Search Results (235)

This research project aims to explore children’s multilingualism and how children’s preschools build on the language resources which families and children bring to their preschools. Research has shown that children actively create their own knowledge and can express themselves regarding their views on language learning and that each child has a unique bilingual or multilingual experience. This qualitative research study contributes to in-depth research with children on their multilingual experiences as described by their parents, preschool teachers and principals. Data was collected from 2022 to 2025 in semi-structured interviews with six parents, their children’s preschool teachers and principals in three preschools in Iceland. The findings indicate that the parents value their children’s language repertoire and use diverse tools to support their children’s multilingualism. The teachers in the study are all interested in supporting the children’s multilingualism, although some of them claim that they lack knowledge, training, and support in implementing multilingual practices. The children are active agents in developing language policies and practices in their families. They contribute to their families’ language practices with their input, ideas, choices, and language preferences. Although Icelandic is the main language used in the preschools, the children, supported by their teachers and principals, have the opportunity and agency to develop their multilingualism. The research findings provide practitioners, policy makers and parents with suggestions as to how children can and will benefit from support in maintaining their heritage languages. More structured collaboration and policy guidance are likely to strengthen children’s multilingualism. Full article

Reflective practice is central to contemporary teacher education, and pedagogical autobiographies are widely used as tools for reflection; yet the structural properties of these narratives, and their relationship to the reflective process they are meant to support, remain under-examined. This study applies computational text analysis to 361 autobiographical accounts written by prospective future Italian teachers across two consecutive cohorts (2024–25; 2025–26). The corpus covers eight pedagogical dimensions and is analysed through two rule-based indicators, Student Agency Ratio (SAR) and Sentiment Valence, both validated against human coding on a subsample, using methods that account for the nesting of dimensions within participants. Results show strong dimension-level differences in both SAR and valence, with agency and valence profiles that replicate across the two cohorts, whereas lexical richness shows a cohort-level shift. Assessment stands apart from the other dimensions: compared with them, it combines markedly more negative valence (a large within-participant effect, dz = 2.31), more frequent negative or unresolved endings, lower lexical richness, and predominant anchoring in upper secondary school. By contrast, STEM and support-related memories are more often anchored in primary school and are generally more positive. These findings suggest that prospective teachers enter initial training with domain-specific narrative schemas that may shape how they interpret key areas of pedagogical practice, especially assessment. As the data come from a single institution, the findings should be read as exploratory and warrant replication with larger, multi-institution samples. Full article

This article examines how teachers in Early Years and Primary Education experience and negotiate democratic risk when enacting democratic pedagogy. Drawing on qualitative data generated through participatory research in Portugal and Croatia within the Horizon Europe AECED project, the study analyses reflections, dialogical exchanges, and collaborative inquiry processes from 33 participants across four cases. Democratic risk is conceptualised as situations in which teachers perceive that democratic pedagogical action may expose them to uncertainty, loss of control, professional scrutiny, or relational tension. The findings identify three interrelated themes: (1) democratic risk as pedagogical, professional, relational, and institutional exposure; (2) the negotiation of legitimacy and accountability; and (3) participatory research as a professional learning ecology supporting teacher agency. Rather than functioning merely as a barrier, democratic risk emerges as an inherent condition of democratic pedagogy and a key site for the development of professional judgement and agency. The article contributes to research on democratic education by introducing democratic risk as an empirically grounded analytic concept and by demonstrating how teacher agency is enacted relationally within professional and institutional contexts. It further highlights the role of participatory research in supporting teachers to navigate the tensions inherent in democratic practice. Full article

This theoretical article considers a case where a chief subject-area superintendent within the Ministry of Education issued a policy, and teachers implemented it more radically than intended—extending it in a way that eliminated core elements of the original mandate. Applying ecosystem theory to the case, the article advances the conceptual theorization of ecosystem theory principles—with respect to teachers’ leadership acts—by refining key components (proximity between actors and interconnectedness, roles in ecosystems, and democratization), adding nuances that the case highlights but existing theory leaves underdeveloped. It further engages with Weberian bureaucracy, street-level bureaucracy, and Weick’s loose-coupling theory as alternative frameworks, establishing ecosystem theory’s distinctive explanatory power for the leadership appropriation dynamics the case reveals. The Discussion delineates the article’s conceptual contributions and outlines research directions that further elaborate the refinements and theoretical differentiation (ecosystem theory vis-à-vis related theories) into areas beyond the scope of this article. Full article

