaps can be identified and how may these inform future research?

Introduction – Although the concept of ‘student voice’ has gained in popularity in recent years, the majority of studies continue to position students as passive recipients of education developed by others (Pinter, Mathew & Smith, 2016). Indeed, “while the curriculum supposedly exists to serve the interests of learners, their preferences, if sought at all, are marginalised and their voices are mostly silent in curriculum making” (Brooker & Macdonald, 1999, p.84). Rather, the curriculum should be created through a systematic and purposeful collaboration between teachers and students, in which the latter are afforded opportunities to shape and develop the aims and content of their education (Brooker & Macdonald, 1999; Enright & O’Sullivan, 2010; Guadalupe & Curtner-Smith, 2020; Oliver & Kirk, 2015). Our objective is to better meet the needs and wishes of (vulnerable) vocational education students by including these students and their teachers in planning, acting/observing and reflecting on the life skills curriculum. The following questions will be answered: (1) How and when do (vulnerable) vocational education students participate in curriculum negotiation?, (2) What are relevant factors that influence the implementation of curriculum negotiation activities in this context? and (3) What is the impact of participating in curriculum negotiation activities on (vulnerable) vocational education students’ personal development and school connectedness?

Methods – Participatory Action Research was selected as the methodological and theoretical framework. This study was conducted with two classes of a large vocational education institution in the south of the Netherlands. Class 1 consisted of 12 students (17-20 years old) and their teacher. Class 2 consisted of 15 Syrian students (17-19 years old) and their teacher. The first round of data collection took place between June 2022 and January 2023. A second round will start in February 2023 in which the number of participating classes will be expanded. Students were asked to devise, develop and carry out a lesson for their peers. The following methods were used: participant observation, taking field notes, researcher journal entries, critical reflections and focus group discussions with students and interviews with teachers. The Theoretical Domains Framework was used for thematic content analysis (Davis, Campbell, Hildon, Hobbs & Michie, 2015; Michie et al., 2005). In our case, the TDF contributed to establishing those factors that influence the implementation of curriculum negotiation activities as well as reflecting on the impact on students’ development and their school connectedness.

Results – As we are still in the process of collecting data, the results and conclusions are preliminary. We expect to have the final results and conclusions ready this Summer. The methodology allowed students to be the driving force during the planning and acting/observing phase. Each group of students co-created and made decisions about for example content, activities, location and speakers for their own lesson. Some relevant factors that influenced implementation were teacher competences, knowledge, skills, beliefs about capabilities and relationship between teacher and students. Students gained knowledge and practised skills while planning, developing and carrying out their own lesson, Moreover, while participating in the lessons developed by their peers, they got into contact with topics that interested them. Also, students’ motivation, participation and engagement increased. They also gained more insights into what it entails to design an informative lesson. Students found it difficult to come up with activities which were interactive and engaging as many of them only had previous experience with lessons which are predominantly instructional and one-directional.

Conclusions – Future research should assess whether this methodology would also be suitable for other subjects as well as in different school contexts. Also, more insight is needed which examines if such methodologies can fit within existing educational structures.

This presentation explores what it means to adopt a knowledge-based approach to curriculum integration and examines the kinds of conditions set by knowledge integration with respect to teaching and curriculum design. The research question is: What kind of conditions knowledge sets for curriculum integration and how these conditions can be acknowledged in curriculum making? The presentation is based on Niemelä’s (2022a) doctoral thesis but looks beyond the thesis to outline concrete ideas for curriculum innovation.

In this presentation, curriculum integration refers to the integration of educational knowledge or to the building of an interdisciplinary curriculum with the objective of making learning more holistic. Key questions pertaining to curriculum integration include how to differentiate between and integrate knowledge within and across the boundaries of school subjects. However, school subjects have often been claimed to contradict curriculum integration because the subjects seemingly fragment the curriculum. Certain approaches to inquiry learning or project-based learning aim at transdisciplinary curriculum integration in which the boundaries of school subjects are considered as boundaries for holistic learning. In turn, this presentation aims to reason why the disciplines of knowledge matter for curriculum integration and how the disciplines are vital for building an interdisciplinary curriculum.

The argumentation of the presentation leans on three published papers (Niemelä, 2021, 2022b; Niemelä & Tirri, 2018) and makes an overarching conclusion based on them. Two of the research papers are theoretical, while the other applies quantitative empirical methods. The studies identify three major conditions affecting curriculum integration. The first study presents curriculum integration as a challenge for teachers because it expands the demands of teacher knowledge. The second study points to the subject-matter specific character of curriculum integration, meaning that not all subjects can be equally integrated with one another. Given that curriculum integration creates challenges for teachers and is subject-matter specific, the third study suggests that it needs to be addressed more clearly as an issue concerning the organisation of educational knowledge in the written curriculum.

Two theoretical frameworks are used to examine the conditions of knowledge-based curriculum integration. First, to study the requirements of teacher knowledge and how they change when curriculum is integrated, Lee Shulman’s (1986, 2015) construct of pedagogical content knowledge is applied. Then, to examine why knowledge matters at the level of written curriculum, the presentation draws on discussions about powerful knowledge in education initiated by Michael F.D. Young and Johan Muller (2016). These two theoretical frameworks serve in a mutually complementary way to assess both the level of teaching and that of curriculum design.

School leadership is regarded as fundamental in ensuring that children with special educational needs (SEN) experience success in school (Mac Ruairc, Ottesen and Precey, 2013). While there are many different facets to leadership in the school context, in the SEN field the literature predominantly focuses on the centrality of leadership for bringing about ‘inclusion’ broadly (Morrissey, 2021). The emphasis on how leadership can be leveraged specifically towards ‘universalizing curricula’ (Norwich and Lewis 2007, p. 127) or at the very least making curricula more accessible for children with SEN is almost negligible. This dearth of data on curriculum leadership in the SEN sphere is reflective of the wider research landscape in education with Harris, Jones and Crick (2020, p.1) finding that curriculum leadership is ‘less well developed’ than other conceptualisations of educational leadership. This paper aims to address this gap in the scholarship, with a particular emphasis on special schools as a context for practice.

Norwich’s (2010) theoretical framework for curriculum design underpinned this study, which formed part of a broader doctoral inquiry. As part of this framework, Norwich (2010, p.133) posits four basic ‘aspects’ as a structure for curricula:

• General principles and aims;
• Areas of learning (for example subject areas);
• Specific programmes of study;
• Teaching practices.

Modification to one or more of these aspects changes the accessibility level of the curriculum, in particular for those with SEN. Stemming from this, this paper aims to address the core question:

• What role does leadership play in complex curricular modification processes and how does this manifest itself to increase curricular accessibility?

A mandatory Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curricular programme in Ireland is used as the vehicle to probe this area. While focused specifically on leadership, the paper explores curriculum enactment in a lateral way, with Shawer’s (2010) curriculum approaches interrogated for their relevance in the SEN sphere. Essentially, the paper examines whether special education teachers are curriculum transmitters, curriculum developers or curriculum makers and scrutinises the mediating function that leadership plays in each of these different curricular roles.

Although rooted in Ireland, this paper will interest scholars in other European jurisdictions given the dearth of data on curriculum leadership and its importance in making curricula accessible for those with SEN. Schools across the continent are embracing inclusive schooling – curriculum leadership is fundamental towards ensuring that curricula are accessible to all learners (Norwich, 2010). Furthermore, this paper will showcase how external inspection, as a key influencer, can impinge on how curriculum leadership is enacted. This adds significantly to the paper’s relevance from a European perspective, as teachers and schools across Europe are subject to greater levels of regulation in order to operationalise, at the micro level, curricula that are introduced at the macro level (Priestley et al., 2021). This paper offers insights into how that operationalisation process takes place at classroom level in relation to one particular curricular programme in Irish special schools.

