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This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers' instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein's theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest how well-being messages are recontextualized into school-based contexts from an analysis of national policy and state curricular approaches to health education as reported in the findings of two selected case studies as well as community concerns about young people’s well-being.

A cross-sectional review of Australian federal and state-level student well-being policy documents was undertaken. Using two case examples of school-based in-curricular well-being programs, the paper explores how discourses from these well-being policy documents are recontextualized through progressive fields of translation and pedagogic decision making into local forms of curriculum.

Pedagogic messages about well-being in Australia are often extra-curricular, in that they are rarely integrated into one or across existing subject areas. Such messages are increasingly focused on mental health, around phenomena such as bullying. Both case examples clearly demonstrate how understandings of well-being respond to various power relations and pressures emanating from stakeholders within and across official pedagogic fields and other contexts such as local communities.

The paper focusses on presenting an adaptation of Bernstein’s (1990) model of social reproduction of pedagogic discourse. The adapted model demonstrates how “top-down” knowledge production from the international disciplines shaping curriculum development and pedagogic approaches can be replaced by community context-driven political pressure and perceived community crises. It offers contemporary insight into youth-at-risk discourses, well-being approaches and student mental health.

Building on the proposition that Bernstein's ideas are due for a revival in higher education research, the call for studies in which theory is put to use and for policy studies to engage in textual analysis, this chapter argues for the affordances of the theoretical underpinnings of Bernstein's pedagogic device and critical discourse studies in investigating connections between policy and practice. Drawing on the sociology of pedagogy and applied linguistics, this chapter aims to explore the theoretical complementarities of the chosen approaches for exploring how policy ideas move through time and space. A focus on the notion of recontextualisation enables an understanding of how influences beyond the discipline itself, including policy discourses, can shape learning, teaching and assessment practices. The illustrating case examines policy on learning and teaching and how these ideas are recontextualised from national policy through to institutional policy and individual practices. The critical or questioning angle of both approaches in seeing ideas, including policy, as never value-free but as situated within their sociopolitical context can shed light on how policy ideas make their way into universities and in whose interests.

Global governance has granted international organizations a political role of utmost importance. As the search for research-based best practices is the spearhead of these nongovernmental organizations, national decision-makers tend to accept their recommendations willingly. The way decision-makers use research-based evidence has been amply investigated, but few researchers have interrogated how the same international organizations, that claim to establish a bridge between research and policy, use such evidence. This prompted us to analyze the pedagogical discourse of UNESCO, an organization that recently reminded the international community that improving teacher quality is now a major issue for all those who are preoccupied with improving the quality of education (UNESCO, 2014). Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. EFA global monitoring report. Paris, France: UNESCO). How does UNESCO deal with the issue of teaching practices? What is the content of its pedagogical discourse? To answer these questions, we analyzed the Organization’s publications on teachers in the past 15 years (N = 45) and conducted interviews with a number of its strategic members (N = 5). The results of our analyses of this dataset indicate a tension between the content of the publications and what the interviewees had to say. While the publications timidly but recurrently promote learner-centered constructivist approaches, the interviewees argued that pedagogical orientations are a matter of national sovereignty; that UNESCO should not cross this line. As an intermediary between research and policy and a think tank, UNESCO seems caught in this contradiction. In matters of pedagogy, shouldn’t the Organization be more forceful in counseling its member States by referring to research-based evidence on teaching effectiveness?

The unparalleled crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic has displaced the existing normal in every field of higher education. Especially architecture education with high dependence on institutional studio based pedagogical participation has been affected. Consequently, there is a critical necessity to reinvigorate pedagogical approaches in order to ensure continuity of pedagogical pursuits.

A systematic approach is used to conduct an interdisciplinary study. The research mainly attempts to externalize the basics of virtual design studio composition. In concurrence role of instructional design in providing an underlying framework for enabling virtual discourse is also explored. Primarily, the process commenced by identifying objectives and queries which needed to be addressed. In order to deal with the concerns rationally, the research used exploratory approach. The primary data were based on focus group interactions. The secondary data were based on relevant subject-oriented literature reviews; explicit information based. Explanatory mode of analysis is used to interpret the outcome.

A pedagogical design; an instructional design process model for effectively structuring the virtual design studio has evolved as part of the research. In addition detailed insights have been derived about the key integrals that make up the constituent phases of the virtual design studio.

The research provides insights into the methodological structure of virtual design studio. The inferences would provide the pedagogues a comprehensive and rational overview to envision and conduct architecture studio discourse virtually.

The study presents a unique contribution to the limited literature available on virtual design studio pedagogy and instructional design in virtual mode.

