All data were coded inductively in NVivo, organized across four historical phases, and only then interpreted through Buddhist ethical categories, a sequencing choice the authors describe as essential to preventing the framework from imposing itself prematurely on the evidence. That framework is the Dasa Raja Dhamma, the Ten Royal Virtues traditionally associated with Buddhist leadership: generosity (dāna), morality (sīla), self-sacrifice (pariccāga), honesty (ājjava), gentleness (maddava), self-control (tapa), non-anger (akkodha), non-violence (avihiṃsā), patience (khanti), and non-obstruction (avirodhana). Rather than treating these virtues as abstract doctrine, the researchers used them as sensitizing lenses to interpret concrete institutional practices.

The analysis traced dāna to the land donations and fundraising campaigns that founded the campus, sīla to codes of conduct and graduate character profiles, ājjava to transparent communication practices, khanti to patient negotiation with accreditation bureaucracy, and avirodhana to efforts at inclusive decision-making. The result is one of the first empirical demonstrations that a classical Buddhist leadership text can function as a practical moral vocabulary for university governance. The story begins in 2007, when local Buddhist communities in Wonogiri mobilized grassroots support for a state Buddhist college.

Community members contributed land and organized fundraising, an act the study interprets as an ethical expression of collective responsibility rather than mere logistics. One community figure recalled the founding motivation as concern that Buddhist higher education should not remain fragmented and sectarian, and that a state college could serve the wider community. Observation notes recorded that this founding contribution continues to circulate in institutional ceremonies and commemorative narratives, functioning as shared moral memory rather than archival record.

The second phase, from 2011 to 2015, brought formal legal recognition and a demanding bureaucratic adaptation. STABN adopted the Indonesian National Qualifications Framework, established academic councils, and implemented stakeholder-inclusive governance mechanisms. Document analysis showed that Buddhist educational aims had to be reformulated into measurable learning outcomes, graduate competencies, and administrative reporting formats.

A vice-rector involved in institutional planning emphasized that the transformation was collaborative rather than the work of one central figure, involving work teams at the campus, the Buddhist Affairs Directorate, and the Ministry, with documents prepared, proposals submitted, and required stages followed. The study describes this as a productive but challenging negotiation between religious identity and state-recognized academic formats, mirroring challenges faced by faith-based institutions globally. Between 2016 and 2020, attention shifted to ethical leadership and institutional capacity building.

Leadership training and faculty development programs incorporated core Buddhist principles, especially compassion (karuṇā) and mindfulness (sati), while participatory governance structures inspired by Sangha values were formally integrated. Yet the triangulated data reveal a crucial tension. Institutional documents described consultation and collegial coordination as desirable governance features, but some participants experienced participation unevenly.

One lecturer noted that leaders usually invite discussion before important decisions, although not all units receive the same level of information at the same time. Observations confirmed both open consultation and respectful communication in some meetings and more centralized decision-making under deadline pressure in others. The authors interpret this as evidence that Buddhist values functioned as guiding ethical ideals whose practical realization depended on institutional capacity, leadership consistency, and procedural transparency.

The most recent phase, from 2021 to 2024, tested the institution against Indonesia's flagship higher education reform, the Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka (MBKM) policy, which promotes curricular autonomy, experiential learning, and student mobility. STABN restructured its curriculum around service-learning, internships, and cross-sectoral engagement, which participants linked directly to Buddhist pedagogical values. Lecturers described a shift from doctrinal transmission toward Dharma in action, with students reflecting on Dharma through real projects relevant to social problems, including community-based teaching practice, Buddhist Sunday school support, and community service assignments.

One student explained that community-based tasks helped students understand Dharma through what they do with people, not only through what they read in class. Digital tools such as Moodle, Google Classroom, and video conferencing platforms were integrated to support hybrid learning, expanding access to materials and flexible communication. However, the digital and MBKM findings also expose practical constraints that complicate any promotional reading of reform.

Lecturers reported that reflective learning needs time, but curriculum reporting, accreditation documents, and MBKM administration often reduce the time available for deep mentoring. Observations showed that digital platforms were useful mainly for distributing materials and coordinating tasks, while value-based learning still depended on lecturer facilitation, discussion, mentoring, and community-oriented assignments. One lecturer put it plainly: digital platforms help distribute materials and coordinate tasks, but reflection still needs dialogue, and students need to be accompanied rather than simply given files or links.

The study concludes that MBKM functioned both as an educational opportunity for Buddhist value-based experiential learning and as a stress test for institutional capacity. Perhaps the study's most striking contradiction concerns the gap between formal value statements and lived practice. Documents presented ethical internalization as a formal institutional commitment through curriculum descriptions, graduate profiles, codes of conduct, and community service records.

In contrast, interviews and observations showed that the enactment of compassion, integrity, and social responsibility depended heavily on individual lecturers, leadership consistency, and repeated interaction. Students described lecturers who guide with compassion, correcting mistakes patiently without embarrassing students in front of friends. A lecturer explained that values can be written in curriculum documents, but students understand them when they see how lecturers speak, guide, and respond to problems.

The authors argue that ethical governance should therefore be understood as a negotiated institutional process rather than an automatic result of religious identity. Comparatively, the authors situate STABN alongside Indonesian Islamic institutions such as pesantren and madrasahs, which face parallel pressures of state regulation, public visibility, and multicultural accommodation while drawing on distinct theological resources. Globally, parallels include the Rahmatan lil Alamin paradigm in Islamic education and integrative religious education models that unite spiritual learning with scientific inquiry.

The authors caution that their findings are analytically transferable rather than statistically generalizable, bounded to institutions sharing similar conditions of minority religious identity, state oversight, community accountability, and reform pressure. Future research, they suggest, should compare Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, and Hindu faith-based institutions and conduct longitudinal studies to determine whether the tensions identified here, especially between formal value articulation and lived pedagogical practice, are specific to STABN or common across minority faith-based higher education worldwide.

Subject of Research: Education Research

Article Title: Buddhist ethical governance in higher education reform in Indonesia a qualitative case study of STABN Raden Wijaya

Article References: Hariyanto, Hatmono, P. D., Siswoyo, E., & Sujiono (2026). Buddhist ethical governance in higher education reform in Indonesia a qualitative case study of STABN Raden Wijaya. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 957. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02188-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02188-0

Keywords: Buddhist higher education, ethical governance, Dasa Raja Dhamma, Indonesia, STABN Raden Wijaya, higher education reform, MBKM, faith-based education, qualitative case study, curriculum modernization, digital pedagogy, minority institutions

The intervention combined a flipped sequence with gamified in-class activities. For the flipped component, the teacher uploaded PowerPoint slides, videos and audio recordings to the class WhatsApp group before each session, covering the concepts addressed in class. During the subsequent online lesson, students played digital games on those concepts using Kahoot and LearningApps. Activity formats included quizzes, cloze tests, matching and pairing games, sentence ordering, millionaire-style questions, image matching, audio or video prompts, number-line exercises and group assignments. The content addressed grammar, vocabulary, discourse conventions, picture description, résumés and cover letters, parts of speech, tense, modal verbs, conditionals, dangling modifiers, parallelism, instructions and technical proposals. The course ran from July to December 2020, with 90-minute laboratory sessions on weekdays except Wednesday.