This overview study has been commissioned by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO) with the overall aim of collecting evidence for the design of a curriculum change strategy that aligns with the current review of the Dutch curriculum frameworks. This comprehensive review is taking place of all curriculum frameworks for all subjects and learning areas in Dutch primary and secondary education. The review has a twofold aim: (i) to provide a substantive update of and more coherence in and among the curriculum frameworks, and (ii) to offer clearer guidance and better support to teachers, school leaders and other stakeholders for curriculum enactment efforts in schools and classrooms.

To support the review process, our study sought answers to the following overarching research question: What fundamental tensions and trade-offs should be taken into account when designing a theory of change for the upcoming Dutch curriculum review? In order to answer this overall question, the following sub-questions have been posed:

SQ1: What are, in general, potentially effective (elements of) large-scale curriculum change processes in basic education (age 4-18 years)?

SQ2: How do, in general, large-scale curriculum change processes (in particular regarding integrated curriculum revisions) develop in basic education (age 4-18 years), both at the national level and at the school level?

SQ3: For the Netherlands, what are potentially effective interventions to promote and realize curriculum change in schools and classrooms?

The paper has tried to answer the following questions.

1) Do different groups of educators in a Scottish local authority differ in their curricular narratives?

2) Which factors influence educators’ curricular narratives?

The answers to these questions are important in order to understand the conditions (global, local, institutional, personal) that shape curricular narratives among different groups of teachers. Since teachers are the key players in curricular enactment (Alvunger et al., 2017), it is important to study their curricular narratives. The findings of this study have implications for teachers’ professional development in Scotland as well as other countries, especially where curricular standards focus on developing students’ competencies (abilities, skills, dispositions).

The past two decades witness an increased focus on learning skills in schools. This can be seen internationally, for example in OECD concept notes ‘OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (OECD, 2019), ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ (2010) and ‘The Statement of National Education and Learning Priorities and Tertiary Education Strategy’, New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2020). This new focus has led to a renewed discussion, in many parts of the world, on the purpose and content of curriculum (Priestley, 2011; Wheelahan, 2015; Young, 2008).

There is no consensus among curriculum scholars on the purpose of curriculum. Cheung and Wong (2002) argue that the purpose of the school curriculum is to “provide each student with intrinsically rewarding experiences that contribute to personal liberation and development. Integration of students’ affective domain (emotions, attitudes, values) with the cognitive domain (intellectual knowledge and abilities) is the top priority” (Cheung & Wong, 2002, p.227). On the other hand, Young (2014) sees the role of school curriculum beyond promoting well-being and human flourishing. He believes that well-being and human-flourishing can be promoted by the institutions of family and businesses (that do not have a curriculum). To him, the purpose of school curriculum is to provide all students access to powerful knowledge (Young, 2014), a knowledge that brings intellectual power to those who have access to it (Young, 2008).

Powerful knowledge has emerged as a key debate in curriculum theory in recent years. Contradictory to the knowledge of the powerful which is ahistorical and decontextualized, ‘social realism’ recognizes that knowledge is historical and “is produced within forms of sociality that are enduring and extensive in time and space and have their own distinctive structures, powers and limitations” (Moore, 2013, p.346). Knowledge-based curriculum impacts the content of school subjects whereas the curriculum rooted in student interests, or social demands (work skills, safety, values) involve content-free process (Yates & Miller, 2016). Subject-based curriculum is pivotal in generating powerful knowledge. Unlike everyday concepts, the concepts associated with a subject-based curriculum are not tied to specific contexts; rather they are linked to each other and the subject related theories (Young, 2013). Rooted in ‘social realist’ school within the sociology of education (Moore, 2013; Muller, 2022; Wheelahan, 2015; Young, 2013, 2014), this study explores narratives about curriculum purpose among different groups of educators.

Biesta et al. (2017) note that teachers’ talk of curriculum and pedagogy is influenced by a number of factors such as generation effect, responsibilities/ roles and trends in educational discourse. Our study further tries to understand the diversity of factors that shape educators’ curricular narratives. The study particularly explores if role diversity (headship role, principal teacher role, primary teacher role, secondary teacher role) and educators’ personal practical or professional knowledge shape curricular narratives. Biesta et al. (2017) label teachers’ personal practical knowledge as teachers’ ‘stock of knowledge’ and argue is “gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers’ ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself” (p. 38).

The overall aim of this paper is to explore and theorize on local school governance. In Sweden, as in many other decentralized school systems, extensive responsibility and autonomy has been delegated to Local Educational Authorities (LEA) concerning school management; as well as attaining and securing educational quality. However, ages of declining student achievement and deficient equality between schools have spurred extensive criticism against the Swedish school system. This criticism has resulted in a recentralisation trend, where the state has successively taken a stronger control over schools' outcomes in terms of, for example, an establishment of a Swedish School Inspectorate in 2008 with the aim to strengthen the national audit and monitoring of schools; ii) a reformation of the Education Act in 2010, emphasizing local authorities’ responsibility for educational quality, student achievement, and equality; iii) the initiation of a number of national professional development programs; and iv) a national curriculum with strengthened national knowledge standards, assessment criteria, and a predefined knowledge corpus. Considering such a ‘re-centralization’ movement, new conditions between the state, the LEA and the schools has emerged (Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017a; Adolfsson, 2018). In the light of such a changing governing landscape, questions linked to local school governance can be raised concerning how the LEA navigate and handle the tension between strengthened state regulation and LEA’s responsibility for educational quality. Based on results from two research projects, conducted in two large-sized Swedish municipalities, the following research question is guiding this paper:

In the light of an emerging re-centralization movement in Sweden, what governing strategies and actions do the LEAs apply to control and manage the schools with aim to attaining and securing educational quality?

Considering a ‘classical’ perspective of school governance (Lindesjö & Lundgren, 2014) four aspects of governance is often mentioned: regulation, economy, ideology (content) and evaluation. This paper offer a complementary perspective on school governance. In this paper, school governance are understood and studied in light of an organizational and neo-institutional theoretical framework (Orton &Weick, 1990; Scott, 2008). The school system is considered as a coupled system composing of different subsystems. From that perspective, school governance is understood as an effort to strengthen the couplings between these different subsystems (e.g. the national curriculum and the teaching practice) to attain a more coherent school system. In light of such coupling aspirations, three dimensions can be highlighted regarding how institutions try to control and affect other institutions, respond to external pressure, and seek legitimacy: regulative (rules and sanctions), normative (prevalent norms, expectations and ideals), and cognitive-cultural/discursive (shared conceptions and frames of sense-making) (Scott, 2008). These theoretical concepts enable to explore and distinghuish the character of different strategies and actions that LEA undertake concerning the local governance of the schools.

Despite the commitment by governments and educational leaders to high-quality and high-equity systems, the defining features of contemporary schooling in liberal democracies are increasing inequality and the uneven distribution of educational opportunities and outcomes (OECD, 2022). Given the challenges of the twenty-first century and the complex set of crises facing young people as they move through the world (Riddle, 2022), it is imperative that we develop new concepts of curriculum, which are committed to providing young people with the best chance of success, but especially for those who have been most marginalised by society’s economic, social and cultural structures. Therefore, it is timely to consider what the concept of curricular justice means for schooling in the twenty-first century (Mills et al., 2022).

