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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lesson observations are used in educational environments worldwide to support professional development and to measure content and quality of curriculum delivery. Within a neoliberal context, lesson observations can arguably be seen as symbolic of the embodied tensions between educational policies that emphasise accountability and the creative, hidden nature of teaching ...

The metaphor of a feedback loop underpinned a significant curriculum change in a first year teacher-education unit. Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices such as discussing examples of previous student work and giving peer feedback were embedded within the curriculum design. The metaphor of a feedback loop connected these AfL practices ...

“Students as co-researchers” is a mode of engagement between students and teachers in school systems that has been likened to a bridge. This article explores the bridge metaphor with reference to one school’s experience of a students as co-researchers project involving students and teachers in the school and a university ...