All 28 students enrolled in the Foundation English course experienced the intervention, but only 10 volunteered for end-of-semester interviews and provided the data analysed in the study. The interviewees included three women and seven men and had a mean age of 18. Placement in the course was determined by an institutional English proficiency test, producing a cohort described as relatively homogeneous in language proficiency. Researchers selected a qualitative case-study design because the question concerned students’ own accounts of emotion, motivation, confidence and preference rather than responses on predefined psychological scales. Each semi-structured, one-to-one interview lasted about 20 minutes, was audio-recorded with consent and was transcribed verbatim by the first author. Each transcript was checked against its recording before analysis.

The transcripts were analysed in NVivo 14 using a codebook-based thematic approach. The first author conducted the initial coding, consolidated related codes into 10 thematic nodes under the parent construct of the affective domain and refined the structure against the full corpus. Two co-authors who had not taught the cohort independently reviewed all 10 coded transcripts against the node definitions; discrepancies were resolved through discussion, and no formal intercoder agreement statistic was calculated. No new thematic nodes appeared after the eighth transcript, while the final two interviews confirmed and enriched existing themes. Word-frequency queries, co-occurrence analysis, coding summaries and sentiment coding were used as descriptive tools. The researchers explicitly treated these outputs as aids to interpretation rather than statistical evidence of theme importance.

Motivation appeared in all 10 transcripts and accounted for 17.9% of coded transcript text, while the engaging nature of the games also appeared in all 10 and covered 16.3%. Language suitability was coded in nine interviews and covered 14.7%. Students described persisting with difficult Kahoot questions rather than abandoning them, sometimes playing beyond scheduled class time and describing picture-description tasks as imaginative and interesting. They connected the activities with vocabulary, grammar, speaking and writing, although the study did not test the perceived skill improvements. The percentages describe the share of transcript text assigned to each node, not effects in the wider student population. They can overlap because an excerpt could receive more than one code; across the 10 nodes, total coverage was 110% by design.

Collaboration was another prominent feature. A preference for playing together appeared in eight transcripts, and social presence appeared in seven. Learners reported choosing group play for unfamiliar or difficult topics and individual play when they felt confident with the material. Group activities created opportunities to ask questions, share responses and learn from peers, while individual games allowed students to test their ability with less immediate social pressure. One participant explained that when a topic was familiar, they played alone, whereas otherwise they learned from others. Some students also said they could support classmates as well as learn from them. The pattern was interpreted through social constructivist and self-efficacy theories, but those frameworks informed the study’s analysis rather than functioning as experimentally tested mechanisms.

Students did not regard the two platforms as interchangeable. Coded references to Kahoot were more often associated with motivation and excitement, consistent with its competitive, timed quiz format. LearningApps was more frequently associated with social presence and language suitability because its varied templates supported activities such as matching pairs, cloze exercises and vocabulary games. These were descriptive tendencies rather than numerical platform ratings: participants did not comment equally on both services, and references were unevenly distributed across interviews. Overall, the accounts suggest complementarity, with Kahoot providing competitive energy and LearningApps supporting focused, skill-specific practice, but the study did not experimentally compare the platforms or establish that either produced better learning outcomes.

One of the clearest findings concerned the timing of instruction. Despite the flipped design, students often preferred to receive conceptual explanation during class before being allowed to play. Their comments suggested that materials shared through WhatsApp were not consistently prepared, either because students failed to complete the preparation or because some concepts were difficult to understand independently. Continuous gameplay also produced boredom for at least one participant. These observations qualify the assumption that placing explanatory materials before class automatically creates a successful flipped sequence. The study did not test alternative classroom sequences or evaluate readiness checks. Instead, it identified timing as a design issue: learners in this particular case generally wanted brief in-class conceptual input before gameplay, while uninterrupted play was not always engaging.

The findings also showed that positive and mixed responses coexisted. Learners reported that choice over when, how and with whom to play could support autonomy; feedback, rewards and graduated difficulty could reinforce perceived competence; and collaborative formats could foster relatedness. Accounts of persistence, absorption and rapid feedback resembled the flow experience described in the study’s theoretical framework, while peer support resembled social scaffolding. At the same time, enthusiasm was accompanied by boredom, inconsistent preparation, platform preferences and variation in prior experience with educational games. Six of the participants reported that they had not played classroom games before, making initial unfamiliarity part of the experience rather than evidence of a longer-term adaptation pattern.

The evidence base remains narrow and should not be read as proof that gamification improves learning or motivation. The study relied on retrospective self-reports from volunteer interviewees in one pandemic-era course, and the instructor’s dual role as teacher and interviewer could have encouraged socially desirable responses even though final grades had been submitted before interviews. Coding was performed by one researcher with co-author review rather than independent double-coding. No pre- and post-intervention proficiency tests, performance scores, classroom observations or platform analytics were used, and the games primarily targeted language knowledge rather than systematically assessing listening, speaking, reading and writing. Future work could triangulate interviews with observations, analytics and proficiency measures, follow learners beyond the novelty phase and include more diverse academic programmes. Within these limits, the case provides detailed qualitative evidence about how game design, collaboration, challenge and the timing of conceptual support shaped students’ reported motivation, confidence and sense of connection in an online English class.

Subject of Research: Perceived affective experiences of undergraduate learners in a gamified flipped online English course

Article Title: Gamified flipped learning and the affective domain of language learning: a qualitative case study of online English classes

Article References: Sivakami, B., Jayasudha, M., & Sanmuganathan, K. (2026). Gamified flipped learning and the affective domain of language learning: a qualitative case study of online English classes. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1888127. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1888127

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1888127

Keywords: gamified learning, flipped classroom, online English, student motivation, social presence, qualitative case study, Kahoot, LearningApps, higher education, language learning, Gamified, flipped

The programme was implemented in the preschools of Istituto Comprensivo Gabelli, located in the Barriera di Milano district, an area marked by educational poverty, linguistic diversity, and spatial segregation. Twenty-three teachers and pedagogical staff voluntarily joined a collaborative process designed to help them reinterpret their everyday practices rather than replace them. The study, conducted by Andrea Lupi of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, adopted a qualitative interpretive case study design with an internal formative evaluation orientation, meaning the goal was not to measure causal effects but to document how professional reinterpretation unfolded in real time.

