The curriculum hierarchy is a powerful heuristic for understanding the socially constructed value that senior secondary curriculum systems place on school subjects. Yet it is also a concept that holds a contested place in policy and academic debate concerned with educational inequalities and pathways. This paper demonstrates the critical importance of the concept of curriculum hierarchy for understanding the persistence of educational inequalities in senior secondary Australian education and the limitations of recent policy reforms seeking to address these inequalities, bringing theorising of the curriculum hierarchy in dialogue with analysis of senior secondary subject achievement patterns over time. Updating and extending earlier scholarship by Teese (2000/2013), the analysis confirms that the New South Wales senior secondary curriculum is organised by a hierarchy of subject status and value, access to which is socially and spatially structured, and that this hierarchy has been remarkably durable across time as it remains embedded within the form of the curriculum, despite attempts at policy reform. The paper calls for more detailed and sustained attention to the nature and structure of the curriculum hierarchy in senior secondary education, and the enduring social and cultural forces that produce and reproduce it.
Inclusive education is a challenge for education systems worldwide. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an internationally recognised theoretical and practical framework that helps educators address this challenge, particularly in early childhood education. Recognising diversity among students in any context, UDL provides an inclusive approach to teaching by proposing inclusive measures organised around three main principles to create engaging, multi-format, and multi-expressive learning environments. As in many countries, UDL has been included in the Spanish educational curriculum, and each region is adapting its legislation to this new model. However, UDL is not being integrated effectively. As part of a nationally funded project, this study examines policy documents through a mixed-methods approach to address three research objectives. First, it seeks to explore the presence, treatment, and impact of UDL in the early childhood education curricula of the 19 Spanish regions. Second, it aims to investigate the political-educational implications of this curricular transformation. Third, it aims to propose recommendations based on the shortcomings found in the analysed implementation. UDL terminology and the presence of the model in legislative documents were examined statistically. Additionally, an analysis was conducted to determine whether explicit and implicit guidance for implementing UDL was provided through instructions, guidelines, and examples within education legislation and regulation. Findings suggest a limited understanding of the framework and little guidance to support teachers’ decision-making in planning and teaching. Although UDL is recognised as a relevant reference point, its development in the regional curricula is insufficient, raising questions about the measures and resources needed to ensure truly inclusive education.
This collective case study investigated the design and implementation of concept-based instruction among ten Taiwanese elementary school English teachers. Thematic analysis of documents, interviews, and classroom observations yielded three key findings. First, teachers’ conceptual decision-making was guided by curriculum standards, learners’ experiences, and local contextual characteristics. Second, teachers employed diverse instructional strategies, such as multimodal approaches to introducing key concepts and learning activities that facilitated learners’ conceptual connections and understanding. Third, challenges arose in relation to learners’ English proficiency levels, scaffolding practices, and assessment. Implications and recommendations for the effective design and implementation of concept-based instruction are discussed.
Alternatives to content-driven units in junior secondary English can be hard for pre-service teachers to imagine. With no clear curriculum or policy imperative for teaching inquiry, initial teacher education for English involves looking for disciplinary traditions and other permission points to imagine what inquiry looks like in practice. This paper offers a teaching resource that was created to show various ways that inquiry could be used in junior secondary English, as well as design principles for re-imagining English with inquiry learning used in disciplinarily appropriate ways. Reflection questions for English teachers and leaders are put forward, with a discussion of challenges faced in the changing landscape of English teachers’ work from the mid-2000s to contemporary times.
This qualitative study investigates the cognitive processes within English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks at the upper primary levels in Rwandan schools. Researchers used the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT) to analyze the levels of 1,531 cognitive activities within the textbooks. This unique research investigates alignment between Rwanda’s intended competency-based curriculum (CBC) policy and the enacted cognitive demands of EFL textbooks across upper primary levels. Results revealed that most cognitive activities focused on lower-order thinking skills (82.46
The role and significance of history in curriculum scholarship is a matter of increasing interest and debate. From a position where curriculum history seemed sometimes to be set in opposition to curriculum theory, it now seems to be increasingly accommodated within, in dialogue with, and even welcomed by, the contemporary field. This is partly to be understood as an ongoing project of reconceptualising curriculum history itself. This paper seeks to contribute to these various lines of inquiry by extending work done to date on the relationship between history and discourse, and relatedly curriculum-historical inquiry and discourse analysis. The paper outlines and elaborates what is described as a conceptual framework, offered as a heuristic resource for re-thinking curriculum history. It might be seen first and foremost as a ‘teaching’ text, a text for pedagogy, in that it is aimed in the first instance towards postgraduate students and early-career researchers, seeking a way into curriculum history as a distinct field of study—although hopefully it is also of wider interest.