This paper argues for a rich, common curriculum that provides all young people with learning choices that have relevance to their worlds, contribute to the preparation for work or further education, alongside opportunities for engagement with a broader knowledge base connected to critical understandings of culture and society. To that end, we have developed a curricular framework of ‘knowledge+plus’, which is committed to the tripartite social justice principles of redistribution, recognition and representation (Fraser, 2004), and brings together powerful knowledge (Young, 2008) and young people’s community funds of knowledge (Moll, 2019) in a common curriculum (Fielding & Moss, 2011; Kelly, 2004). A rich, common curriculum is not an identical curriculum for all students, but rather is developed from a set of common elements, in which ‘young people engage with important disciplinary concepts, are intellectually challenged, and enabled to critically frame knowledge, which is connected to their lives and experiences, while also drawing on broader cultural and social meaning-making practices’ (Mills et al., 2022, p. 350). Such a common curriculum is essential for an inclusive schooling, which can deliver on the promise of a high-quality and high-equity education system for all young people.

The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (e.g., Scottish Executive, 2004; Scottish Government, 2008) has been widely acknowledged as the most significant educational development in Scotland in a generation (Priestley & Humes, 2010). Implemented from 2010, the holistic, competency-based curriculum for those aged 3-18 years seeks to prepare children and young people for the workplace and citizenship in the 21st century (Scottish Government, 2009).

Previous studies have examined how the breadth of the Scottish secondary curriculum (defined as the number of entries to National 5 qualifications in year 4 of secondary education in Scotland, S4) narrowed under CfE (Shapira & Priestley, 2018, 2019) and investigated the relationship between CfE breadth and attainment in school (Shapira et al., 2022).

Given the four capacities framework of CfE, one might assume that students exposed to a broad upper secondary curriculum would not only attain better academic results and move to positive destinations, but also develop skills and competences that indicate they have a better understanding of the complexities of modern societies, awareness of the world and its contemporary problems, cultural openness and sensitivity, self-awareness and resilience, and active citizenship. In other words, it seems that the breadth of the secondary curriculum could be linked to measures of the OECD global competencies.

This paper aims to explore the relationships between the measures of competence of 15-year-old students in Scotland, available in the 2018 Scotland’s PISA dataset, and the breadth of the secondary curriculum experienced by 15-16 year-olds in state-funded secondary schools in Scotland.

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

The trend followed by several European education systems opens to the possibility of making the curriculum offered to students in each school more flexible, more tailor made. However, such trend has been unequally appropriated by systems, teachers and schools (Priestley et. al. 2021).

Explanations of this difference could rely on curriculum traditions that have been framing such educational systems ( Kuiper et. al. 2008). Also, part of this inequality can be explained by the difficulty felt by many teachers and schools in assuming their agency in terms of curriculum decisions.

However, due to increasing traveling policies and international pressure made by OECD and other transnational institutions , acknowledgement regarding such differences have been appropriated by educational advisors and have been the support to Erasmus+ teacher mobility at the school level.

“… the continuous impulse given by European institutions to the mobility of non-university teaching staff supports the idea of the benefits of its completion towards improving the quality of education in European Union member states.” Salcedo-López &Cuevas-López, ,2021, 6).

Has the contact with other education systems and with other teachers from other countries, stimulated by the networks established within the scope of the ERASMUS+ programme, contributed to raising the awareness of teachers who might act otherwise?

Following the perspective of Biesta et al, (2015), we understand teachers' curriculum agency as the teacher's ability to recontextualize policies and translate them into their field of action.

It is a question of exerting a double effort of interpreting the purposes that the policies have defined and of taking local action, which reconfigures and encourages student learning.

That frames the purpose of this proposal - to contribute to the discussion about the effects that these mobilities have had on the power of curricular agency of teachers from two European countries.

Its objectives are:

To relate international mobility experience with curricular agency of teachers from two European countries

To research in two countries the impact of how international experience has encouraged curriculum making in both the school and the classroom.

To identify the impact of mobility on Schools curricular options.

The English language dominates almost all aspects of our daily life, not only in third-world countries like Bangladesh but throughout the world to meet the various needs of communication. Bangladesh uses English for other purposes as well, but in general, to enrol in universities, to migrate overseas for jobs, to study abroad and to work and continue business internationally. Moreover, the ability to communicate effectively in English is also considered an important quality in many job sectors, especially in corporate settings. The ability to communicate in English provides individuals with more opportunities to achieve a suitable position in the job market with an acceptable salary, contributing to economic growth and poverty reduction and achieving sustainable goals in a broader sense (Roshid, 2018).
Different strategies have been taken by the government of Bangladesh to implement standardized English language education in the country, including the revision of the curriculum several times. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was introduced for the first time in 1995 with the hope to improve communicative competence of learners. During the implementation process, a significant gap is observed between the policy aspiration and the resources due to a shortage of teachers with competency in English and teaching skills. To address the situation, government took different strategies and arranged training programs for the in-service teachers to implement CLT successfully in classroom practice and achieve its goal with the support from different Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and foreign donor agencies.
Despite different initiatives, teachers failed to demonstrate significant improvements in classroom practice after completing the training (Huda, 2015). Thus, students who complete their secondary education are likely to enter higher education, outside and inside the country, with a smattering of English language skills. Therefore, students in Bangladeshi universities are still facing difficulties in both speaking and listening to regular class activities despite studying English as a compulsory subject from Grade 1 to Grade 12. It is because of the lack of speaking and listening practices at school and college levels (Shurovi, 2014). The competence in both listening and speaking skills is challenging for students studying at overseas universities, seeking a better job, and networking for social survival (Roshid & Chowdhury, 2013).
In this study, the challenges and gaps in effective training for oral skills from the perspectives of policymakers and teachers were identified to address implementation barriers to help learners proficient in oral skills of English. Finally, it concludes by proposing a conceptual framework for minimizing gaps between the policy and practice to enable more effective implementation of curriculum for oral skills in the future. The present study addresses the following research question:
RQ: How do curriculum policy and practice on oral skills affect English language education at the secondary level in Bangladesh?
The theoretical framework of this study is a “grounded” one as the contextual phenomenon was "grounded" in data, which can provide a better explanation than a theory borrowed "off the shelf" (Creswell, 2012). It does not limit the role of the research in the process-making but gives choices to make categories of interpretation, connect questions to the data, and interweave personal values and experiences (Creswell & Poth, 2018).

Wales is in the process of major educational reform. The new curriculum (Curriculum for Wales, CfW) commenced in schools in September 2022. CfW differs from the previous curriculum through its focus on four purposes representing a “shared vision and aspiration” for every learner and by articulating learners' progression through six areas of learning and experience. In contrast to the previous performative culture in Wales (Evans, 2022), CfW suggests a more developmental view of learning. Also central to CfW is the principle of subsidiarity. Similar to ‘new curriculum’ in Finland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, CfW shifts away from top-down policy and gives schools and teachers greater autonomy (Sinnema et al., 2020). Professional understandings of progression in learning, and a recognition that learners start at different points and progress in different ways, are meant to form the basis for schools’ curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy arrangements (Welsh Government, 2021).

In support of this, Camau i’r Dyfodol (Steps to the Future) is a three-year project designed to support the realisation of CfW by working with teachers and educational partners across the system to advance practical understandings of learning progression. This presentation shares some findings from phase one of our project, which aimed to understand where educational partners are in the change process at the start of CfW and supports needed to move forward. We engaged in conversations with professionals from across the system to address the following research questions:

1. What influences are there on current and future curriculum realisation?

1. How are educational partners moving their identified priorities forward for curriculum realisation?

1. How can new knowledge from co-construction activity be fed back into the system in ways that are meaningful?

As a theoretical frame for this work, we bring together the concepts of curriculum coherence, co-construction, and praxis into an adapted Integrity Model of Educational Change for Wales. This model incorporates systemic integrity, personal and professional integrity, and educational integrity, three dimensions essential throughout the change process (Hayward & Spencer, 2010).

