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This chapter reports on research work which was a component of an independent review of the primary school curriculum renewal exercise that was commissioned by the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago and executed during 2012–2013. It examines how agencies functioned to engender educational change through education governance systems in the process of revising the curriculum. Turbulence Theory (Gross, 2014) was the tool used to explore the interactions among agencies. The research shows that turbulence occurred at various stages and that the outcome of interactions among the agencies that were in pursuit of educational change and equity was largely dependent on the extent of the turbulence and how it was managed. For example, the local Curriculum Planning Team (CPT) was able to learn from external consultants while firmly maintaining that they were the ones who had a deep understanding of the local context and should therefore have a major say in what was included in the curriculum. However, the CPT could do little to offset the severe turbulence caused when the political directorate mandated that there should be full-scale implementation of the revised curriculum without the benefit of a pilot. The role of socio-political contextual factors in the curriculum development process is highlighted.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a resilience curriculum in early years and primary schools to enhance social inclusion, equity and social justice amongst European communities, particularly amongst disadvantaged and vulnerable ones, through quality education. It defines educational resilience in terms of academic, social and emotional growth in the face of life challenges; discusses the conceptual framework and key principles underpinning the curriculum; and presents the six major content areas of the curriculum. Finally, it presents the preliminary findings of a pilot project on the implementation of the curriculum in more than 200 classrooms in about 80 early and primary schools in six European countries.

The curriculum was first drafted collaboratively amongst the six partners on the basis of the existing literature in the promotion of resilience in early years and primary schools, with a particular focus to European realities. Once it was internally reviewed, it was piloted in 200 early years and primary school classrooms in six European countries, with each of the six partners implementing one theme. Data collection included teacher reflective diaries, classroom checklists, semi-structured interviews with teachers and focus groups with students.

The preliminary results from the pilot evaluation of the curriculum in 199 classrooms totalling 1,935 students across six countries indicate that both the teachers and the learners overwhelmingly found the curriculum highly enjoyable, useful, relevant and easy to use. They looked forward to the possibility of having the programme on a full-time basis as part of the general curriculum in the future. The teachers reported a positive moderate change in learners’ behaviour related to the theme implemented and argued that for the implementation to be effective, it needs to take place throughout the whole year. A number of modifications have been on the basis of the teachers’ and learners’ feedback.

This is the first resilience curriculum for early years and primary schools in Europe. While it seeks to address the needs of vulnerable children such as Roma children, immigrant and refugee children and children with individual educational needs, it does so within an assets-based, developmental, inclusive and culturally responsive approach, thus avoiding potential labelling and stigmatising, while promoting positive development and growth. It puts the onus on the classroom teacher, in collaboration with parents and other stakeholders, in implementing the curriculum in the classroom.

To cope with the challenges of the twenty‐first century, the Hong Kong SAR government initiated the Curriculum Reform in 2001. In 2006, a research team from a tertiary institution was commissioned to review the progress of change for smooth implementation of the reform in its next phase. This paper aims to examine this issue.

The nature of the review is basically a survey, applying questionnaires and follow‐up focus‐group interviews to collect data from different groups of subjects. The sample was around 20 per cent of the population, i.e. a total of 252 primary (n=138) and secondary (n=114) schools.

The paper reports findings on the support for the Reform by primary and secondary schools. Five areas of agreement among school heads are examined, which include challenges to be met, guiding principles of the reform, learning goals, reform framework and the overall agreement with the rationale of the reform. It is found that, while the curriculum reform was supported among school heads, senior teachers and teachers, there was a gap between the views of senior management team and frontier teachers.

This is a very comprehensive research project with a limited timeframe. The paper can only report and discuss findings mainly on the support for curriculum reform by school heads. Other aspects of the study will be discussed and reported separately in subsequent papers.

The gap between the views of senior management team and frontier teachers is worth probing as this is the most obstructive factor to the implementation of the reform. Identifying the cause would be the first step in formulating strategies to address and, hopefully, to facilitate the smooth transition from the phase of implementation to the continuation phase of the change process.

The study has suggested the development of a two‐dimensional framework of agreement areas and stakeholders which will contribute to a better understanding of the change process in general, and achievements of a curriculum reform in particular. Other issues are also discussed.

