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In this chapter, we explore our experiences of co-teaching an undergraduate elementary teacher education class titled, “Teaching Language Arts in FNMI (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) Contexts.” In our curriculum-making for the course, we drew on Narrative Inquiry as pedagogy, as well as on Indigenous storybooks, novels, and scholarship. We chose to work in these ways so that we might attempt to complicate and enrich both our experiences as teacher educators, and the possibilities of what it means to engage in Language Arts alongside Indigenous children, youth, and families in Kindergarten through Grade 12 classrooms. Thus, central to this chapter will be reflection on our efforts to co-create curriculum alongside of students – considered in their multiplicity also as pre-service teachers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, etc. – in ways that honored all of our knowing and experience. The relational practices inherent to Narrative Inquiry and Indigenous approaches to education, such as the creation and sharing of personal annals/timelines and narratives, along with small and large group conversations and talking circles are pedagogies we hoped would invite safe, reflective, and communal spaces for conversation. While certainly not a tension-free process, all of the pedagogical choices we made as teacher educators provide us the opportunity to attend to the relational and ontological commitments of Narrative Inquiry, to the students in their processes of becoming, to Indigenous worldviews, and to the responsibilities of the Alberta Language Arts curriculum.

This paper seeks to discuss the rationale of the newly reformed health education curriculum in Cyprus, which aspires to enable not only teachers, but also all the school personnel, to work from the perspective of health promotion. It is a curriculum which moves from the traditional approach of health education focusing on individual lifestyle/behaviour modification into approaches that recognise and tackle the determinants of health.

The paper critically discusses the structure and the content of the learning objectives of this curriculum that encourages teachers to work in a health promoting way.

The central goal of this curriculum is to enable students and schools to act as health agents, addressing the structural determinants of health and promoting environmental changes. The optimum level for all topics of the curriculum is achieved through learning objectives, which concern three interconnected levels. These are: “investigating determinants of health”, “practising action competency skills for health” and “achieving changes in favour of health”. All levels are means as well as end products in terms of the curriculum objectives.

The outcome of the development of the health education curriculum acts as a guide for school interventions, through a methodological framework, which encourages participants to identify and promote environmental changes that facilitate healthy choices. This is of significance to those working in the field of health promotion and who seek to establish a new language of health promotion that goes beyond the pervasive discourse of individual lifestyles.

The implementation of the particular health education curriculum will promote not only health in the school community but also in the local community. This is because a key principle which underlies the curriculum is the involvement of the students, school staff, family and community in everyday health promotion practice. It also promotes the development of partnerships among them.

This is an innovative curriculum for Cyprus, based on health promotion and health education principles, but at the same time taking in account the local socio‐cultural and political perspective. This curriculum may be applicable to other European countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues of race and culture in health education in the secondary school health and physical education (HPE) curriculum in Ontario, Canada.

Using Ontario’s secondary school curriculum as a point of analysis, this paper draws from critical race theory and a whiteness lens to identify how cultural and race identities are positioned in contemporary health education documents. The curriculum document and its newest strategies for teaching are the focus of analysis in this conceptual paper.

Within the curriculum new teaching strategies offer entry points for engaging students in learning more about culture and race. In particular, First Nation, Métis and Inuit identities are noted in the curriculum. Specifically, three areas of the curriculum point to topics of race and culture in health: eating; substance use, abuse and additions; and, movement activities. Within these three educational areas, the curriculum offers information about cultural practices to teach about what it means to understand health from a cultural lens.

The HPE curriculum offers examples of how Ontario, Canada, is expanding its cultural approaches to knowing about and understanding health practices. The acknowledgment of First Nations, Métis and Inuit health and cultural ways of approaching health is significant when compared to other recently revised HPE curriculum from around the globe. The teaching strategies offered in the curriculum document provide one avenue to think about how identity, culture and race are being taught in health education classrooms.

First, with limited analysis of health education policy within schools, the use of critical theory provides opportunities for thinking about what comes next when broadening definitions of health to be more inclusive of cultural and race identity. Second, curriculum structures how teachers respond to the topics they are delivering, thus how HPE as a subject area promotes healthy practices is highly relevant to the field of health education. This paper provides an important acknowledgment of the educative work being undertaken in the revision of HPE curriculum.

Much has been written about the theory and practice of work experience, but mostly in academic terms and aimed specifically at the “world of education”. What follows is presented in practical terms, and is intended to be of help to industrial colleagues. It has been written by an experienced practitioner who has worked at both the chalk‐face and Local Education Authority (LEA) level providing work experience for thousands of students. Basically, work experience is examined briefly in terms of its origins in the 1960s. The mechanics of its delivery are looked at and an indication of the current picture and the anticipated future expectations is given: a practical approach therefore to a very important curricular development area.

This study aims to understand the supports and challenges to using disciplinary and antiracism lenses when teaching with informational texts in middle grades English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms.

This paper analyzes teacher talk in four virtual sessions with four middle grades ELA teachers in one school district. Teachers had recently completed a voluntary, school-based antiracism professional development. Researchers used thematic analysis of session transcripts and semi-structured interviews.