Systemic integrity reflects shared commitment and coherence between constituent parts of the education system. Within curriculum reform, coherence is sometimes conceptualised between the intended and enacted curriculum; or between curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy (Jin et al., 2019). Soini et al. (2022) explicate curriculum coherence in Finland along dimensions of the intended direction and goals of the curriculum, an integrative approach to teaching and learning, and alignment between objectives, content, and assessment. Next, personal and professional integrity reflects a belief that what one is doing matters, enabling teachers to develop their own understandings (Hayward & Spencer, 2010). Co-construction has been integral to achieve this in the context of CfW, and was empowering but also challenging for teachers engaged in curriculum design (Hayward et al., 2020). We define co-construction as a process of constructing new knowledge through collaborative practice (Parsons, 2021) and as a disposition towards learning that involves participants actively ‘knotworking’ together to negotiate solutions (Engeström, 2004, p.17). Finally, educational integrity reflects how change can enhance learning. We draw from the concept of praxis here, whereby teachers enact practice to build theory and reflect upon theory when making practical decisions. Pedagogical praxis can be a challenge in the new curriculum reform as a clear theory of progression in learning is needed to inform practice.

In this presentation, we share findings to the research questions and discuss how these inform phase two of our project. Wales has adopted a number of the OECD’s (2018) principles for the future of education systems, and thus insights gained through this research will be of interest to other countries taking similar approaches.

Recent curriculum policy, both in Europe and elsewhere, emphasizes the importance of teacher involvement in curriculum development (Priestley & Biesta, 2013), and research has showed that teachers are increasingly defined as key actors in education reform and are expected to participate in curriculum work to act as agents of change (Mølstad & Prøitz, 2018; Priestley et al., 2012). Traditionally, subject experts from higher education as well as government administrators have been the most important actors in curriculum development processes, as they are highly knowledgeable of the field and can often pull great political legitimacy (Levin, 2008), so this new development can be considered a shift in views where teacher agency and involvement have become more important (Priestley et al., 2016). Further, it is emphasized in reform implementation studies that teachers need ownership of a reform in order to implement the new curriculum into their practices (Aasen & Sandberg, 2010). Consequently, a logic advocating the importance of teacher involvement in curriculum development processes has spread (Kirk & MacDonald, 2001; Westbury, 2008). This shift underscores the importance of research into how these processes work and the influence and role teachers have in curriculum development.

This study focuses on a central part of curriculum development, namely government-appointed curriculum committees mandated to make recommendations for national curricula, which is a common way of organizing curriculum development in Europe. Research has shown that these committees have much influence on the final official curriculum (Westbury et al., 2016). As an example for study, this paper zooms in on a recent curriculum development process in Norway. In 2020, Norway introduced a new national curriculum, called the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 (LK20), where co-creation and partnerships with the education sector were important policy elements of the development process. Teachers, in particular, were encouraged to take part in the development to a larger extent than in previous reforms (Report to Parliament 28 (2015-2016)). The study aims to investigate teachers’ role in curriculum committees and their contribution to the development process and the final curriculum. The research question is What is teachers’ role in curriculum committees and how do they contribute to curriculum development through this involvement?

Theoretically the study is guided by the concepts compartmentalization, segmentation and licensing (Hopmann, 1991). Compartmentalization refers to the process of dividing large-scale curriculum processes into smaller, more manageable parts so that no one will be held accountable for the whole. Segmentation involves separating different discourse communities (e.g. political, public and professional) into smaller groups who share a common frame of reference when solving complex curriculum development tasks. This enables different stakeholders to give input but also keeping potential for conflict low. Licensing involves delegating parts of the decision making to teachers and school leaders (Mikser et al., 2016). This manner of organizing curriculum development enables central authorities to have control of the process, while at the same time satisfying stakeholders.

The realisation of large scale curriculum renewals' key ideas in teachers' practices has a name of being problematic (e.g., Cuban, 1988; Doyle & Ponder, 1997; Coburn, 2003; Van den Akker, 1998; Fullan, 2007). A common way for curriculum evaluators to investigate the occurrence of this implementation problem is to examine, for a given curriculum renewal project or reform, how closely teachers’ practices subsequent to the renewal activities correspond to the practices that the developers had in mind. This study focuses on the coherence between what curriculum innovations aim at, and what teachers want and do, respectively between written and enacted curricula (Stein et al., 2007; Thijs & Van den Akker, 2009), over a period of several decades of renewals. We use a perspective inspired by metaphors from evolution theory and ecology. We call key ideas in those curricula curriculum intentions, and view them as memes, the cultural equivalent of genes (Dawkins, 1976/2016), expressed over decades in different curricula, as in ecosystems. This perspective is also inspired by Fullan’s Interactive factors affecting implementation (Fullan, 2007, p.87) and a practicality ethic as described by Doyle and Ponder (1973).

The study also explores what factors may have facilitated or hindered such curriculum intentions to be expressed in today's enacted curricula. Categories used to analyse influences on teachers' practices were inspired by the teacher agency model of Priestley et al. (2013).

Central in this study is the case of upper secondary physics education in the Netherlands since 1970. Teachers in upper secondary education in the Netherlands have a great deal of freedom to shape their own curriculum, for example through the choice of textbooks and through the assessment of some of the national attainment targets in school-based exams. However, they are constrained by detailed national syllabi and exams, which cover 60% of the attainment targets.

Dutch physics education has been strongly influenced by science curriculum development projects in other countries, most prominently the American PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) and Harvard Project Physics, the British Nuffield Science Teaching Project, and the German IPN’s Physik im Kontext. For these projects, as for Dutch projects, international literature on theories of knowledge and learning has also been influential.

The two research questions are the following:

1. To what extent do enacted curricula in upper general secondary physics education in the Netherlands reflect the intentions of renewals expressed in written curricula initiated since the 1970s?
2. What factors may have influenced the expression of the renewals’ intentions in teachers’ enacted curricula?

These questions reflect the aim of this study: to provide developers of large-scale curriculum renewals with insights that will help them organise the renewals so that their intentions are reflected in the enacted curricula. The study may also provide teachers with suggestions on how to influence large-scale innovations.

The curriculum intentions focused on had been identified in an analysis of six renewals since 1970. They are the following: Using contexts, Widening the scope of science education, Coordinating with other STEM subjects, Advancing concept development, and Advancing skills development.

The results of the analyses show that most of the renewals’ curriculum intentions have taken root in the teaching practices of most of the interviewed teachers. As prominent influencing factors appear: teacher education, continued professional development, previous classroom experiences, a diverse offer of resources, and, not surprisingly, the high-stake national exam system. Teachers' influence on renewals comes mainly from teachers participating as developers in renewal teams and from how developers process feedback from practising teachers.

The data show that the influences from unintended factors, including international projects and scientific literature, are not less significant than those from intended factors.

European Commission promotes equity, social cohesion, and active citizenship for improving the overall quality and efficiency of education systems (European Union). While appreciating this vision, education systems like Finland have used co-creation for developing its national education policy (Lähdemäki, 2019).