Students’ reading preferences and voices are increasingly relevant for informing teaching practices and strengthening students’ motivation and engagement with reading, thus making their reading experiences meaningful. However, in Chile, there is still little evidence regarding the reading preferences and perspectives of primary school students. Therefore, this study analyzes students’ preferences and perceptions of the texts assigned by their teachers, as well as the pedagogical practices for reading mediation applied across various subjects in the La Araucanía Region of southern Chile. To this end, using a qualitative, multiple-case study design, we conducted 9 discussion groups on reading mediation and discourse genres with 96 students in grades 3–6, each connected to one of 6 outstanding teachers. Thus, we applied an inductive content analysis, constructing categories through initial coding, focused coding, and interpretive analysis, all of which underwent triple review and calibration by team members. The findings show that, in general, students value the support and scaffolding their teachers provide to facilitate reading, comprehension, and participation. However, they express a desire for greater agency in selecting texts and for more opportunities to engage in dialogue around these texts, especially in subjects other than Language Arts. These results highlight the importance of reading mediation across subjects, including student text selection and dialogic interaction, to promote motivation and sustained reading practices in primary education. Full article

The quality of technology integration in K-8 science classrooms has significant implications for educational equity, particularly in minority–majority districts where teacher practice is among the strongest predictors of STEM persistence among underserved populations. This study examined the extent to which K-8 science teachers’ technology integration knowledge translated into transformative instructional practice within a large, minority–majority district in the U.S, using the frameworks of Information and communication technology (ICT)-Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and Passive, Interactive, Creative, Replacement, Amplification, Transformative (PICRAT) model. Technology integration planning knowledge was assessed using the ICT-TPACK instrument across elementary and middle school teachers. Instructional practice was rated using the PICRAT framework applied to teachers’ open-ended descriptions of their technology use. These responses also provided contextual illustration of quantitative patterns. Results indicate that while middle school teachers demonstrated significantly higher ICT-TPACK planning knowledge, this advantage primarily reinforced foundational science concepts through passive consumption rather than facilitating student agency. PICRAT analysis revealed that technology use across all grade levels was dominated by Replacement and Amplification practices, while creative and transformative uses remained nearly absent. These findings reveal a persistent knowing–doing gap in which planning knowledge did not translate into transformative enacted practice. Implications for equity-focused professional development and structural supports moving K-8 science teachers toward more transformative technology integration are discussed. Full article

The terms democracy and the pedagogy of the possible name an approach imagining schools as sites where more just, inclusive and participatory collective life can be practised, particularly in early childhood. The entry brings three traditions into dialogue. (a) Critical pedagogy, particularly in its post-structuralist, Foucauldian, and post-Marxist readings, engages with Rancièrian critiques of pedagogical mastery and offers a vocabulary for examining how power, knowledge, subjectivity, and hegemony are produced and contested within educational life. (b) Freinet pedagogy, extended through Fernand Oury’s Institutional Pedagogy, contributes a politically grounded, practice-first repertoire of cooperative techniques, classroom institutions, and democratic forms of organisation. (c) Educational commons approaches frame knowledge, space, time, and pedagogical relations as shared goods, collectively produced, cared for, and democratically governed by a community of teachers, children, and families. In this perspective, the child is approached as a commoner and agent in the here and now. The educator, in turn, is understood as a fellow commoner and reflexive practitioner, capable of acting beyond the logics of both the state and the market. Together, they co-shape the everyday life of education. Eight shared dimensions, namely the relational, the political, praxis, agency, anti-enclosure, prefiguration, community, and the schoolized mind, traverse all three traditions, with care as their transversal thread. The framework is conceived as a hospitable theoretical and practical space, not as a self-contained doctrine. It is heuristic in orientation, bringing these traditions into conversation because each contributes a complementary layer to democratic educational life. Full article

