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This study considers the structure of PISA penetration into education policy through a comparative analysis of Japan and Norway. Many studies on PISA’s impact tend to emphasize the character of PISA result as a norm, such as the concept of “governance by comparison.” This study regards PISA as a norm of educational contents and analyzes the structure of PISA penetration into educational contents policy, with respect to the national curriculum. In describing the situations around PISA in the two countries, the background of the acceptance of PISA, the nature of national curriculum in education policy and its character, and the structure of PISA penetration with the focus being on how PISA is integrated into the national curriculum are analyzed through related documents and literatures. As a result of comparative analysis, three common features are found. First of all, PISA penetration occurred in the context of “PISA Shock” since the importance of PISA itself was recognized. Second, the system of management by objectives was included in the educational system and PISA penetrated into that system as objectives. Third, in relation with this second point, PISA as a norm of educational contents was integrated into existing educational goals or subjects. These features are evident only in the comparison of two countries, so a deeper analysis of PISA penetration will be needed in a future study.

The chapter demonstrates that one way to read recent developments in national curriculum in nations around the globe is as both expressions of and responses to globalization. Additionally, the chapter argues that curriculum making today is affected by ever-changing imbrications between local, national, regional and global relationships. Examples of this include the curriculum impacts actual and potential of the OECD's testing regime and aspirations in relation to curriculum and the EU's creation of a European education policy space. The more recent rise of new nationalisms and ethnonationalism is seen to have potential impact on national curriculum. Some consideration is also given to the content of the curriculum and the contemporary focus on both disciplinary knowledge and on what sorts of people schools should produce; both it is argued are responses to globalization. The ways the message systems (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation) sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the impact of the strengthened significance of international and large-scale assessments on the enactment of the curriculum are also documented. Some brief account is provided of the enhanced involvement of EdTech companies producing online curricula and the ways the pandemic has accelerated this development with the concerning potential for the privatization of the curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the development of a national curriculum for Australia. The paper challenges stakeholders to interrogate the question of national curriculum, its purpose, values and potential for delivering the type of education Australia wants for its citizens in the twenty‐first century.

The paper provides a general review of the literature, research and opinion associated with the politics, purpose, leadership and potential for change associated with national curriculum innovation.

The national curriculum looms as the largest educational change in Australia's history and requires a thorough examination by stakeholders of the purposes and values underpinning it and how such a centralised curriculum can build the learning capacity of the nation. Authentic engagement of teachers, “buy in”, bottom‐up and top‐down strategies, extensive time for negotiations and the engagement of educational and political leaders are seen as important for community ownership of the product.

The paper challenges political and educational leaders to conduct the national curriculum building dialogue at the local, state and national level and to open up previous “givens” to interrogation. It calls for a long‐term process to protect the authenticity and moral purpose of the process and maximise its ownership and potential for change.

The paper addresses the greatest challenge yet to face Australian education, to deliver a national curriculum that delivers authentic learning for the future needs of Australians and Australia. It presents a case for stakeholders to engage the challenge through a professionally informed and morally defensible approach.

National identification among young people and the issues about how national education should be conducted have been the significant topics when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was entering its third decade of the establishment. This paper was written based on data the authors obtained upon participation in a project organized by the Centre for Catholic Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The project was carried out after the official curriculum, known as the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide, was shelved due to popular resentment. The project aimed at capturing the timely opportunity for substantial resources available for school-based operation of moral and national education and developing an alternative curriculum about teaching national issues and identification for Catholic Diocese and Convent primary schools to adopt. This paper aims to investigate the nature of this Catholic Project and examines the extent to which it is a counterhegemonic project or one for teaching to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2007). It assesses the project’s possible contribution to citizenship and national education in Hong Kong, since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide.

The authors of this paper worked in an education university of Hong Kong and were invited to be team members of this Catholic Project. The role comprised proposing topics for teacher training, conducting seminars, giving comments to teaching resources, observing and giving feedback to schools that tried out the teaching and designing/implementing an evaluative survey and conducting follow-up interviews with involved parties such as teachers and key officials of the Catholic Centre. Given this, the research involved can be perceived as action research. This paper was written up with both the qualitative and quantitative data the authors collected when working the project.

