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.
