Conference Agenda

The last few decades feature a sequence of education policy improvements driven by broad global principles of education quality and equality framed by a ‘progressive neoliberal’ orientation (Giudici et al 2024). However, in the recent years, some fundamental changes have been underway in many regions driven by the political and social polarization, and the popularity of the ideas promoted by the right-wing political populists (Alves et al. 2021, Sadurski 2022). Schools have become a political arena in the struggle for influence over young peoples’ values, believes and knowledge with far-right parties prioritizing neo-conservative and nationalist perspectives, re-shaping education policy and school curricula.

Poland is one of the examples of such fundamental re-shaping of education system by the right-wing populist government led by Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS) party, from 2015 to 2023 (Klatt 2024, Zamęcki & Załęski 2023). Their influence over education has been mostly visible through the centralisation of school management making schools less autonomous and the national core curriculum reform in 2018 (Ministry of National Education [MEN], 2018). Nevertheless, following the change of government in 2024 with a more liberal policy vision another curriculum have been designed. In 2025, two subjects with new curriculum were introduced into schools including Civic Education (CE). In the first year of the Civic Education programme, approximately 270,000 students and around 10,000 teachers in Poland will be impacted by these changes. Typically, Civic Education provides a good testing ground for education researchers where ideological shifts can be clearly visible through the learning content and teaching approaches (Estellés, Oliveira & Castellví 2024, Zamęcki & Załęski 2023). This is because Civic Education has been seen as fundamental for shaping young peoples’ perceptions of democracy and propagation of the social justice principles (Fesnic 2016, Westheimer 2019), and the changes to the CE curriculum may showcase the governing authorities' conceptions of democracy and social rights.

The 2025 reform was introduced by a coalition government comprising centrist, left-wing, and Christian democratic parties, and was undertaken with the intention of enhancing young people's civic competencies. The series of reforms within this single subject over several years will provide a significant testing ground for the study of the complexity of policy (curriculum) enactment in schools, within the context of Poland’s continually changing political, social and education systems. Specifically, we will askl ask: In what ways the new Civic Curriculum in enacted in schools? - to showcase the significance of teachers in the interpretation and recontextualization of the enactment of the new curricula. To highlight the significant context-related factors facilitating or undermining the enactment in the Polish case; and to illuminate potential directions for policy development improvement.

The main aim of this paper is to analyze and critically assess the concept of Powerful Knowledge (PK) and the Curriculum Design Coherence (CDC) model derived from it as a potentially theoretically grounded framework for the development of a civic education curriculum in the context of the revision of the Czech national curriculum, and to examine how criticism shapes its applicability in Czech education.

We draw on experience with a competence-oriented curriculum framework in which teachers in the Czech Republic are provided with prescribed key competencies and learning outcomes for educational areas. The concrete form of instruction, including the selection of curricular content, is developed by teachers themselves at the school level. Moreover, a revision of the national curriculum framework is currently underway, accompanied by critical debate but limited systematic scholarly reflection.

In our paper, we draw inspiration from research and theoretically grounded approaches to curriculum design developed in education systems with comparable experience. Our key points of departure are a report addressing the experiences and challenges associated with the implementation of competence-oriented curricula in several countries—Curriculum Policy: International Comparative Review (Crehan et al. 2025)—and the manifesto Save Our Schools, which criticizes the shift towards generic competencies as well as constructivist approaches (Johnston 2023).

Crehan and her colleagues point out that working with a curriculum oriented towards the development of generic competencies places disproportionate demands on teachers. The more broadly target competencies are defined, the less confident teachers are about how to develop them across different subjects. A further problem arises when the selection of curricular content intended to foster generic competencies is left entirely to teachers’ discretion (Crehan et al. 2025: 6), which reflects the situation in the Czech Republic. By contrast, Johnston’s manifesto offers a fundamental critique of the turn towards generic competencies, which, according to him, displace essential academic knowledge. The central argument of this critique is that such approaches prioritize naturally acquired abilities over cognitively demanding academic knowledge (Johnston 2023). Accordingly, Johnston (2023) and Rata (2021) warn that abandoning clearly defined content leads to the fragmentation of knowledge and disadvantages students who do not acquire an academic foundation in their family environment. They identify a key source of inspiration for addressing this problem in the further specification of the concept of PK (Muller and Young 2019), which foregrounds abstract disciplinary knowledge in the form of academic knowledge rather than students’ immediate experiences. As a vehicle for change, they propose operationalizing this PK framework through the CDC model, originally developed by Rata (2019, 2021).

The CDC model constitutes a theoretical–pragmatic framework for school curriculum design that seeks coherence between disciplinary knowledge, curricular content, and students’ competencies. It is grounded in the premise that a high-quality curriculum must be structured around the key concepts of academic disciplines. The model differs from approaches based solely on skills or subject matter in that it prioritizes the epistemic structure of academic knowledge as its organizing principle.

According to the authors of the CDC model, this approach is crucial for democratic citizenship. Schools should function as secular spaces, separating objective knowledge from local beliefs and emotions (Johnston 2023), thereby developing the cognitive capacities required in the modern world (Rata 2021). However, the emphasis on academic knowledge and the political implications of approaches grounded in Powerful Knowledge have become the subject of extensive criticism (Alderson 2020; Barton 2024; White 2018; Yates et al. 2019). For this reason, we consider it important to analyze the concept of PK and examine its implications for application in civic education.