In the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis necessitates a radical repositioning of the human-nature relationship. This paper examines the sijo poetry in Musan Cho Oh-hyun’s For Nirvana through an interdisciplinary framework bridging Zen philosophy with material ecocriticism. The study elucidates how Musan deconstructs anthropocentric exceptionalism by restoring agency to the non-human world. Textual analysis reveals three arguments. First, elemental forces like wind and waves are subjectified as primordial teachers through mujō-seppō (non-sentient beings preaching the Dharma), dismantling sovereign human scriptural authority. Second, visceral encounters with animals and insects critique logocentric domination, proposing “epistemological silence” and “radical humility” as alternative eco-politics. Finally, bodily decay and trans-corporeal porosity are reframed as generative pathways toward a radical “ecological Nirvana”—a physical matrix of cyclical renewal. By synthesizing Jane Bennett’s vital materialism with Dōgen’s Zen vision of “walking mountains”, this study deploys a Zen materialism lens that enriches Western theory with the Buddhist soteriology of compassion (karuna). Ultimately, Musan reconfigures Nirvana not as an escapist transcendence, but as a profound somatic descent into the material mesh, where ultimate spiritual realization lies in the ego’s total dissolution into the “walking, talking minerals” of a sacred, suffering ecosystem. Full article

As educators play a pivotal role in advancing sustainable futures, understanding their readiness to translate sustainability-related knowledge and values into teaching practice has become an important concern in teacher education and professional development research. This study aims to develop and validate a measurement instrument assessing student teachers’ intention to implement education for sustainable development (ESD). By operationalizing intention as a proximal indicator of future-oriented professional readiness for ESD, the study addresses the need for empirically grounded tools that capture educators’ preparedness to engage in sustainability-oriented teaching. The Intention to Implement ESD Scale (IESDS) was developed through a theory-informed item construction process grounded in ESD literature, teacher agency, and competence-oriented approaches to sustainable education. The instrument was validated on a sample of 706 student teachers enrolled in the final years of teacher education programs. The findings indicate that a bifactor model provided the best fit to the data, with a dominant general factor supporting the interpretation of the IESDS as a primarily unidimensional measure of intention to implement ESD. In addition, intention to implement ESD was positively associated with teacher self-efficacy for ESD, providing evidence of convergent validity and reinforcing the role of perceived capability in sustainability-oriented professional action. The IESDS can support teacher education institutions and professional development providers in monitoring and strengthening educators’ readiness for sustainability-oriented teaching. It may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of courses, modules, and professional learning interventions aimed at promoting teaching for sustainable futures. Full article

Systemic educational change in Colombia refers to coordinated transformation across policy, teaching, curriculum, assessment, school leadership, teacher professionalization, data use, and community participation, oriented toward improving learning quality, equity, citizenship, and transitions to further study and work. This entry treats systemic change as a continuous, context-sensitive process rather than as a single reform event. Its success depends on the alignment of national direction, territorial implementation, institutional capacity, teacher agency, family and community engagement, and reliable feedback on whether students are developing the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and opportunities needed for social and labor participation. Full article

Science process skills (SPS) are a vital component of science education and a prerequisite for engaging in scientific inquiry in the classroom. This study aimed to examine the level of SPS among primary school teachers and to explore possible differences compared with physics teachers as subject specialists. Additionally, the study investigated whether differences in SPS exist among primary school teachers in relation to years of teaching experience. The research was conducted as a quantitative cross-sectional study on a sample of 222 teachers in Croatia (160 primary school teachers and 62 physics teachers). The results indicate that the level of SPS among primary school teachers varies across different domains. Lower levels of achievement were observed in tasks involving the identification of variables, the selection of measuring instruments, and the interpretation of graphical and tabular data. Comparison with physics teachers revealed statistically significant differences in most examined domains, with subject specialists achieving higher levels of performance. However, years of teaching experience did not systematically explain differences in SPS levels. The findings highlight the need for a more systematic development of inquiry-related competencies among primary school teachers within both initial teacher education and professional development programmes. Full article