This conceptual study explores the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) into African environmental education, using the Zulu proverb Indlela Ibuzwa kwabaphambili (The path forward is to enquire from those who have preceded us). IKS are rich in environmental knowledge and education, yet formal education and training sideline them. Drawing on the wisdom and practices of African ancestors or elders, the study aims to improve environmental education. Central to the study is an argument for a more inclusive and sustainable environmental education framework that values IKS alongside Western scientific approaches. Key themes explored include the role of elders in knowledge transmission, the limitations of Western-centric models, comparative epistemologies, strategies for integrating IKS into the curriculum and teacher training, and case studies of best practices. Both the benefits and challenges of IKS integration are further discussed. To address these challenges, the study proposes policy reforms, teacher capacity building and community engagement as crucial strategies for IKS incorporation. Additionally, the study calls for a shift in environmental education that acknowledges the interconnectedness of indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge, fostering a holistic, culturally relevant and sustainable learning experience.
Summative assessment is a critical mechanism of curriculum enactment, yet early career teachers often encounter substantial challenges in designing and implementing assessment tasks that meaningfully align with curriculum goals and pedagogical intent. This study investigates the enabling conditions that support early career secondary teachers in Queensland, Australia, to develop confidence and competence in designing effective summative assessments. A cross-sectional survey of 116 early career secondary teachers explored their experiences across four domains: initial teacher education (ITE) preparation, current opportunities for assessment design, confidence in practice, and preferences for professional learning. Quantitative analyses—including frequency distributions, paired t-tests, and correlation matrices—were used to examine patterns across three interrelated constructs: Competence, Confidence, and Opportunity. While most participants had been introduced to assessment theory during ITE, many reported feeling underprepared to independently design new assessment tasks or rubrics at graduation. Confidence in assessment design increased significantly with contextualised, supported practice. Opportunities to engage in assessment creation and receive feedback were strongly associated with growth in both competence and confidence. Despite low interest in formal external professional development, participants expressed strong preference for mentoring and embedded, practice-based support. This study introduces and affirms a conceptual framework in which iterative interactions among Competence, Confidence, and Opportunity underpin early career teachers’ curriculum enactment through assessment. Findings have implications for teacher education, school-based professional learning, and curriculum policy, highlighting the importance of relational, practice-embedded support to build teachers’ curriculum capacity.
This study offers a critical comparative reconstruction of Julius Nyerere’s and Paulo Freire’s philosophies of education for liberation. It asks how their respective socialist frameworks conceptualise the relationship between colonial domination, capitalist political economy, and curriculum as a site of political and moral struggle. Employing a comparative philosophical methodology, the analysis is grounded in an integrated theoretical framework that brings socialist humanism into dialogue with postcolonial–decolonial critique of coloniality and political economy. The study reconstructs five dimensions of their educational thought: conceptions of domination, the human person, political economy, pedagogical modalities, and the locus of transformative agency. The analysis demonstrates that while both thinkers reject the neutrality of schooling and affirm praxis as central to liberation, they advance distinct strategies within socialist educational thought. Nyerere articulates a state-coordinated, development-oriented socialism grounded in national self-reliance and collective reconstruction, whereas Freire advances a dialogical model centred on conscientisation, popular democratic agency, and vigilance against the reproduction of domination. Their divergence reveals a productive tension between institutional transformation and critical subject formation. The study concludes that this tension reframes contemporary debates on curriculum, decolonising education, and the public purposes of schooling in postcolonial contexts. Rather than offering a unified reform model, it positions liberation pedagogy as an ongoing negotiation between material transformation and democratic agency.