Curriculum co-creation is an innovative and inclusive process of curriculum design in which different stakeholders, such as students, staff members, school leaders, or parents become partners in the process of curriculum development. Bovil et al. (2020) defines it as a collaborative, reciprocal process of curriculum development in which all participants can contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis. Key benefits of this process include enhanced engagement and motivation; bolstered meta-cognitive awareness, a strong sense of identity; influx of fresh perspectives, and development of higher order thinking skills which eventually leads to improvement of student learning (Cook-Sather et al. 2014). Based on social-constructivist view of knowledge construction, this process provides voice and agency to stakeholders thereby leveraging their expertise and experiences in the process of curriculum design (Lubicz‑Nawrocka & Owen, 2022).

Curriculum co-creation has often been used in the sector of higher education for development of few courses predominantly in developed countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia (Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). Research indicates that co-creation is often undertaken within the partnership projects that select small groups of privileged students. In contrast, co-creation involving a whole set of school teachers, academic leaders, curriculum researchers, university professors has been largely overlooked.

To democratise the process of curriculum design, following the guidelines advocated by India’s National Education Policy (GOI, 2020), one of the Indian states for the very first time undertook a comprehensive program of curriculum co-creation at systems level. This seemed essential in the country since innovations introduced in a top-down manner were rejected by the teachers as they considered it to be an imposition on to them by educational researchers and policy makers who are unaware of the classroom realities where reform is to be executed (Berry,et al., 2020). In such cases, high-quality innovations were implemented in ad-hoc manner (Cuban, 1998).

This research presents the case of curriculum co-creation in school education sector while Delhi (National Capital Territory of India) is working towards establishing a new board of school education called as Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE) using the technical expertise of Australian Council for Educational Research. DBSE curriculum designers co-created K-8 curriculum with school teachers which entailed three phases: designed curriculum, process curriculum, and reflected curriculum. Phase 1 (designed curriculum) involved identification of curricular goals at each stage, identification of curriculum designers, and developing requisite learning materials. Phase 2 (process curriculum) was the democratic process of knowledge construction in which epistemic collaborations were developed among curriculum researchers, pedagogic experts, assessment expert, school teachers, and domain leads. This phase involved collective review of curriculum designed in phase 1. The co-created curriculum emerging from this phase was implemented by school teachers in their respective classrooms. In phase 3 (reflected curriculum) feedback was collected from school teachers, students, and academic leaders to ascertain the effectiveness of the curriculum in the field.

This study attempts to understand the perspectives of participants associated with the process of curriculum co-creation. Situated in qualitative research traditions, using semi-structured interviews and focussed group discussions, this paper highlights the perspectives faced by different segments of individuals, ways in which they overcame various challenges to embed partnership and achieve shared ownership of the emergent curriculum. Also, it illustrates the increased satisfaction and professional development resulting from working in partnership.

This study examines how Shanghai’s curriculum policy has been influencing teachers’ understanding and enactment of curriculum from a critical perspective. It reflects how the powerful group benefits from current curriculum by influencing the educational culture. It also seeks to identify the Western educational ideas which challenge Chinese education and have a substantial influence on Shanghai's curriculum development. The study was conducted from a critical perspective based on João M. Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) and Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory when understanding culture.

ICT believes that education is never neutral but is instead shaped by forces. According to ICT, curriculum is not simply a set of instructional materials or lesson plans but is instead a complex social and cultural artifact that reflects and reinforces power dynamics in society. Apple (2000) and Giroux (1989) also viewed curriculum as developing and reviving forms of consciousness that allow for the maintenance of social power and social control without the need for dominant groups to use overt dominance methods. Therefore, educational research that is truly critical must consider how education interacts with economic, cultural, and political power (Apple, 2000). In this study, culture is the focus. Additionally, teachers, whether consciously or unconsciously, are aiding the dominant group in this domineering conduct (Giroux, 1989). This study tried to identify the level of dominance by analyzing teachers’ perceptions of curriculum.

Culture, according to Stenhouse (1971:55), is ‘‘a kind of mental common denominator, a shared store of complex understandings achieved between mind and mind. It comprises the ideas generally accepted within any group. Education is essentially a group process in schools or classes depending upon communication.’’ However, from a critical perspective, the question locates at ‘who shapes the culture or who’s in the leading position of shaping the culture?’ To answer this questions, Stuart Hall’s work must need to be mentioned. Culture, according to Hall (2007), is a site of interpretive conflict. It changes continuously throughout history as a result of the ongoing "play" of power. The prevailing cultural order is "produced" and "reproduced" by the powerful group for their own purposes. The dominating processing is aided by the media (Ibid, 2007) where curriculum policy is one of in dominating the educational culture. Hall’s (2007) Reception Theory claims that producers encode (create/insert) a range of signals into media texts, which consumers subsequently decode (understand). Simply enough, what we see is a "re-presentation" of what the producers want us to see. Audiences or readers interpret messages into one of three categories: Dominant Messages, Negotiated Messages, or Oppositional Messages, depending on whether they fully or partially agree with the producers. By identifying different categories of messages, this study shows how teachers have been struggling with the current educational culture.

Additionally, the risk of Eurocentric culture is another point raised by ICT. The dissemination of hegemonic forms of Western knowledge, according to Paraskeva (2016:241), "are precisely the institutionalisations of a linguistic or cultural epistemicide." Since 2004, Shanghai has been promoting the concept of "suyangjiaoyu" (TMES, 2004). This concept was heavily influenced by the OECD's and the USA's twenty-first-century competencies-skills frameworks. Shanghai’s curriculum has been enthusiastically embracing these Western epistemic presumptions as an "advanced and scientific" process that will enable Shanghai's curriculum to catch up with the West. But simultaneously, it turns China into "a silenced and different genealogy of thought" (Paraskeva, 2016:80). Shanghai’s curriculum must be decolonized in order to promote "cognitive justice" and "ecologies of knowledges" (Santos, 2016). In this study, teachers' responses reflected which parts of Shanghai’s curriculum have been deeply influenced by the West and which aspects, as they believe, should adhere to traditional Chinese educational ideas.

The study focuses on the present reform of Swedish Upper Secondary School curricula and in particular the revision of the subject Psychology. Since 2021, the Swedish National Board of Education is in the process of implementing a grading reform where the course grades that were previously valid are to be replaced by subject grades (Skolverket, 2023). Consequently, the various school subject syllabi must be revised so that each level in a subject build on the previous ones. Today's Swedish curriculum system is made up of various separate courses, which may differ from each other in content, although within the same subject area, and each of which is graded separately throughout the upper secondary education. An underlying reason for the subject grading reform is, among other things, to dispose of the fragmentation of subjects that arose with the course grading system and to open up for more acceptable planning conditions for teachers and students. In order to be able to implement the new grading reform, all Swedish syllabi for upper secondary school must be reworked. For some school subjects such as for instance civics or language, the subject content and structure will be largely the same as before. For other subjects, including Psychology, a major revision is required where the subject content is revised in its entirety. This work is currently underway and is expected to be completed in 2024. I will describe and discuss and problematize aspects of tradition, focusing chiefly on the work with the school subject psychology.

The research questions concern how a subject change in terms of purpose with the subject and how this can come to light in a curricular revision. In this study special attention is paid to the new formation of the subject Psychology, in relation to existing traditions within the subject Psychology and consider it as a subject for Bildung, as a subject for proficiency, and as a subject based on experience. This approach to study subject reforms has been previously applied on other subjects such as Swedish (Hultin, 2008). The public drafts of the syllabi for Psychology, from January 2023, will be analyzed in relation to the historic formation of the subject (Blåvarg 2018; Blåvarg, manuscript). Also, the outcome of the current referral procedure, where authorities, organizations and other stakeholders can comment on the proposals, and consequential changes that the referrals give rise to, will be considered in relation to the existing traditions.

