This book offers a geographically unique cultural comparative lens to examine the issue of transnational curriculum knowledge (re)production. Prompted by the ongoing competency-based curriculum reforms on a global scale, this book examines where global frameworks like the OECD’s core competency definitions are rooted and how they are borrowed, resisted, and/or re-contextualized in various European states with a Christian, foremost Protestant educational–cultural heritage and Asian countries with a Confucian educational–cultural heritage. It highlights the roles that various factors, such as history, culture, religious attitudes, ideology, and state governance play in nation-states’ re-contextualization of global curriculum policies and practices beyond a simplistic and dualistic globalism/power and nationalism/resistance dynamic. In doing so, it provides a global context to better understand individual nation-state’s continuing curriculum reforms and school practices. At the same time, it situates individual nation-state’s latest curriculum reforms and practices within an international community for healthy dialogues and mutual sharing. By selecting two educational–cultural systems and wisdom—Christian-Protestant and Confucian—it also offers a springboard for international curriculum studies beyond the usual confinement of geopolitical nation-state constructs. It not only sheds new light on each nation-state’s curriculum policies and practices, but also creates new collaboration spaces within similar and across disparate cultural–educational regions. With its wide geopolitical and educational–cultural scope, this book appeals to a global market and can be used in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative education, history of education, curriculum theory, school and society, and curriculum history.

Drawing from a comprehensive collection of university-funded teaching development projects, this edited volume explores the theories and practices behind developing pedagogies through Lesson Study for a 21st-century curriculum. It encompasses various aspects such as lesson observation, assessment literacy, online teaching pedagogy, values education, STEM education, language education, and mathematics education. The chapters investigate the application of Lesson Study in diverse contexts, highlighting its use in ICT-based teaching and learning environments, the development and refinement of e-pedagogies, as well as the integration of AI in education. Through these cases, the content demonstrates how Lesson Study empowers teachers to craft pedagogies that enhance student learning, while emphasizing its pivotal role as an innovative approach to address the evolving landscape of education in this digital era. Implementing a 21st Century Competency-Based Curriculum Through Lesson Study is the first to address the academic discussion of using Lesson Study to develop pedagogies for effective curriculum implementation to tackle the impact of Industry 4.0 on school education. It offers valuable insights, reflections, and practical guidance to policy makers, school leaders, teacher educators, and teachers who are dedicated to enhancing student learning and nurturing the essential skills required for success in the 21st century.

The Springer International Handbook of Educational Development in Asia Pacific breaks new ground with a comprehensive, fine-grained and diverse perspective on research and education development throughout the Asia Pacific region. In 13 sections and 127 chapters, the Handbook delves into a wide spectrum of contemporary topics including educational equity and quality, language education, learning and human development, workplace learning, teacher education and professionalization, higher education organisations, citizenship and moral education, and high performing education systems. The Handbook is grounded in specific Asia Pacific contexts and scholarly traditions, using unique country-specific narratives, for example, Vietnam and Melanesia, and socio-cultural investigations through lenses such as language identity or colonisation, while offering parallel academic discourse and analyses framed by broader policy commentary from around the world.

Following closely behind the global pandemic’s recent forced challenges to schools and teachers, Xu gives an overview of how educational researchers and schools in Asia respond to challenges in times of change. Her research focuses on how they adjust or change curriculum policy and practice to find a balance between developing innovation in response to fast-changing societal needs and maintaining the existing education systems that traditionally predict success for students. In this book, curriculum innovation is documented in three themes: 21st-century skills and competency-based curriculum, technology-supported curriculum and equity in curriculum. Xu includes three types of chapters: (1) case studies that provide detailed analyses of curriculum innovation at the school or country level, (2) conceptual analyses that deepen our understanding of curriculum issues using a new lens and (3) literature reviews that provide an overview of research in particular topics. The volume will be of great interest to researchers and educators interested in the role of curriculum innovation in times of change. In particular, it focuses on the ways innovative curriculum provides opportunities for individual students to maximize their potential while also acknowledging the constraints of local education systems.

Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Tracing historical and cultural factors which gave rise to the Nordic Education Model, this volume explores why Northern European education policy has become an international benchmark for schooling. The text explains the historical connection between a Nordic ideal of democracy and schooling, and indicates how values of equality, welfare, justice, and individualism might be successfully integrated in national school systems and curricula around the world. The volume also highlights recent debates around the longevity of the Nordic model and explores the risks and challenges posed by international policy and assessment agendas. Exploring how Nordic education polices successfully merge social equity with academic excellence, the book combines cultural, historical, sociological and philosophical analysis with a deep exploration of curriculum and teaching. This book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduates working across the fields of curriculum, comparative education, cultural studies and history and philosophy of education and education policy.

This volume uncovers the colonial epistemologies that have long dominated the transfer of curriculum knowledge within and across nation-states and demonstrates how a historical approach to uncovering epistemological colonialism can inform an alternative, relational mode of knowledge transfer and negotiation within curriculum studies research and praxis. World leaders in the field of curriculum studies adopt a historical lens to map the negotiation, transfer, and confrontation of varied forms of cultural knowledge in curriculum studies and schooling. In doing so, they uniquely contextualize contemporary epistemes as historically embedded and politically produced and contest the unilateral logics of reason and thought which continue to dominate modern curriculum studies. Contesting the doxa of comparative reason, the politics of knowledge and identity, the making of twenty-first century educational subjects, and multiculturalism, this volume offers a relational onto-epistemic network as an alternative means to dissect and overcome epistemological colonialism. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies as well as the study of international and comparative education. Those interested in post-colonial discourses and the philosophy of education will also benefit from the volume.