Health education curricular analysis is an emerging approach for a systems level understanding of health literacy (HL) development, with previous findings highlighting international curricula trends in HL promotion for primary school aged children. A contemporary understanding of HL advancement during adolescent years would provide new knowledge and awareness of health behaviours during a critical time of transition in life. Analysing All-Island secondary level health education curricula in Ireland would encourage an understanding of needs and structure of HL, and could provide a starting point for shared dialogue and learning. Using content analysis, a comparison of secondary level health curricula in Ireland was undertaken. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to evaluate HL and health education exposure. There was a significant main effect of HL level (p < .05), indicating the percentage of HL changed depending on the level it was measured at. Overall HL level did not differ between Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland health education curricula. Limited functional HL development was found in a Northern Ireland post-primary health education context. Social health dominance was observed across the island, mirroring an international trend on HL development in schools. An All-Island emphasis on critical social HL in health education was established. More research into an Irish primary school curricular context, matched with emphasis on explicit and implicit delivery of health curriculum through teacher agency, could provide further extended insight. Collectively there is shared potential for significant shared dialogue towards an All-Island contextual approach to HL development.
Understanding how curriculum materials are selected, adapted, and utilized is fundamental to delivering engaging, age-appropriate, and effective English language instruction. This study investigates how K–12 English teachers in Türkiye determine which curriculum materials to use, identifies the factors shaping their selection decisions, and examines the ways in which teachers incorporate both printed and digital resources in their instructional practices. Employing a qualitative holistic multiple case study design, the study draws on classroom observations, post-lesson stimulated recall interviews with twelve English teachers, and curriculum document analysis, interpreted through the ecological lens. The findings reveal that teachers exercise meaningful but bounded agency. While the state-approved coursebook functions as a non-negotiable instructional core, teachers actively supplement, substitute, and re-author curriculum content in the spaces the mandated curriculum leaves open. This agency takes varied forms, from vocational curriculum contextualization and care-driven content replacement to digitally mediated improvisation, and is shaped by factors including learner diversity, institutional setting, time constraints, technological access, and professional beliefs. Variation across participants, from principled offloading to sophisticated curriculum re-authoring, points to pedagogical design capacity as an unevenly distributed but emergent professional competence. The study contributes a theoretically grounded, empirically detailed account of teacher agency in curriculum materials use to the literature, and offers implications for curriculum policy, materials development, and teacher education in Türkiye and comparable centralized educational contexts.
The use of testimony in Holocaust education has recently seen a significant shift with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to preserve survivor representation and interactivity. With the emerging post-witness era, such approaches demand ethical consideration regarding system design, survivor ownership of testimony beyond the time of recording, and implementation with school-aged learners. The guiding research question is: what are the ethical and educational perspectives of the designers, implementers, and facilitators of AI-mediated interactive Holocaust survivor testimony experiences? Qualitative research to analyse the perspectives of museum educators as designers of Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) was conducted via semi-structured interviews at the Sydney Jewish Museum in 2024. A thematic analysis was conducted whereby inductive approaches articulated key ideas surrounding curriculum, pedagogy, and ethics. Designers at the Sydney Jewish Museum are effectively implementing interactive testimony by drawing connections from survivor narratives to objects in the museum collection and the curriculum. Positive findings note student active co-construction of testimony experiences, but concerns are raised regarding narrative guardianship, the generalised nature of filming, and for continued authentic testimony experiences as the post-witness era is realised. Findings are considered in line with participatory design features to conclude that whilst it can never fully replicate the experience of interacting with a Holocaust survivor, DiT can play a meaningful role in a broader ecosystem of Holocaust education. Genuine ethical concerns surrounding survivor representation and student engagement are perpetuated, however, and demand educator awareness.
This paper builds on the call by Luke et al. (2013) for case studies showing the complexities of policy and curriculum located within their specific cultural and historical contexts, especially with respect to the technical form (i.e. the locus of authority) of the curriculum. We thus describe diverse ways in which primary science teachers in Singapore interpreted, adopted, and transformed a suite of integrated curriculum resources that were recently developed by the Ministry of Education. From our lesson observations and interviews, local teachers demonstrated a defensible mix of adherence and autonomy in teaching science concepts and practices at different phases of their lessons, expressed rationales for teaching the way that they did prioritised national syllabus requirements, and showed sensitivity to learner profiles, and other classroom factors. In accounting for teachers’ pedagogical decision-making and use of resources, we therefore highlight the negotiation of informed prescription as well as informed professionalism. This was done within a qualified “low-definition” primary science curriculum context that tried to balance curriculum guidance and implementation flexibility. More productive and quality curriculum reforms—at least based on our primary science cases—may benefit from orchestrating multiple factors while striking a balance between prescription and professionalism, rather than adopting an “all-or-nothing” stance.