The intellectual architecture of MoMAg rests on a deliberate tension between three traditions. Montessori contributes structured materials, autonomy, repetition, and the control of error; the Agazzi sisters bring everyday objects, sensory contrasts, and the didactic museum; Malaguzzi adds documentation, collaboration, and the celebrated hundred languages of children. Crucially, the framework does not attempt to dissolve the differences between these approaches. Instead, it uses them as prompts for professional reflection, asking teachers to consider when materials should support perceptual distinctions, when they should guide autonomous manipulation, and when they should open space for narrative and symbolic meaning-making.

What makes this synthesis scientifically credible is its grounding in contemporary research on embodied cognition. Developmental studies consistently show that early cognitive growth is rooted in sensorimotor experience, and that gestures, actions, and object manipulation help children connect concrete experience with emerging symbolic reasoning. Meta-analytic evidence indicates that physical manipulables enhance conceptual understanding when embedded in guided pedagogical contexts, and recent work has even interpreted Montessori materials through the lens of extended cognition, treating child and material as a unified cognitive system. MoMAg takes these findings seriously: learning is conceived as multimodal and embodied, and the educational environment is treated as an active pedagogical mediator rather than a neutral backdrop.

The framework also takes a firm stance on one of the most contested questions in early education: the balance between free play and adult guidance. Drawing on research showing that minimally guided instruction tends to produce weaker outcomes than purposefully scaffolded approaches, MoMAg positions the teacher as an intentional mediator of children’s exploration rather than a mere facilitator of spontaneous activity. Recent meta-analytic work on guided play supports this position, showing that scaffolding and assisted inquiry can promote deeper learning while preserving children’s agency. For the teachers in Turin, however, this message was not always easy to absorb, and the tension between guidance and autonomy became one of the programme’s central points of negotiation.

The programme’s activities were deliberately varied. Laboratory training sessions combined presentations of the Italian pedagogical tradition with discussion of neuroscientific and developmental evidence and reflection on teachers’ implicit beliefs about children and learning. Workshops invited teachers to design learning spaces, develop language materials from everyday objects, build collections of recycled loose parts inspired by the Agazzian didactic museum, and construct Montessori-inspired sensorial materials. Job shadowing allowed teachers to observe one another’s classrooms, an approach supported by research identifying peer observation as a powerful form of experiential professional learning. Guided visits to centres such as Remida, which specialises in creative reuse of materials, broadened teachers’ perspectives on exploratory environments.

A flagship activity was the Laboratory of Agazzian Loose Parts, a contemporary adaptation of the seven-step lesson Rosa Agazzi described in her 1962 work on the didactic museum. The sequence moves from a structured introduction to contrasting sensory qualities, through the preparation of a museum of recycled objects contributed by children and families, to narrative activation with storytelling and Kamishibai theatre, guided exploration, a dialogical collective lesson in which children compare and categorise objects, and finally documentation through drawing, construction, or digital recording. The design resonates with Simon Nicholson’s theory of loose parts, which holds that the richness of play environments depends on the diversity and manipulability of available materials, and with recent reviews linking open-ended materials to problem-solving, creativity, and early academic skills—provided that teachers scaffold the experience with skilful questioning.

The findings reveal four main areas of transformation. Teachers reported heightened awareness of didactic mediators and sensorial processes, describing how materials shifted from occasional attractions to recurrent mediators of exploration and categorisation. Classroom documentation and photographs documented a reorganisation of learning environments, with furniture repurposed, materials made accessible, and a manipulative materials corner becoming the most sought-after area of the classroom. Perhaps most strikingly, teachers reinterpreted what the researcher calls latent practices—routines such as colour lessons and classification games that had always been present but never conceptualised. As one teacher put it, these activities were previously disconnected, but now form a didactic pathway from material to language.

A fourth outcome was the emergence of a shared professional lexicon. Terms such as mediation, sensorial materials, loose parts, guidance, and categorisation began circulating in everyday professional discourse, and teachers joked that they had become Montessorians and Agazzians. This shared vocabulary functioned as a practical coordination tool: when one teacher proposed improving the provision of fine-motor materials, colleagues immediately began making suggestions. The finding aligns with systemic perspectives on teacher learning, which hold that durable change emerges from the recursive interaction between individual reflection, collaborative dialogue, and organisational context.

The study is candid about its limits. Teachers struggled to reconcile guided instruction with play-based pedagogy, sometimes perceiving them as incompatible, and one remarked that other trainers usually tell them the opposite. The absence of protected institutional time for documentation and reflection emerged as a significant constraint, with teachers noting that colleagues in Reggio Emilia are lucky to have paid hours for team reflection. As a single qualitative case study with the author serving as both programme designer and analyst, the findings are not statistically generalisable, and no formal inter-rater coding was applied. Future research, the author argues, should formalise MoMAg into operational guidelines, involve independent researchers, and test its effects longitudinally on teacher–child interaction quality and children’s language, executive-function, and early mathematical development. Even so, the Turin experience offers a compelling proof of concept: sustainable professional development in early childhood education may depend less on imported programmes than on embedding learning in real contexts, fostering collective reflection, and treating local pedagogical heritage as a living resource for innovation.

Subject of Research: Situated professional development for early childhood teachers integrating Italian pedagogical traditions with cognitive science

Article Title: Situated Professional Development for ECEC: The MoMAg Experience

Article References: Lupi, A. (2026). Situated Professional Development for ECEC: The MoMAg Experience. International Journal of Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00545-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00545-6

Keywords: early childhood education, professional development, Montessori, Agazzi, Malaguzzi, teacher empowerment, loose parts, sensorial learning, embodied cognition, guided play, Turin, qualitative case study

The research, published in Frontiers in Education by a team from the University of the Free State, examined how School Management Teams, or SMTs, understand and promote learners’ right to dignity. Led by Ngwenya Lihle Tracia, Makhasane Sekitla Daniel, and Mulaudzi Lebohang Victoria, the study focused on eight senior leaders, including principals, deputy heads, and departmental heads, drawn from two primary schools in the Ehlanzeni District. The district, which borders Mozambique and Eswatini, is home to roughly 2.27 million people, is about 70 percent rural, and is linguistically diverse, with SiSwati and isiZulu the most common home languages.

Methodologically, the study was anchored in Human Rights Theory, which treats dignity not as a privilege granted by institutions but as an inherent characteristic of personhood. The researchers adopted an interpretive qualitative case study design, generating data through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Each interview lasted between 30 minutes and an hour, was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and followed a protocol of 22 core questions covering understandings of dignity, leadership practices, challenges, policy influences, and stakeholder involvement. The researchers also examined school codes of conduct and disciplinary records, triangulating what leaders said with what their institutions formally prescribed.

Analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic approach, with manual coding rather than software assistance. The team paid particular attention to convergence and divergence between the two schools, and to minority accounts that complicated any easy consensus. Trustworthiness was reinforced through member checking, in which participants reviewed their own transcripts, and through an audit trail supervised within the research team. Ethical clearance came from the University of the Free State’s research ethics committee, with permission from the Mpumalanga Department of Education and the participating principals.