In this paper we trace notions of ‘curriculum’ as emerging in sociopolitical and historicized contexts, where both constancy and change are possible, through the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers across six cohorts that correspond to different periods (late 1950s-2010s). By tracing such narrated notions, we highlight how they are connected to an institutional context marked by both change and constants. Inquiring into the various definitions of ‘curriculum’ in the literature, we note that it was used in education (along with class) to organize the whole multi-year course (in all years and subjects) by the principles of disciplina (a sense of structural coherence) and ordo (a sense of structural sequencing) in some of the first European universities (Hamilton, 1989/2009). This rationality of organizing and planning schooling through curricula or different types, tracks and grades also informed the spread of mandatory public schooling through which curricula were mobilized as a mechanism of modernist governance of populations by nation-states (Ball, 2013). In such contexts of administration and governance ‘curriculum’ has largely been conceptualized as institutionalized text, embedded in various practices, but materially manifested in the form of official curricular documents, (subject-area) syllabi, guides or frameworks, plans (of content or subject-matter), course outlines, programmes of instruction, timetables for any or all subjects. These constitute what Doyle names ‘programmatic curriculum’, locating it between its ‘societal’, and ‘classroom/instructional’ representations of curriculum (1992a; 1992b) or between Deng, Gopinathan and Lee’s (2013) ‘policy’ and ‘classroom curriculum making’ because it ‘translates the ideals and expectations embodied in the policy curriculum into programmes, school subjects, and curricular frameworks’ (p. 7). How the programmatic curriculum is specifically materialized, its ‘technical form’ Luke, Woods & Weir (2012) argue, is replete with power issues: inspired by Foucault’s (1972) ‘grids of specification’, ‘that is an institutional structure for mapping human knowledge and human subjects’ (Luke et al., 2012, p.3), the technical form has implications for the selection, classification and hierarchization of important and valued school knowledge; grids do this as they ‘divide, contrast, regroup and derive what will constitute, now, from the unlimited possibilities available’ the curriculum. The technical form also has significant ramifications for teacher professionalism because ‘high definition, or extremely elaborated, detailed and enforced technical specifications and low definition, that is, less elaborated, detailed and constrained curriculum act as degrees of central prescription’ (p. 7, authors’ emphasis) and constrain or enable it; respectively they encourage or discourage ‘teacher and student autonomous action, critical analyses of local contexts, teachers’ bending and shaping of curriculum to respond to particular students’ needs and to particular school and community contingencies’ (p. 7). Such problematizations of ‘high definition’ forms could be inspired by a distinction between the institutional and the instructional context, the latter situated, diverse, contingent and unpredictable, materialized as ‘classroom’ or ‘enacted’ curriculum which ‘entails transforming the programmatic curriculum (embodied in curriculum materials) into “educative” experiences for students’ (Deng, Gopinathan and Lee, 2013, p. 7). Pragmatist, historical, (auto)biographical and poststructural approaches (e.g. Doyle, 1992a; Pinar & Grumet, 1976/2015; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992), for instance, have been problematizing bureaucratic and managerial discourse through which curriculum is constituted as a regulative apparatus to achieve consistency, conformity and control of how teachers and students should be acting and performing in schools; instead, the ‘complexity of curriculum making at the societal, institutional and classroom levels’ (Deng, 2021, p. 1670) requires our empirical attention; we argue that in this study we highlight the complexities of translating the programmatic into the instructional curriculum by tracing how teachers narrate its enactment over the last 60 years, in an institutional context where central prescription has been constant, yet changing.

In today’s world, scientifically literate people are needed to solve problems and make responsible decisions in science, medicine, and other areas important for society (OECD, 2019). This suggests that learning in science subjects needs to equip students not only with the necessary knowledge, but to promote the application of knowledge, plus the gaining of 21st-century skills and associated values (Cipková et al., 2020). A worldwide concern in science education is perceiving learning as a series of disconnected knowledge acquisitions, which impacts students’ interest in science (Author 1 et al., 2019). In such a learning environment, students have difficulty in perceiving how to apply knowledge, to solve real-life global challenges, as well as lack the ability to make links between knowledge from multiple subjects (Cipková et al., 2020). For learning to be meaningful, Ausubel et al. (1968) indicate information needs to be completely conceptualized and used to make connections with other previously known knowledge, thus aiding further learning. As indicated in previous research, applying meaningful learning methods (e.g. mind mapping tasks), has a positive influence on students’ self-efficacy (Baltaoğlu & Güven, 2019). DCIs and ICIs form a unified scientific framework for various topics of the curriculum, as set out in the curriculum and are forming a necessary core for conceptualizing science (NRC, 2012; Author 1 et al., 2019). These are important in everyday life and in the future, currently agreed upon by science and society (Author 1 et al., 2019). DCIs and ICIs can support a perception of interdisciplinarity between science subjects and in so doing, support the development of conceptualizations, which, in turn, makes the learning process more meaningful (NRC, 2012). The goal of this research is to identify students’ ability to use DCIs and ICIs to form maps to support meaningful learning across science subjects. The following research questions are put forward:

RQ1 How effective are students in expanding DCI and ICI maps as a tool for promoting self-efficacy in science?

RQ2 What differences occur in students’ self-efficacy between an experimental group that expand DCI and ICI maps and a control group not utilizing such maps?

RQ3 What are students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the developed teaching/learning method, within the experimental group, for supporting students’ self-efficacy?

In both Swedish and international research there is a significant gap of knowledge about pupils' experiences of Physical Education [PE]. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, the grading system implemented in Sweden in 2011 was intended to be more equitable. But rarely has a grading system been more criticised by pupils. Grades don´t work the same for all pupils, younger pupils are more affected by grades than older and high-performing pupils (Vetenskapsrådet, 2015). Pupils have emphasised that they experience problems with assessment and grading, as well as lack of clarity about the PE teacher role (Redelius & Hay, 2012). It´s also important that students know when the assessment happens and what´s being assessed (Redelius & Hay, 2009).

PE teaching should create better conditions for all pupils to participate in activities according to their own abilities. Different conditions and challenges apply to a diversity of pupils, depending on their ethnicity, gender, culture, socio-economic background, to participate in physical activities in PE on equal terms. It´s necessary to recognise all forms of diversity in teaching and different learning contexts but this needs to agree with changes in curricula, pedagogical strategies and the teaching style of the PE teacher. Diversity generates heterogeneous systems, and thus can have a positive impact on teaching with greater inclusiveness in assessing pupil performance and creating fair and equal opportunities for each individual pupil. A school for all is a school where all pupils, regardless of their differences, are equally valued and teaching is adapted to each pupil's different abilities (Skolverket, 2017). Simultaneously, teachers should promote variety and diversity as something positive, which creates an understanding that everyone has the right to develop their abilities at their own pace, integrated with others (Hammar & Johansson, 2013).

In PE, there are several aspects of diversity that need to be reviewed. This study is based on a Swedish context, but is also applicable to provide knowledge and understanding for other European countries. The study also presents the pupils' own suggestions for improving PE, which is an important societal investment. The purpose of this study is to contribute to increased knowledge and a deeper understanding of PE, based on the pupils' perspectives on assessment and the grading system in PE.

The study takes a socio-cultural approach and a dialogical perspective on the theory of Social Representation [SR] (Markova, 2003). SR is characterised by sentences, values, similarities, ideas and practices shared by groups of people in societies and is used as a tool to describe and analyse the creation of common social representations. SR is used to analyse pupils’ common knowledge about PE; how they understand each other and the topic, and how they are socialised into, and develop social representations of, grading system.