This article critically examines the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as “Uncle Chatty Gee” (ChatGPT), within tertiary Indigenous Studies classrooms, using a Critical Indigenous Studies lens. It highlights the risks posed by AI to Indigenous knowledges, pedagogies, and cultures, including issues of inaccuracy, the misappropriation and homogenisation of Indigenous identities, and the perpetuation of settler-colonial biases. Drawing on our professional practice, we present three classroom case studies, illustrating strategies to stimulate ethical reflection, student collaboration, and critical engagement with Indigenous content while navigating the environmental and social harms of AI. We emphasise the irreplaceable value of genuine transformation, creativity, and relationality in Indigenous education, arguing that these outcomes cannot be meaningfully replicated by AI-generated outputs. Recommendations include fostering critical AI literacy, centring Indigenous voices and sovereignty, and developing teaching practices that resist punitive approaches while equipping students to challenge technological harms. Ultimately, this research advocates for Indigenous-led educational futures in which digital tools are engaged thoughtfully, with a commitment to transformative and culturally safe learning environments.
Curriculum transitions pose significant challenges for educators, necessitating continuous adaptation of instructional methodologies to align with evolving educational frameworks. This study examines the influence of teaching experience and school demographics on teachers’ adaptability to curriculum changes, focusing on the Competency-Based Curriculum (KBK), School-Based Curriculum (KTSP), Curriculum 2013, and the Merdeka Curriculum in Lombok Barat, Indonesia. The study explores the correlation between teaching experience and curriculum adaptation, assesses variations in implementation across different school settings, and identifies key challenges educators face during curriculum transitions. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research integrates quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews with middle school teachers who have undergone multiple curriculum reforms. The findings indicate that while 78.9
This paper examines the landscape of online Indigenous curriculum resources in Australia, exploring their potential to address challenges in integrating Indigenous content into classrooms. The primary research question guiding the study is: how can online Indigenous curriculum resources effectively support the integration of Indigenous content into Australian classrooms? A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted through critical dialogue and reflection on the findings from an environmental scan of 23 websites offering Indigenous curricula resources. This process identified key trends, challenges, and opportunities across resource development, professional learning, technology integration, community engagement, and quality assurance. Findings reveal a diverse ecosystem of resources, with varying approaches to cultural authenticity, pedagogical frameworks, and financial models. While online resources offer wide accessibility and cost-effectiveness, concerns persist regarding quality control, cultural responsiveness, and effective implementation. The study highlights gaps in comprehensive, high-quality resources as well as explicit connections between pedagogical frameworks and curriculum materials. The research informs the development of Ngarrngga, a national initiative aimed at creating evidence-based, culturally responsive curriculum resources and professional development opportunities. Ngarrngga’s approach emphasises quality assurance, accessibility, and effectiveness through rigorous development processes, Indigenous leadership, and iterative design based on educator feedback. This study contributes to ongoing discussions about enhancing Indigenous education in Australia, highlighting the need for trusted, centralised resources that support educators in meaningfully integrating Indigenous knowledges while upholding cultural integrity and pedagogical rigour.
To address global challenges in mathematics education, China’s recent mathematics curriculum reform proposes a systematic framework that integrates big ideas, structured curriculum content, and big unit teaching. This framework aims to enhance conceptual coherence and foster deep learning, representing a significant departure from the traditional emphasis on basic skills and subject knowledge in classroom teaching. This review critically examines how these reformed elements interact in classroom practice to effectively implement big ideas, develop students’ key competencies, and respond to local educational needs. We analyzed research literature and policy documents within the context of Chinese mathematics education from China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database (CNKI). Two main findings were derived. First, big ideas can be categorized into three distinct types: life big ideas, interdisciplinary big ideas, and disciplinary big ideas. Second, when combined with big-unit teaching, a structured curriculum serves as a practical mechanism for implementing big ideas in mathematics instruction. By examining China’s mathematics reforms within the global discourse, this research provides actionable strategies for educators, policymakers, and researchers seeking to implement big ideas across diverse educational settings. Furthermore, the findings contribute to advancing the global debate on mathematics education reform by addressing critical issues of both theoretical coherence and practical implementation challenges.