This entry focuses on an Aristotelian approach to contemporary discourses about the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) regarding what it teaches and learns, with special regard to virtue or arete, practical wisdom or phronesis, and human flourishing or eudaimonia. Even though AI technologies provide new options for personalized learning, adaptive assessment, and data-driven instruction, their increasing entrenchment in the education ecosystem raises fundamental philosophical questions about the essence of teaching and learning, and about how we become better people. Aristotle’s distinction between intellectual and moral virtues can help us determine whether AI meaningfully contributes to the cultivation of good judgment, ethical character, and responsible agency. While AI is not completely antithetical to virtue formation, its knowledge and skill acquisition cannot replace the social, experiential, and habituated processes through which virtues are grown. AI should be designed and deployed as a “technological partner” to support (not replace) the teacher’s moral and pedagogical role. Guided by Aristotle’s view of eudaimonia and the common good, this analysis suggests that education should be structured to promote human flourishing in the age of AI, ensuring that learners develop their capacities for ethical reasoning, autonomy, and co-responsible participation to build a more sustainable and just society. Full article

The steady advancement of online education has not automatically translated into improved educational quality. Teacher training often continues to focus on the technical use of digital tools, while the pedagogical processes through which teachers report supporting students’ digital competence remain insufficiently understood. The objective of this study was to examine the sequential and predictive structure of teachers’ digital competence using the DigCompEdu framework as a reference. A quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted with a sample of 136 university teachers involved in online education. Data were collected through a self-reported questionnaire based on DigCompEdu and analyzed in two phases: Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The PLS-SEM results suggested a sequential pattern of associations among teacher-reported constructs: Professional Commitment (PC) was positively associated with Digital Resource Management (DR), which in turn was positively associated with Digital Pedagogy (DP) and Assessment and Feedback (AF). These dimensions were associated with Student Empowerment (SE), which showed the strongest positive relationship with teachers’ reported practices for Facilitating Students’ Digital Competence (FS). The ANN sensitivity analysis showed adequate predictive performance in the testing phase (RMSE = 0.155) and identified Student Empowerment as the predictor with the highest normalized importance within the specified model. These findings suggest that faculty development in online higher education may benefit from moving beyond basic digital literacy and platform management toward pedagogical design, formative assessment, inclusive participation, and learner agency. However, the results should be interpreted as evidence of teacher-reported facilitation practices within the analyzed sample, rather than as direct evidence of students’ actual digital competence development. Full article

Educational systems are increasingly required not only to innovate but to sustain innovation over time. While research on Change Laboratory (CL) interventions has extensively examined the development of new models and the emergence of transformative agency, less is known about how such agency is enacted through concrete actions in everyday practice. This study addresses this gap by examining consequential actions as expressions of entrepreneurial agency in the implementation of open work in a kindergarten following a CL intervention. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 staff members, the study adopts a theoretically informed inductive approach to identify types of agentive actions and interpret them in relation to EntreComp competences and activity system components. The findings show that entrepreneurial agency is a distributed and situated process enacted through coordinated material, relational, and organizational actions toward the tools and community, highlighting the importance of environmental reconfiguration and collaboration in sustaining change. The study also shows that agency is unevenly distributed across roles and that newcomers participate differently in the implementation process. Overall, sustaining educational innovation appears to depend less on the design of models than on the collective capacity to continuously enact and transform them in practice. Full article

Background: Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder affecting executive functions such as impulse control, focus, and organization. This study addresses three research questions: current models and gaps in ADHD interventions, ways to enhance strengths and address weaknesses, and program recommendations for various ages. The aim is to develop a comprehensive framework to improve ADHD interventions, with a particular focus on youth and addressing existing gaps to enhance effectiveness. Methods: The current study systematically reviews the literature to answer these research questions. Sources were examined to identify existing intervention models, documented strengths and weaknesses, and recommendations relevant to different developmental stages. Results: Findings show that interventions for ADHD are varied and include psychological or behavioural therapy, family-school issues and parent involvement, school-based approaches, and medication. Key challenges include a lack of evidence-based practices, gaps in translational research, and insufficient teacher training. Notable strengths are family-school conference and family input, though there is less emphasis on building problem-solving capacity and family agency. Conclusions: Program recommendations highlighted in the literature include the need for family involvement, matching intervention intensity to individual needs, and ensuring professional education for special education. Addressing these gaps is essential for strengthening ADHD interventions and improving outcomes for children and youth. Full article