In recent years, Western pedagogical discourse has intensified debates on the “return of knowledge” and on Powerful Knowledge (PK) as a response to the dominance of competency‑oriented curricula (Young 2013; Young and Muller 2016). These debates are entering the Czech context, especially with the ongoing curriculum revision. Reflection on disciplinary knowledge, however, remains fragmented, particularly regarding links between academic disciplines, curriculum content selection, and initial teacher education.

This paper responds to this situation within the reform of initial teacher training and focuses on the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and teaching. It assumes that curricula centred on cross‑disciplinary competencies place higher demands on teachers, especially when content selection and structure rely on their individual judgement. Findings from an international comparative study led by L. Crehan show that the more generally competencies are formulated, the greater the uncertainty teachers experience in discipline‑specific implementation, and that “situations in which” responsibility for content selection fully transferred to teachers reaches the limits of their professional capacity (Crehan et al. 2025).

This is not a simple opposition between competency‑based and discipline‑based curricula. Approaches such as the Curriculum Design Coherence (CDC) model highlight teachers as curriculum designers who understand disciplinary epistemic structure and can justify content selection and sequencing (Rata 2019; Pountney et al. 2025). The key question is how to support teachers in this role during initial training.

The paper has two main objectives. First, it aims to present the research design of a study to be conducted from the second half of 2026, based on the methodology of Educational Design Research (EDR). The study seeks to develop a multi-step tool for identifying instructionally relevant concepts (i.e. a tool for curriculum content selection) that will serve both practicing teachers and academics involved in the initial teacher training. The second objective is to offer an example of such content, namely the issue of oligarchy. We will provide a discipline-robust justification of this topic within the framework of our interpretation of the concept of PK.

EDR will be applied in authentic teaching of prospective teachers to develop a tool for selecting and evaluating disciplinary knowledge in relation to the aims of social science education in the Czech Republic. EDR involves iterative development linking practical problems with empirically grounded theoretical knowledge (McKenney and Reeves 2018, 2020).

As a case study, the paper employs the issue of oligarchy and oligarchization in the context of a post-socialist state in Central and Eastern Europe. It draws primarily on the work of Jeffrey A. Winters and examines whether, and under what conditions, contemporary theories of oligarchy can provide a productive framework for civic education (Winters 2011; 2017; Winters and Page 2009; Alfani 2023; Winslow 2024; Gilens and Page 2014). Oligarchy serves as an interdisciplinary concept, on the basis of which a more general theory and practice of the didactic transformation of disciplinary knowledge in the initial teacher's training can be developed.

The purpose of this study is to explore how Norwegian lower secondary school teachers interpret and communicate values in their teaching in a time of global polarization, where democratic values are challenged and under pressure. The Norwegian national curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2017) highlights and specifically emphasizes the school’s role in promoting students’ ability to interpret and reflect on values, identity, and society. To investigate this, we focus on how teachers promote student participation and reflection, as well as the affective, relational, and ethical dimensions that may come into play. The research question guiding our research is thus:

How do teachers understand and negotiate their role in conveying the value foundation of the Norwegian curriculum, and how do they describe their contribution to students’ ability to interpret and reflect on values, identity, and society?

Our analysis is based on Hannah Arendt’s views on education as a means of preparing individuals to think and make judgments within a shared world. She emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for our political lives in these challenging times and reminds us of the potential rooted in each generation's ability to initiate something new (Bernstein, 2018, p. 119). According to Hannah Arendt (1961/2006), the teacher’s role involves guiding students into a culture’s established knowledge, norms, values, and ideals; a preparatory process aimed at equipping them for future engagement with complex societal issues. Arendt (1961/2006) is very clear that adults must take responsibility for the world and for introducing it to children, and that this must be achieved through the exercise of authority. To relinquish authority is, in effect, to relinquish responsibility. However, she points to a challenge in the loss of authority – in both education and society – where adults are increasingly hesitant to take responsibility for the world and to act as mediators between the past and the future. She argues that education should be conservative, and at the same time protect the newness each generation brings without controlling how the future will unfold (Arendt, 1961/2006, p. 189).

Another theoretical concept we incorporate in the analysis is the concept of ‘teacher agency’, which highlights teachers' active role in shaping educational practice. Consequently, teacher agency emphasizes teachers' autonomy in decision-making, professional judgment, and ethical and professional action in complex teaching situations (ref.). In this study, it opens for investigating how the teachers navigate their roles within the mandate to promote students’ ability to interpret and reflect on values. And further, how they balance influencing students in a particular direction (pedagogical normativity) and promoting independent learning and critical thinking. This fundamental pedagogical dilemma, for which there are no clear-cut solutions, is often referred to as the ‘pedagogical paradox’ (cf. Løvlie, 2007). Furthermore, thepedagogical paradox concerns the inherent inequality in the relationship between the educator and the learner: for the relationship to have meaning, one party must hold more knowledge or insight than the other and exert some form of influence (ref). According to Nixon (2012), pedagogical practice cannot be separated from the aims of education and the intentions of those who enact it. It must be understood in relation to the values and beliefs of practitioners who are themselves situated within particular settings and traditions that make those values and beliefs intelligible. Thus, the pedagogical paradox remains a tension within both the institutional structures of the education system as well as the relational dynamics between educators and children (Willbergh, 2019).