From a socio-cultural perspective, individual learning is tied to social interaction (Säljö, 2014). We influence the group and the group affects us. The context is constantly changing both unconsciously and consciously (Linell, 2009). In PE, it´s relevant for pupils and teachers to interact in teaching and to link activities to real and meaningful contexts. These contexts are important for pupils’ motivation and meaningful teaching. Different representations are shared within the group of pupils and determine how the group members perceive, act and think together. SR provided a useful way of finding out what PE was in the social context (Moscovici, 2001,2008). The study focuses on what pupils talk about in connection to PE, and is based on a dynamic constructivist approach – and thus how the pupils construct content in PE.

Over recent years, several countries in Europe and elsewhere have seen a resurgent interest in the concept of learning progression and what it means to progress in learning. Learning progressions, or ‘progression frameworks’, are typically thought about as optimised pathways along which pupils might be expected to progress towards greater sophistication in knowledge and skills. They can be informed by or be the product of research and classroom evidence, and can be used to support effective teaching, learning and formative assessment. They have also been critiqued for imposing a sense of linearity and predictability in learning as well as artificial ceilings that can be narrowing and reductive. While many studies of learning progression are concerned with single concepts or ideas (e.g., progression in understanding the concept of matter), the notion that learning becomes more sophisticated is variously reflected in different country’s curricula.

In recent years, some countries and jurisdictions have chosen to foreground ideas of learning progression as part of curriculum development and/or enactment. One such country is Wales which, following the publication of Successful Futures (2015), has embarked upon an ambitious programme of curricular reform in which the curriculum is structured around 6 areas of learning experience, each with its own set of progression frameworks. Foregrounding progression in curricula opens up questions about the relationships between high-level curricular frameworks of progression, and how pupils actually learn over time in and across different subjects or curricular areas. Does pupil learning develop as curricular progressions suggest? We see these relationships as multifaceted, reified within processes of translation and enactment and variously influenced by complex factors.

Here, we present a study funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (RIG009335) that was undertaken to design a methodological approach for developing a rich understanding pupils’ progression in learning. It is set within the context of Welsh Educational reform and is designed to form part of a future and larger-scale longitudinal study that will follow individual pupils through several years and stages of a national education system in which learning progression is foregrounded. We positioned this study by first exploring, challenging and making explicit our own understandings and assumptions about the nature of learning, its acquisitional and participatory natures and the socio-cultural context of classrooms. Making progress in learning was seen as different to making progress in performance and we distinguish between ‘learning progressions’ as symbolic representations of possible ways learning might evolve, and the substantive learning of pupils which may or may not reflect these. We considered the method in relation to three characteristically different areas of learning: Maths & Numeracy, Humanities, and Science & Technology.

Rather than testing the extent to which pupil learning reflects smaller-scale intervention type progression frameworks as explored in the review, or the extent to which assessed performances meet pre-determined outcomes, learning is viewed more holistically. Here, it is seen as non-linear, mutable, involving misconceptions, confusion, gaps, connections, divergencies, emotion, realisation, and insight. Rather than successive performances, progress in learning is seen as an epistemic process of meaning making. While socially and culturally mediated, learning is seen as that which takes place in pupil’s heads. The approach does not prescribe or preclude any particular assessment or pedagogical approaches but accommodates these as part of curriculum is translated through practice. We noted that almost all symbolic learning progressions rest upon a conventional empirical model of fixed time, but that this may not reflect the experience of pupils as they make meaning. We therefor incorporate both fixed and fluid models of time (Neale, 2019).

The coronavirus crisis impacted higher education institutions in many new and unexpected ways bringing both challenges and opportunities particularly in relation to distance education and digitally enhanced learning and teaching. Lectures and their students across the world were forced into this new reality without the requisite time to plan, consult the theory, develop supports, embed relevant pedagogies and have curriculum alignment in the online environment between content, teaching, learning and assessment (Toqero 2020; Rudolph et al., 2023). The move to distance education for many institutions was more akin to emergency response teaching than theory informed online learning (Adedoyin and Soykan 2020). This research aims to examine how student agency impacted their engagement with online learning during the lock down in one Irish university. This first year cohort (2020-2021) experienced arguably the most change with traditional second level examinations being cancelled for the first time in the history of the state, transition into third level during a pandemic that mitigated the usual rites of passage taking place and the need to adapt to learning in an online environment with classmates and lecturers that in many cases they had never met face-to-face.

Some research has found that there is a significant positive effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns on students’ performance because they changed their learning strategies to a more continuous habit and this had led to better grades in assignments (Gonzalez et al., 2020). However, others found that stress, anxiety, loneliness and mental health concerns increased during the pandemic lockdowns with students feeling more isolated (Elmer at al., 2020; Liu et al., 2020). One of the key challenges encountered by higher education institutions was the sudden shift to distance learning and the need for a change of pedagogical thinking (Marinoni et al., 2020; Pokhrel and Chhetri 2021). This challenge comes with different dimensions, most particularly the technical infrastructure, the support tools to use for distance learning, assimilating online teaching pedagogies, providing structure for students to collaborate, giving feedback on learning and finally how to organise and manage student assessments from distance (Besser et al., 2020). For students it meant they needed to be more self-directed in their learning. This research project aimed to develop a comprehensive understanding of how agency was impacted by these changed conditions.

To explore the affordances and challenges faced by students learning in this changed environment we used the concept of agency to frame our analysis of data. To analyse what constitutes agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) define agency as constructing engagement with structure through individuals’ temporal reflection on the past, present and future. This temporality emerged as critical for these students as they missed out on key experiences needed to build competences for present learning and motivation for future aspirations. Biesta and Tedder’s (2007) conceptualised agency as one’s “ability to exert control over … one’s life” (p. 135) by means of structure rather than simply within structure. Later Priestley and colleagues (2015) described agency as being always informed by past experience and is oriented towards some future goal. They go on to say that “agency is always enacted in a concrete situation” (p.30) and is supported and constrained by available cultural, structural and material resources. These resources to support learning at third level changed during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Ireland. The impact of these changes was not uniformly felt by individuals and in some instances they exacerbated existing inequalities (Daly and Cahill 2018).

The education system is fundamental for empowering people to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. In promoting corresponding literacies (e.g., health/digital/sustainability literacy), a common approach is to implement them as cross-cutting themes (UNESCO, 2012) or cross-curricular tasks (Bieber et al., 2017). As such, they can be written into curricula and hold potential for driving innovation of available subjects. Yet, when (too) many subjects are called to contribute, diffusion of responsibility may occur (Hellmann-Tuitert, 1999). Another barrier is perception as additional burden on teachers (Baena-Morales et al., 2022). Especially where the principial of subject-matter education applies, cross-cutting themes become a matter of both professional development and curriculum innovation.

