The notion of thinking skills as a key component of a 21st century school education is now firmly entrenched in educational policy and curriculum frameworks in many parts of the world. However, there has been relatively little questioning of the manner in which educational globalisation has facilitated this diffusion of thinking skills, curriculum and pedagogy in a cultural context. This book will help to redress such an imbalance in its critical assessment of the cross-cultural validity of transplanting thinking skills programs from one educational system to another on an international scale.

The Unscripted Classroom: Emergent Curriculum in Action

Emergent curriculum encourages early childhood educators to use creativity and flexibility as they respond to classroom challenges and children’s interests. Filled with case studies and stories from toddler and preschool teachers about their experiences responding to events in their own classrooms, The Unscripted Classroom provides inspiration for educators to step out of their usual scripts and try something new. A review of the emergent curriculum philosophy and an examination of the many ways creativity in teaching benefits children are included. This resource complements Emergent Curriculum in Early Childhood Settings: From Theory to Practice by the same author.

High stakes testing, standards, and accountability politics is taking us away from the importance of the affective domain in curriculum development. This critical learning domain is often an unrecognized and infrequently considered topic in the literature. Through this book we extend the current knowledge base by addressing a curriculum model developed in the 1980s. We add a 2012 knowledge base as we delineate the role of self-perceptions in school-related learning, how middle level curriculum affects self-perceptions, and the type of curriculum planning which enhances self-perceptions and improves learning in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.

Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence offers an example of a different approach to national curriculum development. It combines what are claimed to be the best features of top-down and bottom-up approaches to curriculum development, and provides an indication of the broad qualities that school education should promote rather than a detailed description of curriculum content. Advocates of the approach argue that it provides central guidance for schools and maintains national standards whilst at the same time allowing schools and teachers the flexibility to take account of local needs when designing programmes of education.

In many countries the school curriculum oscillates between focusing on traditional subjects and focusing on skills that are linked to the needs of the 21st-century digital age. Rosamund Sutherland argues against such a skills-based curriculum, maintaining that, from a social justice perspective, the priority of schools should be to give young people access to the knowledge that they are not likely to learn outside school.