Curriculum Challenges And Opportunities In A Changing World

This book brings together voices and perspectives from across the world and draws in a new generation of curriculum scholars to provide fresh insight into the contemporary field. By opening up Curriculum Studies with contributions from twelve countries—including every continent—the book outlines and exemplifies the challenges and opportunities for transnational curriculum inquiry. While curriculum remains largely shaped and enabled nationally, global policy borrowing and scholarly exchange continue to influence local practice. Contributors explore major shared debates and future implications through four key sections: Decolonising the Curriculum; Knowledge Questions and Curriculum Dilemmas; Nation, History, Curriculum; and Curriculum Challenges for the Future.

"What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995? Can you honestly say that your school's curriculum and the program you use are preparing your students for 2015 or 2020? Are you even preparing them for today?" With those provocative questions, author and educator Heidi Hayes Jacobs launches a powerful case for overhauling, updating, and injecting life into the K-12 curriculum. Sharing her expertise as a world-renowned curriculum designer and calling upon the collective wisdom of 10 education thought leaders, Jacobs provides insight and inspiration in the following key areas: * Content and assessment: How to identify what to keep, what to cut, and what to create, and where portfolios and other new kinds of assessment fit into the picture. * Program structures: How to improve our use of time and space and groupings of students and staff. * Technology: How it's transforming teaching, and how to take advantage of students' natural facility with technology. * Media literacy: The essential issues to address, and the best resources for helping students become informed users of multiple forms of media. * Globalization: What steps to take to help students gain a global perspective. * Sustainability: How to instill enduring values and beliefs that will lead to healthier local, national, and global communities. * Habits of mind: The thinking habits that students, teachers, and administrators need to develop and practice to succeed in school, work, and life. The answers to these questions and many more make Curriculum 21 the ideal guide for transforming our schools into what they must become: learning organizations that match the times in which we live.

This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks readers to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become "educated" in the present moment. Curriculum theory is the scholarly effort – inspired by theory in the humanities, arts and interpretive social sciences – to understand the curriculum, defined here as "complicated conversation." Rather than the formulation of objectives to be evaluated by (especially standardized) tests, curriculum is communication informed by academic knowledge, and it is characterized by educational experience. Pinar recasts school reform as school deform in which educational institutions devolve into cram schools preparing for standardized exams, and traces the history of this catastrophe starting in 1950s. Changes in the Second Edition: Introduces Pinar’s formulation of allegories-of-the-present — a concept in which subjectivity, history, and society become articulated through the teacher’s participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum; features a new chapter on Weimar Germany (as an allegory of the present); includes new chapters on the future, and on the promises and risks of technology.

"This book considers the role of language education in a rapidly changing world. Drawing on their extensive experience in language education, the authors consider how students might be supported in developing the language awareness and competences they need in order to participate fully and confidently in our increasingly diverse societies"--

Suggestions are constantly being made about the kinds of changes schools should make. Research in this text shows that schools are primarily inward-looking, and would benefit from a better understanding of the changes surrounding them and the pressures on them.

Advances in Business Education & Training is a Book Series to foster advancement in the field of Business Education and Training. It serves as an international forum for scholarly and state-of-the-art research and development into all aspects of Business Education and Training. This new volume deals with several aspects of the challenge to design learning in and for a changing world. The first part concerns program development. How to build curricula that are future-proof? Principles to innovate our curricula are identified. It answers the question how we can incorporate the need for change in our thinking about curriculum-development and identify the necessary elements to incorporate in our curricula. The second part focuses on the increasing diversity of students and employees within our schools and organizations, in terms of culture, language, and perception of ability, gifts, and talents. This offers a range of opportunities, but at the same time can possibly jeopardize some processes that are taken for granted. Chapters in this part analyze the processes that play a crucial role in dealing with this diversity and identify educational practices that can help to harvest the potential that lies within this diversity. The third part of this book digs further into the possibilities that are opened up by the implementation of ICT-support in our learning environments. E-learning provides tools to adapt these environments to the needs of an increasingly diverse student-population. In the last part we focus specifically on the workplace and how learning can be designed in such a way that employees are equipped for a shifting workplace. On the one hand it is looked how training can affect performance in the workplace. Does learning transfer to the work environment? On the other hand it is questioned how one can design affordances to trigger learning in the workplace.

Based on rapid advances in what is known about how people learn andhow to teach effectively, this important book examines the coreconcepts and central pedagogies that should be at the heart of anyteacher education program. Stemming from the results of acommission sponsored by the National Academy of Education,Preparing Teachers for a Changing World recommends thecreation of an informed teacher education curriculum with thecommon elements that represent state-of-the-art standards for theprofession. Written for teacher educators in both traditional andalternative programs, university and school system leaders,teachers, staff development professionals, researchers, andeducational policymakers, the book addresses the key foundationalknowledge for teaching and discusses how to implement thatknowledge within the classroom. Preparing Teachers for a Changing World recommends that,in addition to strong subject matter knowledge, all new teachershave a basic understanding of how people learn and develop, as wellas how children acquire and use language, which is the currency ofeducation. In addition, the book suggests that teachingprofessionals must be able to apply that knowledge in developingcurriculum that attends to students' needs, the demands of thecontent, and the social purposes of education: in teaching specificsubject matter to diverse students, in managing the classroom,assessing student performance, and using technology in theclassroom.

"It is a pleasure to have a full length treatise on this most important topic, and may this focus on transfer become much more debated, taught, and valued in our schools." - John Hattie Teach students to use their learning to unlock new situations. How do you prepare your students for a future that you can’t see? And how do you do it without exhausting yourself? Teachers need a framework that allows them to keep pace with our rapidly changing world without having to overhaul everything they do. Learning That Transfers empowers teachers and curriculum designers alike to harness the critical concepts of traditional disciplines while building students’ capacity to navigate, interpret, and transfer their learning to solve novel and complex modern problems. Using a backwards design approach, this hands-on guide walks teachers step-by-step through the process of identifying curricular goals, establishing assessment targets, and planning curriculum and instruction that facilitates the transfer of learning to new and challenging situations. Key features include Thinking prompts to spur reflection and inform curricular planning and design. Next-day strategies that offer tips for practical, immediate action in the classroom. Design steps that outline critical moments in creating curriculum for learning that transfers. Links to case studies, discipline-specific examples, and podcast interviews with educators. A companion website that hosts templates, planning guides, and flexible options for adapting current curriculum documents. Using a framework that combines standards and the best available research on how we learn, design curriculum and instruction that prepares your students to meet the challenges of an uncertain future, while addressing the unique needs of your school community.