The findings paint a picture of leaders who grasp dignity in richly multidimensional terms. Across both schools, SMT members framed dignity as respect, fair treatment, inclusion, and recognition of learners’ inherent worth regardless of background, poverty, or academic performance. One deputy head described dignity as not degrading or belittling people or making them ashamed of themselves, while a departmental head linked it to treating everyone with fairness and compassion without discrimination. School codes of conduct in both institutions formally echoed these commitments, stating that every learner must be treated with dignity and respect, free from discrimination or humiliation.

Yet the cross-case comparison revealed a striking difference in institutional vocabulary. Leaders at School 1 more often spoke in explicit rights language, describing anti-bullying committees, campaigns, and reporting mechanisms. Leaders at School 2 more frequently framed dignity through belonging, shared core values, relational modelling, and continuity between home and school. One School 2 leader described the school as a home away from home where children’s worth is respected, while School 1’s principal connected inclusion directly to safety and academic engagement. The researchers interpret these not as competing definitions but as different local translations of a common constitutional principle.

The practical machinery of dignity promotion emerged clearly from the interviews. SMTs described assemblies, anti-bullying campaigns, learner debates, peer education, and parent meetings as recurring spaces for teaching respect. They emphasised ethical role modelling, with one leader noting that young children learn by seeing, so a leader who violates dignity damages learners emotionally. Discipline emerged as a crucial test case: rather than abandoning discipline, leaders distinguished corrective approaches, such as talking to a learner and explaining why behaviour is wrong, from punitive practices like public humiliation, name-calling, or making a child stand on a chair while classmates continue working. Both schools relied on codes of conduct as normative anchors, with one deputy head calling it the law book of the school.

But the study’s most consequential finding is what the researchers call a dignity implementation gap. Formal policy presence did not guarantee consistent practice. Both schools had codes prohibiting bullying and degrading treatment, yet participants in both cases still described such practices occurring. Teachers occupied a deeply ambivalent position: they were cast as the adults best placed to model and protect dignity, yet some were also identified as sources of humiliation, verbal abuse, stereotyping, and even corporal punishment, which remains legally prohibited. One participant noted that even a teacher’s frown could communicate degrading disapproval, illustrating how expansively some leaders interpreted the relational demands of dignity.

The constraints leaders described were layered and systemic. Overcrowded classrooms, staff shortages, and the absence of counsellors or psychologists forced SMTs to absorb responsibilities beyond their formal roles. Cultural and linguistic diversity created tensions between home practices and school norms, while inconsistent parental involvement, and in some cases parental preference for punitive discipline, complicated schools’ efforts. Participants also traced dignity harms to home environments, where harsh criticism or emotional abuse could damage self-esteem long before a child arrived at the school gate, and to community-level influences, including social media exposure that participants said normalised disrespect among peers.

Despite these constraints, the study positions SMTs as what human rights theory calls institutional duty-bearers, actors responsible for translating constitutional commitments into lived experience. Participants insisted that dignity promotion is a shared responsibility, not a leadership solo. Parents were engaged through meetings and, in one striking case, through a participatory process in which families helped identify the school’s four core values. Learners themselves were cast as active participants who report bullying, serve as peer mediators, and perform small acts of care, such as sharing food with a classmate who cannot afford it. Community organisations, NGOs, churches, and local businesses extended support beyond the school’s own capacity, with sponsorships ensuring that no child was excluded from activities on financial grounds.

The researchers argue that their contribution shifts the conversation from whether dignity is legally protected to how it is operationally sustained. Dignity, they contend, is not merely a legal principle but a leadership, governance, curricular, and relational practice. Their recommendations are concrete: make learner dignity a standing item in staff meetings at least once per term; build ongoing human-rights and dignity education into Life Skills, assemblies, and staff development; establish clear reporting channels for bullying; move staff training beyond legal compliance toward non-humiliating communication and restorative responses; and strengthen home-school collaboration so that parents hear about dignity before problems arise, not only after.

The study’s limitations are acknowledged candidly. It examined only two schools in one district, focused solely on leadership perspectives, and did not collect demographic data on race, ethnicity, or home language that might have enriched the cross-case comparison. The findings are therefore contextually situated rather than statistically generalisable. Future research, the authors suggest, should include learners, teachers, parents, and school governing bodies, compare differently resourced schools, and combine leadership interviews with direct observation of disciplinary and classroom interactions to test whether stated commitments match enacted practice.

What emerges from this research is a sober but not despairing account. South African primary school leaders are not waiting for perfect conditions to affirm children’s dignity. They are assembling awareness campaigns, restorative discipline, parent evenings, and community partnerships with whatever resources they have. The gap between constitutional ideal and school reality is real, but so is the leadership commitment working to close it, one assembly, one conversation, and one corrected practice at a time.

Subject of Research: How school management teams in South African primary schools understand and promote learners' right to human dignity

Article Title: Promoting learners’ right to human dignity: perspectives of school management teams in two South African primary schools in the Ehlanzeni District

Article References: Lihle Tracia, N., Sekitla Daniel, M., & Lebohang Victoria, M. (2026). Promoting learners’ right to human dignity: perspectives of school management teams in two South African primary schools in the Ehlanzeni District. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1916212. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1916212

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1916212

Keywords: human dignity, learner rights, school management teams, school leadership, South Africa, primary schools, human rights theory, bullying, restorative discipline, qualitative case study, Ehlanzeni District, constitutional rights

The stakes are striking when measured against the numbers. Although Black students enroll in four-year institutions in growing numbers and express strong interest in the biological sciences, only about 8 to 8.8 percent of biology bachelor’s degrees awarded between 2000 and 2024 went to Black students, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the U.S. National Science Foundation. That figure stands in sharp contrast to the 20 to 25 percent of Black students entering four-year universities who say they intend to major in biological sciences or another STEM field. The attrition is not a matter of ability or interest, the researchers contend, but of a STEM culture that treats white, middle-class male identity as its default norm and rewards competition, weed-out courses, and deficit stereotypes about Black learners.

STEM culture, as the study frames it, is socially constructed through disciplinary norms, values, beliefs, and practices that privilege Western and Eurocentric ideologies. Instructors often maintain color-blind approaches, avoid conversations about race, and fail to acknowledge anti-Black events in their classrooms. Faculty at institutions of every type, from historically Black colleges and universities to predominantly white institutions, have perpetuated negative stereotypes, encouraging Black students to change majors or abandon STEM altogether. Even at HBCUs, which generally support Black students more holistically, discrimination can radiate from STEM departments where faculty hiring patterns rarely reflect the students they serve. The result is a signal, repeated across campuses and disciplines, that Black students do not belong.