This paper reported a Catholic citizenship training project with the focus on a Catholic school project on preparing students to understand the nation by learning national issues analytically. The ultimate goal was to ensure teachers in Catholic primary schools could lead the students to examine national issues and other social issues from the perspective of Catholic social ethics. Though the project arose after the failure of the government to force through its controversial national education programme, this paper found that instead of being an alternative curriculum with resistance flavour, the project was basically a self-perfection programme for the Catholic. It was to fill a shortfall observed of Catholic schools, namely, not doing enough to let students examine social and national issues with Catholic social ethics, which, indeed, had a good interface with many cherished universal values. In the final analysis, the project is not a typical national education programme, which teaches students to belong to a nation but an innovative alternative curriculum transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions as advanced by western literature (for example, Gramsci, 1971; Freire, 1970; and Apple, 1993).

The paper contributes to the literature of Hong Kong studies and citizenship education studies. The results of such an innovative endeavour, which captures and capitalizes the opportunity and resources for developing a national education curriculum in school-based manner. Attention was paid to the endeavour’s nature and its possible contribution to the knowledge, policies and practices of citizenship and national education in Hong Kong amidst deep social transformations. In particular, the paper can add to the specific literature about Hong Kong’s citizenship and national education development since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. Using an empirical example of Asian schooling and society, analysis of this paper illustrates the way in which development of an alternative curriculum is more innovative and interesting, transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions.

This essay engages with scholarship on history as a discipline, curriculum documents and academic and public commentary on the teaching of history in Australian, British and Canadian secondary contexts to better understand the influence of the tension between political pressure and disciplinary practice that drives the history wars in settler-colonial nations, how this plays out in secondary history classrooms and the ramifications this may have on students' democratic dispositions.

This article aims to compare secondary history curricula and pedagogies in Australia, Britain and Canada to better articulate and conceptualise the influence of the “history wars” over the teaching of national histories upon the intended and enacted curriculum and how this contributes to the formation of democratic dispositions within students. A conceptual model, drawing on the curriculum assessment of Porter (2006) and Gross and Terra's definition of “difficult pasts” has been developed and used as the basis for this comparison. This model highlights the competing influences of political pressure upon curriculum creation and disciplinary change shaping pedagogy, and the impact these forces may have upon students' experience.

The debate around what content students learn, and why, is fraught because it is a conversation about what each nation values and how they construct their own national identity(ies). This is particularly timely when the democratic self-identification of many nations is being challenged. The seditious conspiracy to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Orban's “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and the neo-Nazis in Melbourne, Australia are examples of the rise of anti-democratic sentiment globally. Thus, new consideration of how we teach national histories and the impact this has on the formation of democratic dispositions and skills is pressing.

The new articulation of a conceptual model for the impact of the history wars on education is an innovative synthesis of wide-ranging research on: the impacts of neoliberalism and cultural restorationism upon the development of intended curriculum; discipline-informed inquiry pedagogies used to enact the curriculum; and the teaching of national narratives as a political act. This comprehensive comparison of the ways in which history education in settler-colonial nations has developed over time provides new insight into the common elements of national history education, and the role this education can play in developing democratic dispositions.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.

The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.

A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.

The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.

The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the development of school autonomy, school leadership and curriculum innovation in England over the past 40 years. It provides a baseline picture for the wider international study on school autonomy and curriculum innovation.

An initial literature review was undertaken, including policy document analysis. Interviews and observations were undertaken with participants on a pilot professional programme for school leaders seeking to develop their school curriculum.

While all schools in England have needed to adapt their curricula to reflect the new National Curriculum introduced from 2014, relatively few schools appear to have used this opportunity to design genuinely innovative curricula that respond to the changing needs of learners in the twenty-first century. This includes the academies and free schools – currently around one in four schools – which are not legally required to follow the National Curriculum. The authors posit that leadership agency by principals and their professional teams is more important than policy/legal freedoms for securing curriculum innovation. Such agency appears to depend on the capacity and confidence of leaders to shape an alternative and innovative curriculum in the face of structural constraints, in particular England’s sharp accountability system, effectively making these leaders “rebels against the system”.

The empirical findings are preliminary and based on a small convenience sample.

