As part of a multiyear research project investigating the affordances of online citizen science (OCS) projects for enhancing school students’ learning in relation to science and digital technology, teacher–researchers have designed and implemented classroom interventions incorporating one or more OCS projects. The project is situated in New Zealand, and each ...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to protect children and young people have proliferated in educational contexts, consolidating safety as a core principle guiding an increasing number of decisions at schools. Recently, however, more and more scholars have begun to question the ambiguous nature of “safety”, analysing the tensions between this ...

The New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, encourages teachers to intentionally implement learning experiences so children learn about and through the visual arts. Acknowledging the tensions between intentional teaching and play-based learning, teachers are urged to be neither hands-off nor very structured in designing visual arts learning experiences. In ...

Science capabilities were introduced within the New Zealand context following the revised New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). These capabilities are a small set of things that NZC intends students to be able to do in science, which weave the nature of science with content strands. Using pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to ...

In this article, we consider how assessment might reinforce New Zealand curriculum goals of knowing and doing in science for active and informed participation in societies that rely on scientific knowledge to guide decision making. This focus constitutes an orientation towards “sustainable assessment”. Sustainable assessment encompasses the capacities students need ...

Due to anthropogenic impacts generated by colonial and neocapitalist cultures, the world is now moving on accelerating trajectories toward dystopian futures. Education, traditionally engineered as an instrument of cultural reproduction, now urgently needs to adopt a leadership role for cultural transformation to generate a sustainable future. To fulfil this role ...

A standards-based assessment system provides opportunities to join curriculum intentions to demonstrations of complex learning. In this article we use New Zealand’s senior secondary qualifications system—the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA)—to illustrate how adaptations of existing structures might help to better reflect future-focused curriculum intentions in high-stakes, summative assessments ...

Designing an assessment that is fit for purpose in the initial teacher education (ITE) setting is complex. The assessment must meet the university and New Zealand Teaching Council regulations, mirror educational best practice, support ITE students to learn curricular and pedagogical content as well as be practicable to teach and ...

This article provides a snapshot of assessment for learning in action. It introduces the drawings made by children who had been studying “Planet Earth and Beyond”—Matariki as a context in science in a New Zealand primary school. The visual data are drawn from the Te Ao Hurihuri project (The Changing ...

Integrated STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) has been shown to effectively foster global competencies as well as school and societal engagement for 21st century learners of diverse backgrounds. However, facilitating quality STEAM teaching and learning can be challenging for teachers, particularly in the area of subject integration ...