The REC Network emerged in response to these conditions as a multigenerational, interdisciplinary coalition of roughly forty Black biology faculty, researchers, professionals, community activists, cultural experts, and artists drawn from HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, R1 research universities, liberal arts colleges, secondary schools, and community organizations. Beginning with a virtual think tank in fall 2020, the group spent four years in workshops and small-group sessions practicing what its members call freedom-dreaming: envisioning introductory biology without systemic barriers. In fall 2023, a hybrid gathering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University brought participants together to draft Afrofuturist-inspired lessons on core topics such as mitosis, DNA, and cancer, work that continued through a 2024 preconference session with the International Conference on Urban Education.

The researchers analyzed the resulting curriculum materials using a deductive coding process anchored in six Afrofuturist principles drawn from the literature: alienation, Blackness, feminine identity, liberation, time, and futurity and worldbuilding. Four working groups, each with at least five participants deliberately paired across areas of expertise, produced lesson plans, slide decks, assessments, and supplementary resources. Four authors coded the materials independently, then met weekly to resolve disagreements and refine emerging patterns. Three final themes crystallized from the analysis: Reckoning with Black Marginalization, Reclaiming Black Legacies, and Re-envisioning Black Possibilities.

The first theme confronts students directly with how systemic racism shapes biological vulnerability. One lesson on cancer asks students to tell their own health stories or those of someone they know, connecting molecular concepts of carcinogenesis to societal, environmental, occupational, and genetic exposures that disproportionately burden Black communities. Another lesson examines Louisiana’s so-called Cancer Alley, where entire communities have been devastated by cancer and children are rushed to emergency rooms with asthma attacks, using the region as a case study in environmental racism. A reading on Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were taken and shared without her knowledge and became foundational to decades of medical research, introduces students to the history of medical exploitation and nonconsensual research practices that continue to shape distrust of medicine.

The second theme restores Black contributions to science that standard curricula have systematically erased. Lessons situate the story of Henrietta Lacks within the Afrofuturist principle of feminine identity, noting how her immortal cell line, which supported breakthroughs from chemotherapy and in vitro fertilization to gene mapping and vaccine development, embodies a nonlinear, almost boundless relationship with time. Students learn that her family, some of whom lacked basic needs such as health insurance, began seeking restitution in 2021 from pharmaceutical and biotech companies that profited from her cells. Other materials highlight a repository of one thousand current Black geneticists and community scientists, positioning ancestral knowledge alongside contemporary innovation. A performance task invites students to build a Black woman superhero grounded in the biology of mitosis, reimagining Lacks herself as a figure of futurity, creativity, and hope.

The third theme treats imagination as a productive cognitive stance rather than a distraction from rigorous content. A lesson on DNA uses genetically modified organisms as an entry point into structural inequities in food access, asking students to map access to fresh produce in their own communities as a practical strategy for resisting environmental racism and imagining sustainable, community-controlled food systems. A cancer unit titled Black Don’t Crack asks students to develop a multimodal offering depicting a post-cancer world, acknowledging the history, people, places, and practices that would change as a result. Students interview elders and family members to document intergenerational health narratives, and readings on sickle cell disease show how traveling clinics and community outreach can translate medical imagination into tangible interventions. Across these activities, the curriculum asks students to become producers of biological knowledge rather than passive consumers.

The researchers describe this work as gatebreaking, the intentional disruption of oppressive systems that prevent Black students from fully accessing STEM as their whole, authentic selves. Culturally relevant pedagogy, first articulated by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995, provides part of the foundation through its three pillars of academic excellence, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, but the authors argue that Afrofuturism extends the framework by adding speculative imagination and non-Western conceptions of time. Symbolized by the Sankofa bird, which looks back to move forward, Afrofuturism oscillates between ancestral histories and future possibilities, allowing students to critique the present while authoring themselves into futures that might otherwise seem unimaginable.

The study’s backdrop adds a note of urgency. In 2025, new United States federal guidelines began characterizing human-centered research promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion as a violation of anti-discrimination laws, and the National Science Foundation canceled the REC Network’s grant amid the immediate termination of more than one billion dollars in grant funds nationwide. The authors argue that the political climate is both the documented reason their funding was cut and the clearest justification for their curriculum, since rescinding such funds does not increase scientific rigor but distorts the integrity of STEM disciplines by ignoring whose knowledge and futures they have historically served. They call for future research tracking how Black undergraduates who experience Afrofuturist biology lessons develop long-term scientific identities, professional pathways, and community advocacy, and they contend that the gatebreaking strategies are transferable across STEM disciplines. For a network whose members see themselves as scholars, activists, and dreamers, the message is simple: Black students deserve to learn biology with their histories in mind and to use their imaginations freely to solve the problems facing their communities.

Subject of Research: Afrofuturist curriculum redesign to support Black students in undergraduate biology education

Article Title: Reclaiming legacy and envisioning futures in STEM education: Afrofuturism and a scholar-activist-community coalition

Article References: Williams, M. R., Stewart, I. M., Rouse, A. L., Seay, J., Petit, L. J., Woolfolk, M., Flagg, D. L., Jordan, K., Stewart, I., & Morton, T. R. (2026). Reclaiming legacy and envisioning futures in STEM education: Afrofuturism and a scholar-activist-community coalition. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1907915. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1907915

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1907915

Keywords: Afrofuturism, STEM education, biology curriculum, Black students, culturally relevant pedagogy, gatebreaking, Henrietta Lacks, health equity, higher education, qualitative case study, environmental racism, funding cuts

The study, published in SN Social Sciences by Musa Adekunle Ayanwale of the University of Pretoria and Maipato Charlotte Khoase of the National University of Lesotho, addresses a question that has received surprisingly little attention in the large literature on international assessments. Researchers have extensively examined the technical quality, comparability and policy use of cross-national testing programmes, but far less work has asked whether a country’s own national report clearly states its evidential boundaries, represents the sampled population faithfully, interprets results against national conditions, and actually reaches the stakeholders expected to act on them. To fill that gap, the authors developed a provisional Authenticity Evaluation Framework built around four reporting functions: methodological transparency, fidelity of representation, contextual interpretation, and policy accessibility and usefulness. The framework is explicitly presented as an analytical heuristic rather than a validated measurement model.

A central conceptual move in the paper is the separation of technical validity from what the authors call report authenticity. Validity, in the psychometric tradition associated with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing and Michael Kane’s argumentation framework, concerns whether accumulated evidence supports intended interpretations and uses of scores. Authenticity in assessment literature has traditionally referred to the realism or meaningfulness of assessment tasks, not to reports. The authors extend the term to documents, defining report authenticity as the fidelity, transparency, contextual adequacy and practical interpretability with which a report represents the educational reality within its stated scope. This distinction matters because a testing programme can generate sound scores while a national report communicates them with varying degrees of clarity about scope, uncertainty and implication. The two functions are complementary, and neither substitutes for the other.

