Curriculum Matters 10: 2014

Curriculum commentators have identified well-documented participatory pathways for key competency development. However, there is a paucity of New Zealand research that takes a poststructural view of how competencies play out in classroom discourses. It is the contention of this article that, rather than learners ‘having’ agency to transfer competencies from one situation to the next, competencies can be produced and enacted as learners shift subjectivities across discourses. The findings are… Read more

This article reports on the views of secondary school music teachers in relation to curriculum content in New Zealand. We know very little about music teachers’ response to the cultural and educational changes of recent times and how these changes are being reflected and managed in their curriculum decision making. The article outlines and discusses responses obtained in a recent survey (N = 99). The data suggest that music teachers remain committed to progressive student-centred… Read more

The social phenomenon that is “identity” appears to have gained prominence in the landscape of New Zealand educational curriculum during the three decades of curriculum development, review, and change that began in the 1980s. While the term identity is a recent addition in national curricula, the concept of identity has been a constant inclusion in the goals, rationale, and purposes of state education. However, the nature and use of this concept has shifted. This article sets the… Read more

New Zealand has guidelines for education outside the classroom (EOTC) that support schools to take advantage of the community and environment beyond the school gates and thereby bring the national curriculum alive. While teaching and learning are the main focus for EOTC, safety is another paramount principle of EOTC programmes. Safety has not always been the priority that it is now, as notions of safety have changed over time. Taking a position that meaning-making occurs in social contexts,… Read more

This article reports on the first phase of an investigation into the effective transitioning of secondary students to tertiary education through a focus on academic literacy. Action research was used to develop collaborative partnerships between teachers and researchers, and between students and peer mentors. We found that the interpretation of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement’s (NCEA) design features and its implementation in teachers’ practice may be inhibiting students… Read more

In this article we draw on ideas of boundary crossing and boundary objects as a way of thinking about preservice teachers’ metaphors about the nature of mathematics. During a graduate primary mathematics education paper, the writing of metaphors was employed as a reflective tool to support preservice teachers to conceptualise their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and to consider implications for their practice as teachers. Focus-group discussions were also held. The metaphors, and… Read more

It is anathema for educators to describe pedagogy as having a recipe—it is tantamount to saying it is a technicist process rather than a professional one requiring active, informed decision making. But if teacher educators are to help novice teachers understand what pedagogy is and how it can be understood, there must be a starting point for pedagogical knowledge to shape both the understanding and design of appropriate curriculum learning. To address this challenge, I argue that food-… Read more

This article deals with several problems associated with metaphors commonly used for scientific concepts associated with the topic of evolution. First, a pragmatic linguistic approach is used to clarify the relationship between analogies and metaphors, about which many authors in the science-education literature express uncertainty. A “razor-wire” metaphor is then applied to discuss the linguistic risks of several metaphors describing aspects of evolution. The razor-wire metaphor expands the… Read more