Given England’s position as a relatively extreme example of high-autonomy-high-accountability quasi-market school reforms this paper provides valuable insights on school autonomy and curriculum innovation that can inform policy and practice more widely.

The national mathematics curriculum of Pakistan has emphasized on improving content knowledge, reasoning abilities and problem-solving skills of students about thinking, communicating and solving mathematics (national mathematics curriculum of Pakistan, 2006). Whereas, there is a need to understand the point of view of teachers about the challenges they face in achieving the goals of national mathematics curriculum. This will help leading teacher training institutions to revisit their math teacher continuous professional development (CPD) programs and facilitate school leadership in improving the quality of math education in rural schools of the province. However, the purpose of this research study is to figure out the challenges that teachers are facing while achieving the goals of the national curriculum by teaching mathematics at the primary level in educational institutes of Pakistan.

In this research study qualitative research approaches have been utilized, in which focus group discussions (FGDs) were used as data collection techniques. Furthermore, thematic analysis of the data led toward the development of four overarching themes such as teachers' knowledge about mathematics curriculum, challenges relating to mathematics content and pedagogy, difficulties in developing conceptual understanding and designing lesson plans to address students' diversity.

The overall findings of this research study suggested that the majority of teachers are facing difficulties in mathematics content teaching such as decimal fraction, unitary method, measurement principles, practical geometry and data handling. Moreover, teachers are also facing challenges and difficulties in developing hands-on and minds-on activities in the teaching of mathematical concepts to the students of primary level in educational institutes of Pakistan.

This research study will facilitate the teachers and stakeholders to address the problematic issues in the domain of content delivery of mathematics. Whereas, this study recommends educating teachers about national mathematics curriculum and to develop a CPD framework for mathematics teachers for the enhancement of their pedagogical content knowledge. The study also recommends orientating school heads about the different aspects of math curriculum so that they can mentor math teachers in achieving math curriculum goals.

This is the first research study of its nature, which targets and highlights the teacher's perceptions toward the achieving the goals of national mathematics curriculum of Pakistan and addressing the pedagogical challenges faced in mathematics teachers. There is a dearth of studies in mathematics education in Sindh province. The issue is of immense importance, the findings will help teachers to improve mathematics instructions at primary level.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the case of a school on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten that was created to serve students who had experienced educational and other injustices in the broader society.

Using qualitative methods, the paper explores two research questions: how did Triumph Multiage School (TMS) conceptualize community and the goals of education, and how did these perspectives reflect or diverge from those of the local, national, and global educational communities to which TMS was connected? What was the nature of curriculum knowledge at TMS, and what points of alignment and difference existed among TMS’ curriculum knowledge and those of its local, national, and global educational communities?

Analysis found points of symmetry and disjunctures among TMS’ conceptualization of community, purposes of education, and curriculum and those of the local, national, and global educational communities to which it was connected. However the strength of ideological and sociopolitical boundaries separating TMS and its local and national communities constrained opportunities for building professional community and curriculum knowledge across them.

The paper contributes to research on the creation of new schools and teacher professional communities by demonstrating the need to expand the construct of community to include local and trans-global dimensions. Such a reconceptualization of community is essential for building professional capital and community that will equip schools and teachers to meet the social and educational needs of student populations in a globalized world.

The national core curriculum is renewed in Finland approximately every ten years, the most recent one being 2016. The core curriculum sets the general goals, providing the foundation for district- and school level curriculum development work (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). The messages from transnational educational policy (e.g. OECD) are apparent in the core curriculum. However, districts, schools and teachers are highly autonomous in upholding, resourcing and deciding about the curriculum making at the local sites of activity. Accordingly, the curriculum making relies heavily on shared sense-making as a tool for cultivating transformative learning throughout the educational system. The chapter draws on the results of the national “School Matters” research project (2014-2018), to provide the meta-analysis of the sense-making in national curriculum making. Results suggested that the shared sense-making focused on engaging educational practitioners in learning at all layers of the system. However, the means for facilitating shared sense-making between the different layers of the system and curriculum was perceived to be less coherent by the stakeholders at the district and school level, than at the state level. This implies that the educational providers should not only be involved in co-creation of the aims, contents and values of the curriculum document, but also in designing novel and ecologically valid ways for orchestrating the complex and dynamic curriculum making.