The division of labour within the consortium underpins the study’s framing. Regional coordination structures, historically run with the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, established common instruments, standardised administration, central data validation and cross-national reporting. National ministries, research coordinators and country teams were responsible for interpreting the evidence and producing national reports for domestic planning. Consequently, the authors direct claims about omitted context, accessibility or policy translation at Lesotho’s national reporting arrangements rather than at the regional coordination centre. The unit of analysis is the trio of Lesotho’s national reports, not the consortium’s international outputs, and the study does not extend to the consortium’s fifth cycle, now conducted under the name SEACMEQ.

Methodologically, the researchers adopted an interpretivist qualitative case study combining documentary analysis with semi-structured interviews involving four purposively selected senior stakeholders drawn from Lesotho’s Ministry of Education and Training and affiliated institutions. The informants, aged between 48 and 60, had direct experience in curriculum development, educational planning, assessment and quality assurance. Analysis followed inductive content analysis principles, supported by ATLAS.ti 24 for coding and theme development, with the four framework dimensions serving as sensitising concepts rather than predetermined codes. Trustworthiness was addressed through methodological triangulation, an audit trail, reflexive notes and repeated checking of themes against transcripts and reports. The authors are candid that four participants provide depth rather than representativeness, and that interview testimony cannot independently verify the implementation quality of every technical procedure described in the documents.

The documentary evidence confirmed a clear descriptive trend: mean literacy performance rose from 451 in SACMEQ II to 511 in SACMEQ IV, while numeracy climbed from 447 to 514, moving Lesotho from below the SACMEQ reference mean of 500 to slightly above it. Stakeholders interpreted these gains cautiously, distinguishing statistical improvement from the attainment of nationally desired standards. Interviewees accepted that the assessments were sufficiently aligned with the Grade 6 curriculum to support regional comparison, and they praised the data management chain, citing double data entry, national cleaning, central validation at the Coordination Centre and continuity in questionnaire design, with new modules added while core questions were retained. One informant noted that the consortium does not fundamentally change its questionnaires between cycles, which participants saw as supporting comparability, although the authors caution that perceived continuity does not by itself establish measurement invariance or full cross-cycle equivalence.

The limitations clustered around boundaries and context. Participants worried that the reports did not adequately represent learners with disabilities, with one informant observing that children with visual impairment in particular appeared to be excluded, in tension with the policy of inclusion. The authors are careful to note that a precisely defined sampling frame is not inherently a weakness; probability sampling permits defensible inference to a specified population even when that population is narrower than all children of the relevant age. The reporting problem arises when exclusions, non-response and the limits of generalisation are not made visible, or when conclusions drift beyond the eligible population. Participants also reported that reasons for non-response went unstated, that methodological limitations received only brief discussion, and that wider influences on achievement, including parental involvement, community support and household socio-economic conditions, received comparatively limited attention. A perceived divergence between SACMEQ results and Lesotho’s separate national assessment was treated strictly as a prompt for contextual inquiry, since the two programmes differ in grade, instruments, sampling and metric, with SACMEQ reporting Item Response Theory scale scores and the national programme reporting percentages.

On policy usefulness, the picture was again mixed. Stakeholders valued SACMEQ evidence for monitoring, benchmarking against the consortium’s member states, curriculum review, teacher development and resource allocation discussions, and the documentary record confirmed these intended functions. Yet dissemination emerged as the strongest constraint. One informant remarked that results typically stayed with government officials and a few participating academics, whereas some other countries make publication of the results a national agenda item. Participants also pointed to resistance to pedagogical change among some teachers and to systemic constraints, including shortages of qualified teachers, limited learning resources, inadequate facilities, financial pressure and weak parental participation. The authors stress that these conditions are not deficiencies of SACMEQ reporting; rather, they explain why credible evidence does not automatically translate into educational improvement, and they distinguish report credibility from implementation capacity.

The recommendations that follow from the evidence are practical and largely fall within national reporting and knowledge mobilisation. The authors suggest that Lesotho’s ministry and national research team make the target population, exclusions, non-response, uncertainty and limits of inference prominent in future reports; separate descriptive associations from causal explanations; explain how findings relate to national curriculum and system conditions; provide disaggregated analyses only where sample design and precision support them; and accompany technical reports with concise, audience-specific briefs for policymakers, curriculum specialists, district officers, school leaders and teachers. Participants additionally called for closer links between assessment evidence and in-service teacher training, and for reports to combine quantitative results with richer qualitative explanation. The authors emphasise that these strategies have not been evaluated prospectively, so their reach and effectiveness should be tested.

The study’s broader significance lies in its bounded, carefully qualified contribution to how the education world thinks about assessment reporting. It does not validate a new scale, estimate the psychometric quality of SACMEQ instruments, or generalise stakeholder perceptions to all report users, and it explicitly excludes SEACMEQ V and international reports from its corpus. Its theoretical claim is modest but pointed: validation of assessment-based inferences and evaluation of how national reports communicate those inferences are distinct tasks, and the second deserves systematic attention. The Authenticity Evaluation Framework offers a provisional vocabulary for that second task, pending expert content review, independent coding studies and multi-country testing. For Lesotho, the message is one of complementary responsibility: regional structures supply comparable, technically sound evidence, while national teams must supply the contextual interpretation, transparent boundaries and active dissemination that turn numbers into decisions. Technically defensible scores, the study concludes, are a foundation rather than a finished product.

Subject of Research: Authenticity and policy usefulness of Lesotho's national SACMEQ literacy and numeracy assessment reports

Article Title: Authenticity of Lesotho’s SACMEQ II-IV literacy and numeracy reports

Article References: Ayanwale, M. A., & Khoase, M. C. (2026). Authenticity of Lesotho’s SACMEQ II-IV literacy and numeracy reports. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 543. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01841-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01841-7

Keywords: SACMEQ, Lesotho, report authenticity, large-scale assessment, literacy, numeracy, educational reporting, psychometric validity, qualitative case study, education policy, SEACMEQ, dissemination

The research, led by Rif’ati Dina Handayani of Universitas Jember together with colleagues at Universitas Sebelas Maret, examined how twelve tenth-grade students from Pendhalungan farming families translated their tacit knowledge of tobacco curing into engineering design practices. The team employed a qualitative case study design, observing four sessions of a project-based learning module in a rural secondary school physics classroom and analyzing student-generated artifacts, including design sketches, worksheets and prototype documentation. All participants came from households engaged in tobacco farming and curing, and none had previously encountered formal engineering design instruction.

The motivation behind the study lies in a persistent equity problem. STEM curricula worldwide are frequently criticized for being urban-centric, privileging metropolitan examples and forms of technical representation while overlooking rural perspectives. The authors cite Indonesian national planning data indicating that only 18.47 percent of students graduate in STEM fields, a figure far below neighboring Malaysia, where roughly 42 percent of middle school students choose STEM pathways. Crucially, the researchers argue that this low enrollment reflects not a lack of interest but a form of epistemic alienation, in which students perceive school science as disconnected from their lived experiences and community knowledge.