This paper aims to explore the contextual problems and priorities that create tensions in the implementation of activity-based learning reforms such as learning enhancement through active pedagogy in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). By doing so, it aims to understand the relevance of activity-based learning (ABL) in diverse contexts as perceived by stakeholders.

Using qualitative data drawn from semi-structured interviews with 29 teachers, this study uses an anthropological approach to policy implementation to unleash factors creating a disjunction between policy text and policy practice.

Narratives from teachers reveal how critical awareness about context raises tensions and shapes beliefs about ABL. Their beliefs about ABL can be summed as “pedagogy for its own sake”, reflecting the perceived ineptness of ABL in bringing about considerable improvements in students learning outcomes. Reference to “outcomes” was invoked as a crucial recontextualising discourse in teacher’s pedagogic orientation which resulted primarily from the poor learning attainments of rural children in the prevalent outcome-focussed educational setup.

The study is the first of its kind conducted in J&K and amongst very few around the world elucidating tension around the implementation of pedagogic reforms in underserved areas. This is the only study providing a critical analysis of pedagogic reforms in the school education system in J&K.

The study has significant implications in terms of helping immediate functionaries such as headmasters, teacher trainers and administrators and policy planners in understanding the dilemmas faced by teachers in enacting pedagogic reforms. It also adds to the field of policy implementation in terms of understanding the tensions of policy implementation at peripheries.

The study is the first of its kind conducted in J&K and amongst very few around the world elucidating tension around the implementation of pedagogic reforms in underserved areas. This is the only study providing a critical analysis of the school education system in J&K.

In this chapter we open up questions about educational standardisation by thinking through the possibilities of the theoretical work on Totally Pedagogised Societies (TPSs) initially developed by Basil Bernstein (2001). In relation to new modes of teacher professionalism, including the introduction of standardisation measures, researchers have drawn on Bernstein's sociological concepts, including the concept of the TPS (Robertson & Sorenson, 2018). Studies, drawing on the concept of the TPS, have tended to focus on the power scape or power reach of international organisations into pedagogic acts across time space – from cradle to grave, in and out of schools. We seek here to move the analytical possibilities for TPS where the focus on the ‘total’ part of the concept is often read and understood as ‘totalising’ (see, for example, Gewirtz, Mahony & Hextall, 2009; Ball, 2009) and deterministic. Instead, we extend work on the TPS and theorise the redesign of standardisation.

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Authors’ note: To capture the collaborative feminist process in writing this article, we list authors’ name alphabetically rather than the traditional presentation of lead author first.

We use Third World, Materialist, and Poststructuralist feminist perspectives with an intersectional transnational lens to analyze our self-reflections about feminist pedagogy and the messy business of conducting our research. We draw on student participant interviews and responses to follow-up questions to support key arguments.

Much feminist pedagogy discourse constructs consciousness-raising and empowerment as positive. However, our research indicates our students’ experiences of these processes as well as our own as teachers and researchers is contradictory; outcomes are often unintended and not always positive, despite our best intentions.

Our work seeks to destabilize problematic notions of empowerment and consciousness-raising by contributing accounts of how feminist pedagogy impacts students in sometimes negative, unintended ways. These contributions should be utilized to better understand power relations between students and teachers, as well as refine pedagogical approaches to best address and reevaluate their impacts on students.

Rather than perpetuate decontextualized and overly optimistic notions of feminist pedagogy, consciousness-raising, and empowerment that fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and the gendered relations in which they participate, this chapter stands as a call to feminists to problematize their key concepts and practices and lay them open to critique.

This paper argues that because leadership is a relational practice and leaders are gendered and racialised, in socially diverse schools and societies, leader preparation around difference is potentially emotionally confronting to leaders' professional and personal identities.

The paper draws on critical race and feminist theoretical perspectives to undertake a review and analysis of current approaches to professional development.

The paper concludes that because there is significant agreement now that leadership is considered to be emotional management work, then leadership learning, if it seeks to change practice, is also emotionally laden. The paper concludes that to develop more reflexive leaders, professional learning should begin with scrutiny of the self as gendered and racialised to consider what that means for “the Other” in terms of leadership in culturally diverse communities and schools.

The paper is context specific, largely drawing on Australian data with reference to indigeneity. This is consistent with its theoretical position that leadership is relational and situated.

The paper identifies possible strategies that could be undertaken in professional learning forums that address issues of difference.

While there are significant issues around professional learning to develop pedagogical practices that address student diversity, there is less theorising around leadership diversity and what that might mean in terms of professional development of leaders.