ABSTRACTTo remove cultural bias is critical for the legitimacy of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as an internationally reliable academic assessment. Since its inception, PISA has made extensive effort to address this issue by putting in place a range of methodological and procedural measures to ensure its test fairness. This study attempts to disrupt the clean and reassuring accounts of PISA's technical solutions to cultural bias and exposes the irrationalities, tensions and messes that get muted in the rational and scientific discourse of test fairness. To this end, this article turns to Japanese kokugo (national language) curriculum experts as a source of critical insights. In particular, it looks at the way they responded to PISA's notion of reading literacy and then how those who were tasked to develop test items for reading literacy in PISA 2009 made sense of their item development experience. Their experience highlights the inherent cultural bias in the PISA's framework for reading literacy itself as well as the highly messy and coercive processes of PISA item development. In conclusion, I call for broadening the sources of critical insights beyond Anglo-American and select European countries to denaturalize the underpinning premises of PISA that remain unproblematized by Anglo-European critical education policy scholars.

ABSTRACTStudent capacities to actively listen, sense and feel are often relegated to lower order skills in an education system increasingly governed by measurable outcomes. While most school-based pedagogies focus their approach on cognition, this paper considers how we might make sense of the affective experiences that often resist the deep thinking, independent learning and explanation so often required of students. The guiding aim is to explore how affective learning can be better understood through an Indigenous Australian concept of Country. We apply the pedagogical work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, along with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore ways in which sensation and affect are already a method of learning, but ones that are substantially under-valued in designed curricula. A series of interviews with senior Aboriginal people are presented to assist in understanding the various ways in which affect can lead to thought. The authors present three case studies to highlight how knowledge can be taught through affective experiences of Country.

Just about every process associated with academic-related pedagogy, evaluation, and programming is shaped, in part, by its relationship to the concept of student ability. In essence, the modern-day...

This article refers to:The three Rs: Parental risk management strategies in the International Secondary Education Market

ABSTRACTEarly childhood writing curriculums typically focus on skills and encouraging interest. What children are asked to write is rarely closely examined. Through a self-study of my first and second grade classroom, in this paper I look at the implications of genre when teaching young children. I first identify some of the problems of a popular personal narrative curriculum and then showcase the ways that fiction can be more empowering for my students.

Commonly, the central question of curriculum study is posed simply as “what knowledge is of most worth.” The question, of course, is deceivingly simple, and many curriculum scholars have complicate...

ABSTRACTThe currents of elitism surging through curriculum studies in the United States have long been of chief concern to critical scholars in the field. Elements of this elitism running along racialized, gendered, classed and other such lines elide to marginalize knowledge generated by and about the “other.” For this racialized, gendered, classed and otherwise marked “other,” curriculum can be conceptualized as an unwelcoming and uninhabitable space. In this article, I focus on how Black feminist theorizing refuses the “othering” of Black girls and women in curriculum. I re-search the curricular space through a Black feminist framework, and discover the hopeful existence of Black social life, as opposed to social death, in its charred soils. My application of this lens to a reparative reading of Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl” finds that the author subversively disrupts the status quo by de-centering the Western world – in which whiteness is inherently deified – while simultaneously re-presenting Black girls and women as agentic, textured subjects, rather than passive, one-dimensional objects. These findings magnify the radical affordances of Black feminist theorizing for critical curriculum studies by illustrating the promise of this framework for propelling the field beyond deconstruction and toward re-imaginings of the human, as well as engagements with diverse versions and visions of the human unhinged from the White, Western man as the quintessential human being.

ABSTRACTFoucault's notion of heterotopia offers a novel way to understand teachers’ conceptualizations of childhood, in juxtaposing adult memories of childhood with their present context of teaching children. Memory writing prompts were given to 41 early childhood teachers, and the resulting written narratives were analyzed as heterotopic spaces. The study follows two trajectories. First, in terms of teacher development, we examine how the construct of heterotopia can help teachers and teacher educators understand the impact of memories on their current assumptions about childhood. Second, we argue that examining the teacher's internal experiences through heterotopia can contribute to theoretical thinking about childhood. The study's findings suggest that it is a considerable but meaningful challenge to examine our subjective experience of childhood in relation to our understanding of children today. This process may be useful in assisting the teacher to disentangle the imagined, remembered, conceptualized and actual child, and to interrupt our tendencies to project our own experiences onto others. Perhaps, there is a childhood that exists in heterotopic spaces, not quite the subjective or psychical child, but not quite the external child either. This may be the liminal childhood that the early childhood teacher, preoccupied as (s)he is with childhood, experiences. Theorizing teachers’ subjectivities as they are linked to their memories of childhood is a complex endeavour, and Foucault's heterotopia provides rich images of strange juxtaposition that may be useful in thinking about childhood and teaching.