Theoretically, the study draws on the Funds of Knowledge framework, which recognizes household and community expertise as legitimate cognitive resources, and on Third Space Theory, which describes hybrid learning environments where everyday knowledge intersects productively with formal academic discourse. In this framing, the Gudang Atag functions as a bridge between two worlds: the first space of students’ tacit agrarian knowledge and the second space of physics and engineering concepts embedded in the curriculum. When students examined the barn’s thermodynamic and environmental control mechanisms, a hybrid space emerged in which experiential expertise could be mobilized to interpret and articulate scientific principles.

The classroom results were striking. Rather than relying on conventional two-dimensional technical drawings, students demonstrated sophisticated problem-solving through direct hands-on experimentation, material adaptation and the creative use of locally available resources such as bamboo and klaras, dried banana leaves. During the prototyping phase, students in one group negotiated how the physical density and arrangement of klaras would control moisture within their model, explicitly recalling that a barn roof packed too tightly prevents water vapor from escaping and causes curing leaves to rot. Another group conceptualized the curing structure as an adjustable ventilation system, proposing to loosen the leaf bindings at the base so that incoming air could push hot air out through the roof.

These exchanges reveal something more profound than simple recall. Students were not treating local materials as symbolic cultural decorations but as functional engineering variables for regulating airflow, temperature and structural stability. When initial trials exposed problems such as insufficient airflow or excessive heat retention, they modified their physical prototypes directly rather than revising paper designs, iterating through cycles of building, testing and refinement. The researchers interpret this behavior as epistemic agency, a form of knowledge generation through material experimentation that mirrors the iterative, practice-based processes through which the Gudang Atag itself was refined across generations.

Yet the study also uncovered a significant pedagogical tension. Students’ initial sketches consisted of simple functional outlines without measurements or detailed structural representation, and their final prototypes often diverged substantially from those drawings. The authors caution against reading this as a cognitive deficit. In rural farming communities, structural knowledge is typically transmitted through practice and visual-spatial intuition rather than structured drafting, so the sketches served as flexible conceptual anchors rather than formal engineering plans. When freed from rigid drafting conventions, students bypassed conventional barriers by demonstrating strong material-based reasoning. The friction, the study argues, lies in assessment systems that equate engineering competence with mastery of dominant two-dimensional abstract representation.

An equally revealing dynamic appeared during the final presentation session. The same students who had confidently led prototype construction, coordinating tasks and stabilizing bamboo frames together, became hesitant to speak publicly and delegated explanations to teammates. The researchers label this the builders-versus-speakers paradox, a confidence gap in which strong practical engineering competence coexists with anxiety about formal academic communication. They argue that culturally responsive STEM education must therefore extend beyond the design phase to how academic dissemination is evaluated, providing structured scaffolding in technical drawing, spatial planning and scientific communication rather than abruptly returning students to conventional high-pressure presentation formats.

The study’s discussion also highlights the role of language. Group discussions featured what the authors call intellectual code-switching, in which students alternated between vernacular agrarian expressions and formal scientific terminology to explain ideas to peers. Rather than viewing this hybrid discourse as a sign of conceptual confusion, the researchers theorize it as a sophisticated linguistic asset, a high-level translation process in which local knowledge serves as a cognitive and epistemological link. The familiar cultural context also catalyzed collaboration, with group members sharing materials, assisting one another with structural assembly and jointly troubleshooting mechanical problems during construction.

The authors propose a translational model showing how community agrarian experiences are converted into engineering design solutions through ecological reasoning, material experimentation and iterative testing, positioning rural knowledge as a primary epistemic architecture rather than a motivational hook. They acknowledge limitations: the case is deeply embedded in one cultural setting, the intervention spanned only four sessions, and the qualitative data did not include standardized measures of cognitive gains. Future work, they suggest, should combine classroom observation with quantitative assessment, track longer-term effects on communication confidence and STEM identity, and test the framework with other forms of indigenous technology. For now, the message is clear: when rural students are allowed to build on what their communities already know, engineering stops being a foreign language and becomes a native one.

Subject of Research: Integrating traditional agricultural knowledge into culturally responsive STEM engineering design education in rural Indonesia

Article Title: Reimagining rural STEM by integrating traditional agricultural knowledge into engineering design practices through culturally responsive approaches

Article References: Handayani, R. D., Triyanto, Dewi, N. M., & Sutarto (2026). Reimagining rural STEM by integrating traditional agricultural knowledge into engineering design practices through culturally responsive approaches. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02266-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02266-3

Keywords: STEM education, culturally responsive teaching, engineering design, rural education, traditional agricultural knowledge, Indonesia, funds of knowledge, Third Space theory, tobacco curing, thermodynamics, qualitative case study, educational equity

The study, led by Shahazwan Mat Yusoff, set out to answer a question that most previous Malaysian CEFR research had left unexplored. Earlier studies had documented that teachers generally hold positive views of the framework while struggling with training gaps, workload, materials, and student proficiency. What remained poorly understood was the cognitive and pedagogical process in between: how teachers actually make sense of the reform and translate it into daily decisions about tasks, scaffolding, and assessment. Drawing on the sensemaking tradition in education research, the authors argue that teachers do not simply receive policy messages and execute them. Instead, they interpret, select, modify, and sometimes quietly transform reform ideas according to their professional knowledge, beliefs, and the realities of their classrooms.

To capture this process, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with ten ESL teachers drawn from three government secondary schools, deliberately balanced between five novice teachers with fewer than five years of experience and five senior teachers with more than ten. Each interview lasted between thirty and forty-five minutes, and the transcripts were analysed thematically using both deductive codes derived from the research questions and inductive codes that emerged from the data itself. The team followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis, strengthened by member checking with four participants, peer checking, and an audit trail of coding decisions. Ethical approval came from the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee, and all participants gave written informed consent.

The first major finding is both encouraging and sobering. Teachers overwhelmingly viewed the CEFR as a useful, structured framework that brought clearer organisation to their lessons than the older KBSM syllabus. One novice teacher described it simply as more organised than what came before. Yet beneath this acceptance lay a striking unevenness in conceptual understanding. Some participants appeared to understand the CEFR mainly as a syllabus guide or textbook structure rather than as a proficiency-based framework for describing learner ability. A senior teacher captured the tension directly, noting that the real challenge was getting teachers to understand that the framework exists to describe what students can do. The distinction matters because a teacher can dutifully use CEFR-aligned materials while still interpreting the reform procedurally, missing its deeper purpose of informing judgements about learner progression and communicative task design.