Primary schools provide continuous, intensive contact with large numbers of children starting from a young age, thus providing an appropriate setting for the promotion of healthy eating through food and nutrition education (FNE). This qualitative study explores the views of Australian primary school parents about FNE in primary schools.

In total, 19 parents of primary school children from Victoria participated in semi-structured interviews. Audio recordings were transcribed and underwent thematic analysis using Nvivo. A total of three themes emerged: FNE topics currently taught in primary schools, essential food skills and knowledge for primary school children and the importance of FNE.

Most parents thought that FNE is as important as the core subjects of primary school. Parental support for FNE, which is delivered over a prolonged period, and expanded by hands-on content such as cooking and gardening classes was evident. Parents viewed these classes as likely to improve children's food-related knowledge and healthy eating behaviours. Parents expressed appreciation for schools' emphasis on food sustainability and its alignment with school policies and practices. Parents were keen to see more sustainability included in the curriculum.

These results may have implications for curriculum developers and schools, as the findings can assist the design of food and nutrition curricula for primary schools which can empower children as well as their families to make better food-related decisions.

Australian parents' views of FNE in primary schools have been under examined.

This article presents the summary and main recommendations for companies, local partnerships and networks, primary schools, education authorities and initial teacher education institutions, of the RSA project “Industry Matters”.

The paper sets out to analyse the quality education curriculum innovations that have been implemented in Kenya since independence in 1963. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the success and or failure of the innovations and determine the lessons learned that can inform future design and implementation of curriculum innovations designed to improve the quality of education.

This was a desk review of curriculum policy documents and related research literature. The documents analysed included various education commission reports produced by education commissions, committees and task forces appointed to inquire into education and make recommendations to government; primary school syllabuses and related research literature.

The review has revealed that the curriculum innovations recommended and implemented in Kenya have targeted the attainment of the goals of individual and national economic development; national identity and unity; socio-cultural, moral and ethical development; cognitive development and globalization; and psycho-social skills development. Many of the innovations have not been implemented effectively. Impediments to effective implementation have included hasty implementation, limited in-service training for teachers, inadequate ongoing professional support for teachers, and inadequate resources.

Achieving effective curriculum innovation is not easy. It requires greater participation in curriculum decision making, patience in training those in various levels of the curriculum implementation process and enormous resources.

In adopting content analysis as a methodology, the paper constitutes a unique contribution to the study of curriculum innovation in Kenya.

Barry Down describes curriculum design in much the same way when he claims that in the years following World War Two Australian civics education was planned under ‘perpetual tension and conflict between the imperatives of capitalism and democracy’. The suggestion seems to be that an ideal democratic education is possible, if short‐term political and economic considerations had not prevented this. I argue that this suggestion is naive. The democratic idea is not static ‘short term prudential requirements of the moment’, whether concerned with war, imperialism, fear of communism, industrial development, or otherwise, create the conditions by which democratic society is defined. This definition is embedded in civics education with the hope that children might perfect that society in adulthood. But visions of the ideal society do not only concern civics education, lessons on right behaviour. Rather, the very world children are educated to see depends on the politics and economics at the time that curriculum is designed. The content of lessons, the way the lessons are taught, and the underlying assumptions about what the world is like ‐ all are constituted by politics. Therefore, to understand civics education it is important to delve deeper and locate the epistemological basis of social studies education in the political context of its time. What children are taught about the social world as a whole should be considered before civics education can make any sense. To make this argument I look at the two curricula used at Victorian primary schools in the mid twentieth century, put in place in 1934 and 1952

Outdoor education was first included in the formal (written) curriculum for New Zealand schools in 1999. This article explores New Zealand outdoor education as a product of a particular coincidence of social and economic conditions and the contested domais of pedagogy and curriculum during the period 1935‐1965. Popkewitz, among others, views school curricula and associated practices as emerging from ‘systems of ideas that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards and conceptual distinctions’ which ‘shape and fashion interpretation and action’. It is these ‘systems of ideas’, or ‘traditions’ in Goodson and Marsh’s terms, that provide a framework for understanding outdoor education in New Zealand schools. Since the 1930s, outdoor education in New Zealand appears to have consolidated from, and been shaped by, competing educational ideologies and changing social and economic influences. The way in which outdoor education accommodated competing traditions is the focus of this, necessarily broad, analysis

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.

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.