In this context, this paper reports on the cLEVER-3-study, which explores subject cultural patterns of teachers concerning consumer education as a cross-cutting theme. We refer to consumer education as a process of developing knowledge, understanding, reflection, and action in manifold consumption areas and enhancing the ability to read the world in terms of consumership (consumer literacy) (cf. Sumner, 2013; Steffens, 2012; Heseker et al., 2005). For this, the reflective basis is subject culture research (Lüders, 2007; Poweleit, 2020). Building on theories of disciplinary and school cultures, subject culture research expands the notion that in contexts of subjects, too, cultural structures emerge through habitual practices and shape the rules by which social actors play their social game (Bourdieu, 1984). Although subject culture research is still in its infancy in consumer education, two lines of work exist to build upon:

1. Consumer education in relation to better-established subjects
Many countries integrate consumer education not as a singular subject but a cross-cutting theme (Ueno et al., 2009). This corresponds to the United Nations’ guideline that “[c]onsumer education should, where appropriate, become an integral part of the basic curriculum of the educational system, preferably as a component of existing subjects” (UN, 2016, art. 43). Germany and Austria, e.g., have installed consumer education as a cross-curricular task or principle (KMK, 2013; BMBWF, 2015). Internationally, home economics offer an anchor, e.g., as Family and Consumer Sciences in the USA (https://www.aafcs.org/partnership/about-aafcs) or as Nutrition and Consumer Education in German-speaking countries (http://habifo.de/dach.html). Other disciplines appear rather silent, which is not the case for other multidisciplinary tasks (e.g., Baena-Morales et al., 2022, Vrabec et al., 2013). Not least because of the precarious situation of home economics in schools and the multidimensionality of consumer issues, curriculum integration as a cross-cutting theme seems a rather viable option. Still, whether and how it reaches subject practice on the classroom level remains an issue (Ueno et al., 2009), especially when assuming an enculturation of teachers.

2. Teachers’ views of consumer education and professional development
Several studies have explored this issue. For instance, Wittau (2021) found that teachers from various subjects within the social sciences often base consumer education on the values of their own milieu, which contradicts aspirations for professional learning. Håkansson (2016) found that qualified home economics teachers in Sweden have a lower degree in their intention to transport moralized consumer education than their formally unqualified colleagues. For Australia, Sawatzki and Sullivan (2017) report that most participating teachers at primary schools regard themselves as financially literate while only half is confident in teaching financial literacy. However, there remains a paucity of research on the views of teachers from other subjects than economics and home economics.

Thus, the research questions of this paper are:

1. Is teacher professional learning and development regarding consumer education informed by diverse subject cultural patterns?
2. Do subject cultural patterns exist in the way that teachers offer consumer education in the context of their subject teaching and learning? What are the similarities and differences?

Introduction

Changes in the process of acquiring and using information, differentiating student characteristics, innovations in online access, connecting and sharing, and changing understandings from what to learn and how to learn have made it necessary to rethink traditional methods and reform education in the 21st century. From this point of view, first of all, which skills individuals should have and their reasons were questioned (OECD, 2005), and strategies were developed for the application of these skills in educational areas. In this context, many conceptual frameworks have been put forward, the main objective of which is to guide national curriculum policies for the implementation of 21st century qualifications in education (Erstad & Voogt, 2018; Voogt & Roblin, 2010). Although they focus on different areas, collaboration, communication and information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy have been included in all of these frameworks, and many curricula have been organized around these skills. With the digitalization of all areas of life, a new skill area presented as "digital competence" or "digital literacy" has taken its place in the education programs of different countries (Erstad, 2013; Erstad & Voogt, 2018).

In the light of developments in the world, Turkey is one of the countries that has updated its education program by considering the requirements of the 21st century. In the 2018 curriculum, it was aimed to raise digitally literate individuals and the relevant standards were integrated into the curriculum.

Textbooks play a critical role in achieving the goals of raising digitally literate individuals. Textbooks maintain their importance as a component of teaching by improving teaching at all levels of schools and in different disciplines, guiding the scope and content of the course, and being a guide of the course (Knight, 2015; Knight & Horsley, 2011). Due to its active role in education and training, digital literacy skills should be supported with textbooks along with other competencies. Due to its nature that concerns all disciplines, digital literacy should not be limited to technology-related parts of a particular course or curriculum but should be included in all textbooks. When textbooks from different disciplines are examined in the context of digital literacy, there is no study that examines Turkish primary school science textbooks based on global digital literacy competence areas. For this reason, it was necessary to examine the availability of digital literacy skills in primary school science textbooks. In this context, the aim of the research is to examine the primary school science textbooks used in schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education of Turkey in terms of digital literacy.

Digital Literacy

Although digital literacy was used to describe various skills in the 1990s, its popularization began with the book “digital literacy” published by Paul Gilster in 1997 (Bawden, 2008; Martin & Grudziecki, 2006). In the following years, many definitions have been put forward, like every fashionable term, and these definitions have been presented in a wide range from those focusing on technical skills to those focusing on cognitive psychological and social skills (Eshet, 2004).

The diversity and ambiguity in the definition of the concept has led to misunderstandings and poor communication among educators and researchers involved in the development of digital environments (Norton & Wiburg, 1998) and efforts to introduce global definitions and conceptual frameworks have emerged. Global frameworks have been proposed by various organizations to meet this need. The main ones of these frameworks are DigComp 2.1-EU, UNESCO (2018), DQ, Edith Cowan University of Australia (ECU) Digital Literacy Framework.

In this study, the digital literacy framework proposed by UNESCO in 2018 was taken as a basis while determining the criteria for reviewing textbooks.

Nazarbayev Intellectual School (NIS) is an educational institution focused on providing quality education to students in Kazakhstan. The school aims to develop students' knowledge and skills in various areas, including language and content learning, through a variety of pedagogical approaches. One of the approaches that has proven to be beneficial to student learning is Content-Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). CLIL is a teaching and learning approach that combines language and content in an integrated way (Marsh, 2010). In recent decades, this teaching approach has gained popularity in many countries around the world (Hussain, 2022). The aim of CLIL is for students to learn both the target language and content knowledge more effectively in the same lesson. CLIL is also beneficial for teachers because it offers them the opportunity to become more proficient in the target language and to expand their pedagogical knowledge and skills. Although NIS is committed to quality education, there are still challenges in effectively implementing CLIL in classrooms. The challenge is to find an effective way to engage students in the learning process and ensure that they understand and make sense of the language they are learning. Furthermore, implementing CLIL can be challenging and requires a high level of teacher commitment to ensure success. Therefore, there is a need for effective teacher professional development to support teachers in implementing CLIL in their respective classrooms (Nhan, 2013; Garzón-Díaz, 2021).

This study proposes the use of the Lesson Study (LS) model to provide teachers with the necessary support and development for successful implementation of CLIL. The LS model encourages teachers to collaboratively plan, observe and reflect on their own teaching practise, which helps them to better understand CLIL principles and provides them with the necessary resources to successfully implement CLIL in their classrooms (Lewis & Lee, 2017). As part of the process, the teacher-researchers in this study observed each other's classes and discussed their observations together to increase their knowledge and skills related to CLIL and to identify areas for improvement (Takahashi, 2016). In this way, the LS model helps teachers to develop more confidence and competence in their CLIL teaching and to gain a better understanding of how to teach using different CLIL strategies. Furthermore, LS not only promotes collaboration between teachers, but also encourages them to share best practises, develop new teaching strategies and find innovative ways to incorporate more CLIL activities into their lessons (Willems & Van den Bossche, 2019).

The primary objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the LS approach as professional development to strengthen CLIL instruction among teachers in NIS, as well as its effect on student academic achievement. The study focuses specifically on the professional development of educators in NIS Uralsk, Kazakhstan. NIS Schools and their network incorporate both the LS model and CLIL into their curriculum. LS and CLIL provide teachers with the opportunity to develop innovative lesson plans and instructional materials that challenge and engage students' learning and help them become more independent students. Moreover, these methods are essential for establishing a framework for teacher education programs across the NIS network.

In particular, the following research questions are addressed:

1. How does participation in the lesson study approach impact teachers' knowledge and skills in integrating content and language in their instruction?
2. How does the lesson study approach impact student academic performance in CLIL contexts?
3. How does the lesson study approach impact the quality of teaching and learning in CLIL classrooms?
4. What are the perceived benefits and challenges of the lesson study approach for teachers and students in CLIL contexts?