Teachers’ informational text use was nested in and directed by curriculum and contexts that limited disciplinary and antiracist teaching. The context and texts constrained instruction to basic reading skills. Equity was conceptualized as supporting students’ persistence. Discussions of race were avoided.

This study has implications for ELA teacher preparation, and district and state resources to support merging disciplinarity and antiracism in informational text instruction in ELA. The study is limited by the small sample from one district and access to only teacher self-reports.

Secondary ELA disciplinary literacy has privileged literature, yet there is an increase of informational text use in middle grades ELA. Teachers need support teaching informational texts through disciplinary and antiracism lenses.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an exploratory study, Project En-ELT (enhancing English language learning and teaching), which used lesson study to mediate curriculum innovation to enhance student learning by engaging teachers in learning and implementing effective English language teaching strategies and formative assessment practices in seven lower secondary schools in Singapore over two years. It aims to portray how lesson study can be adapted to build teacher pedagogical capacity in carrying out the language development goals formulated in the revised national English Language Syllabus 2010.

Project evaluation is embedded systematically into the research design from the very beginning of the pilot to in between each step of lesson study process across three consecutive cycles in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot program from the project advisors’, participating teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Both the quantitative and qualitative data were collected in and across the instructional steps and lesson study cycles to create immediate evidence-based feedback to inform continuous on-going adjustment and improvement.

Findings indicate that across the three cycles the lesson study teams moved from isolated to collaborative planning; from poor understanding and mechanical execution of the retelling strategy to a more sophisticated and skilful use of reciprocal teaching. An increase was found in teacher confidence and positive attitude towards the value of the project in developing their language and teaching effectiveness. There was enhanced student engagement and collaborative participation in the lessons while assessment for learning was fostered in the classroom.

Program evaluation provided feedback loops to ensure that each enactment stage and cycle learns from and builds on the limitations and strengths of the previous one(s) so internal consistency, continuity and coherence can be achieved for concrete implementation; different perspectives from the project officers/researchers, teachers and students were collected consistently and analyzed to gauge the accuracy of the findings; the collaboration between Ministry of Education curriculum officers, specialists and teachers, through lesson study, was able to create democratic relations rested upon interdependence, and mutual respect and trust; and it provides an illustrative case of how lesson study can be used effectively to help schools carry out national curriculum and pedagogical innovations. The project has important implications for addressing the issues of implementation and sustainability of innovative curriculum practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore student perceptions of the internationalised learning environment across a particular university's home and offshore campuses. It addresses three research questions namely: what constitutes the internationalised learning environment for students? Can a university offer an internationalised learning environment that is equitable for students across its home and offshore campuses? And what differences exist in the internationalised learning environment for students in a university's home and offshore campuses?

In total, 484 completed responses were collected from the university's six campuses in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Findings suggested significant differences in the way students perceived of teaching reputation, context-specific curriculum, resources, student-support staff interaction and their attitude towards their university.

These insights could help a university's teaching staff and administrators to focus on specific attributes in marketing the internationalised learning environments of each of its campuses. This could give the university better opportunity for improving the learning process and its outcomes for students.

This paper sets out to define the parameters of the internationalised learning environment and conducts an audit of this environment from the student perspective. Findings suggested significant differences in the way students perceived of teaching reputation, context-specific curriculum, resources, student-support staff interaction and their attitude towards their university. In the market of fierce competition for international students, it is crucial that these positive attributes be part of the marketing messages in any promotion campaigns for universities.

This chapter reports on how teachers engage with research evidence in New Zealand (NZ). NZ is classified as a mixture of egalitarian and individualist ways, as it has low social regulation but is ‘centre right’ on social cohesion according to Hood’s (1998) matrix. That is to say, as it is self-governing school system, it has low social regulation with fewer hierarchical accountability systems, but there is evidence of both high and low social cohesion in the system. While the system values and promotes research engagement and establishes initiatives that require it, such engagement is not yet as fully embedded as the related policies and initiatives would hope. Many teachers are unlikely to engage with research without sufficient support, conducive conditions and adequate resourcing that support that aspiration. Enablers include: a research-derived and research-promoting model of pedagogy in the national curriculum, and initiatives that promote connections between practitioners and research/researchers. Barriers include: limited system-wide mechanisms to ensure that the policy mechanisms are working as intended, the ‘translation’ of research to practice, and research accessibility. We discuss three lessons from the NZ case: systematic and system-wide efforts to ensure high-quality tools and capability-building initiatives, the potential of research-practice partnerships to build research engagement capability, and how enquiry can support appropriate use of research evidence.

Assessing learners with extensive support needs has traditionally been rooted in deficit perspectives, in which student incapacities are highlighted. We start this chapter with an overview of this historical view and identify its shortcomings. Next, we identify alternate assessment and progress monitoring as key efforts for shifting the lens from deficit-oriented assessment toward more grade-aligned, inclusive-, and strengths-based strategies. We also identify strategies for comprehensive assessment that can continue this shift in approach. Finally, we conclude with ideas for future directions in assessing learners with extensive support needs.