As contemporary education becomes increasingly tied to global economic power, national school systems attempting to influence one another inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures. Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world. Informed by historical and sociological insight into a variety of nations and eras, these in-depth case studies reveal how and why sweeping, convergent reform agendas clash with specific institutional policies, practices, and curricula. Countering current theoretical models which fail to address the potential pressures born from these challenging isomorphic developments, this book illuminates the cultural idiosyncrasies that both produce and problematize global reform efforts and offers a new way of understanding curriculum as a manifestation of national identity.

As contemporary education becomes increasingly tied to global economic power, national school systems attempting to influence one another inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures. Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world. Informed by historical and sociological insight into a variety of nations and eras, these in-depth case studies reveal how and why sweeping, convergent reform agendas clash with specific institutional policies, practices, and curricula. Countering current theoretical models which fail to address the potential pressures born from these challenging isomorphic developments, this book illuminates the cultural idiosyncrasies that both produce and problematize global reform efforts and offers a new way of understanding curriculum as a manifestation of national identity.

At a time when ICTs are proliferating various facets of society and human interactivity, optimizing the use of these tools and technologies not only enhances learning but also transforms learning experiences all together, resulting in an increase of effectiveness and quality of education around the globe. As such, teachers are being challenged to implement a wide range of tools, such as mobile learning and augmented reality, to create smarter learning environments inside and outside of the classroom. Cases on Smart Learning Environments explores the potential of SLE tools for enhanced learning outcomes as experienced by educators, learners, and administrators from various learning institutions around the world. This publication presents cases on the real-world implementation of SLEs in 11 countries that span the continents of Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as learner engagement, teacher training, and intelligent agent technology, this book is ideally designed for academicians, instructors, instructional designers, librarians, educational stakeholders, and curriculum developers.

Politics of Education in Latin America: Reforms, Resistance and Persistence portrays complex situations of education change policies in Latin America from Argentina and Chile, the southernmost part of the continent, to Mexico, the northernmost. The analyses tour through Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Cuba to conclude with a chapter that scrutinizes why the big teacher unions reject most attempts at education reforms. In these, teachers are the target of criticism and, at the same time, the focus of the expectations for progress and better educational quality. Readers will find a variety of contentious issues such as inclusion, equity, privatization, uses of power, and dialectics between the indications of intergovernmental organizations and the rejection of their recommendations by local political actors. They will also find narratives to raise public education participation, improve the quality of life of teachers, and put local education systems to dialogue with the global world. The politics of education in Latin America is a territory that groups and institutions continue to dispute since the establishment of their education systems.

A presence for decades in individuals’ everyday life practices and identity formation, the Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the "big" curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. Disney, Culture, and Curriculum explores the myriad ways that Disney’s curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney’s historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its products and perspectives while providing insight into Disney’s operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond. The contributors engage with Disney’s curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, Disney, Culture, and Curriculum extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities.

This book addresses practices of bordering, debordering and rebordering on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after state borders had been remapped on the negotiation tables of the Paris Peace Treaties following the First World War. As life in borderlands did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. The chapters in this book include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains; on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany; and on cross-border activities. The book shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. The contributions demonstrate the practices of borderland inhabitants in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, European Review of History.

Expanding Curriculum Theory, Second Edition carries through the major focus of the original volume—to reflect on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "lines of flight" and its application to curriculum theorizing. What is different is that the lines of flight have since shifted and produced expanded understandings of this concept for curriculum theory and for education in general. This edition reflects the impact of events that have contributed to this shift, in particular the (il)logic of school policy changes and reforms in the past decade, and the continued explosion of social media and its effect on the collective understanding of how both "knowledge" and "education" work as forms of repression. The introduction updates the text and puts it into current debates in the field and in the larger socio-economic milieu. New dis/positions are presented that explore central questions circulating within and outside curriculum studies. Exciting scholarship on a range of topics includes notions of desire and commodities, youth culture and violence, new directions in curriculum theory, Eco-Ethical consciousness, new Deleuzian views of normality, the diffusion of technology and lines of flight in transnational curriculum inquiry.