The second finding shows how classroom realities became the crucible in which the reform was tested and reshaped. Teachers reported negotiating the CEFR against a cluster of practical constraints: limited instructional time, low and mixed learner proficiency, unfamiliar cultural content, and relentless examination pressure. Time emerged as one of the most immediate pressures, with one teacher admitting that restrictions forced the skipping of complementary skills within the prescribed lesson structure. Learner proficiency posed an even thornier problem. As one senior teacher explained, even in non-rural areas the number of students with low language capability and limited real-world knowledge was worrisome, and the end of ability streaming meant classrooms now contained a wide mix of levels. A single CEFR-aligned task could be trivial for some students and impenetrable for others, making implementation dependent on each teacher’s diagnostic judgement.

Cultural relevance added another layer of negotiation. Some teachers found that CEFR-aligned materials included topics, particularly around culture, that students simply could not relate to, dampening comprehension and participation. Meanwhile, the tension between communicative ideals and assessment demands produced genuine professional dilemmas. One senior teacher described having to decide whether to focus on a CEFR-based lesson or on the necessities of an upcoming examination, noting that the two are sometimes contradictory. The authors interpret these accounts not as evidence of teacher resistance but as contextual negotiation: teachers incorporated constraints into their pedagogical decision-making, simplifying tasks, localising content, and selectively implementing curriculum components. This supports the view, articulated in earlier scholarship, that Malaysia’s adoption of the CEFR is a case of global policy borrowing that must be reinterpreted within local educational and linguistic conditions.

The third finding, and perhaps the most provocative, concerns the difference between novice and senior teachers. Both groups recognised the need to adapt lessons to student needs, but the nature and specificity of their reported adaptations diverged sharply. Novice teachers tended to describe adaptation in broad, activity-focused terms: picking activities students could manage, adjusting question difficulty to proficiency levels, and relating lesson contexts to students’ lives. Senior teachers, by contrast, reported a considerably richer repertoire. One described first assessing the class’s proficiency profile, then designing activities to cater to the majority while scheduling personal intervention sessions for struggling learners. Another outlined differentiation strategies designed to challenge higher-level students while allowing lower-proficiency students to push themselves. Senior teachers’ accounts extended beyond task modification into scaffolding, motivation, targeted intervention, and support for low-anxiety communicative participation.

The authors are careful about what this comparison does and does not establish. Because the study relied on interviews rather than classroom observation, the findings describe differences in teachers’ reported adaptive repertoires, not directly observed differences in practice. The study does not claim that senior teachers are automatically better implementers of the CEFR. What it does suggest is that professional experience may shape the range and specificity of the strategies teachers can draw upon when negotiating learner diversity. This aligns with international research showing that experienced EFL teachers demonstrate stronger knowledge of scaffolding strategies, including the linguistic, affective, and metacognitive support that helps low-proficiency learners participate in communicative activities that would otherwise defeat them.

From these three strands, the researchers build a broader conceptual argument they call adaptive professionalism. Rather than treating adaptation as an add-on technique applied after the curriculum has been delivered, adaptive professionalism positions teachers as active interpreters of reform who use professional judgement to make global expectations workable in particular classrooms. The concept weaves together sensemaking theory, language teacher cognition research, and work on teacher agency, which holds that teachers’ capacity to act is shaped by the interaction of professional competence, structural conditions, and professional purposes. In this framing, the CEFR provides a common reference point, but it is teachers’ sensemaking and judgement that determine how its principles are understood and enacted. Implementation, in other words, is better understood as contextual negotiation than as policy transfer.

The practical implications are significant for Malaysia and for any education system importing an international framework. The findings suggest that professional development must move beyond familiarising teachers with CEFR terminology and descriptors. Teachers need opportunities to connect proficiency descriptors with actual learner performance, communicative task design, assessment decisions, and classroom progression, so that acceptance deepens into genuine conceptual understanding. They also need support in developing the adaptive repertoire that mixed-proficiency classrooms demand: scaffolding, differentiation, localisation of materials, and low-anxiety support for reluctant speakers. The authors acknowledge the study’s limitations, including its small sample from a single district and its reliance on self-reported practice, and they call for future research incorporating classroom observations, lesson artefacts, and student perspectives across rural and urban, high- and lower-performing settings. But the core message is already clear. Curriculum reform does not succeed on the strength of its design documents. It succeeds, or stalls, in the moment-to-moment interpretive work of teachers who must decide, lesson by lesson, what a global framework means for the specific students sitting in front of them.

Subject of Research: Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of the CEFR-aligned English curriculum in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms

Article Title: Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of curriculum reform based on the CEFR in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms

Article References: Mat Yusoff, S., Mohamad Marzaini, A. F., Ahamat, M. I., Abdullah, M. R., Seyapalan, E. D., & Ali Huddin, M. R. (2026). Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of curriculum reform based on the CEFR in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02305-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02305-z

Keywords: CEFR, ESL teachers, curriculum reform, teacher sensemaking, Malaysia, qualitative case study, scaffolding, differentiation, language policy, communicative language teaching, novice and senior teachers, adaptive professionalism

Place value, the principle that a digit’s meaning depends on its position within a multi-digit number, is the structural backbone of the base-ten system. Without it, children cannot reliably round numbers, write a digit’s value in a four-digit numeral such as 3724, or decompose 1253 into 1000 + 200 + 50 + 3 in expanded notation. These are precisely the competencies the Namibian senior primary syllabus for Grades 4 to 7 demands, and precisely the ones learners find hardest. An analysis of Grade 4 learners’ mathematics books in Namibia previously documented persistent failures on number charts, rounding, digit value and expanded notation, suggesting that the topic’s difficulty is not incidental but systemic, rooted in how it is taught.

The theoretical case for manipulatives, physical objects such as abacuses, base-ten blocks and place value charts that let children handle number structures directly, is well established. Young children often lack the mental maturity to grasp abstract concepts presented only in words or symbols, and concrete materials with visual representations provide the experiential bridge. Research from Quebec has shown that manipulatives designed to make place value denominations transparent reinforce understanding, especially for learners at risk of mathematics learning disabilities. A systematic review from Turkey found that game-based, hands-on approaches produce large effects on both understanding and motivation. Yet the evidence also carries warnings: Multi-base Arithmetic Blocks can increase extraneous cognitive load when their representations are misaligned with learners’ understanding, and manipulative use can degenerate into an end in itself rather than a route to mathematical meaning.

What has been missing, the researchers argue, is attention to the decision point itself: how teachers in under-resourced Global South classrooms actually choose and integrate these tools. Most existing studies come from Ireland, the Philippines, Turkey, Eswatini and the United States, contexts where curriculum expectations, resource conditions and school structures differ sharply from Namibia’s. To fill that gap, the team from the University of Namibia conducted an exploratory qualitative case study, purposively selecting ten Grade 4 mathematics teachers from a pool of 51 in the Rundu Circuit, each with at least two years of Grade 4 experience. Data came from semi-structured interviews of roughly forty minutes each, followed by document analysis of the teachers’ lesson plans, with thematic analysis applied across both sources and triangulated to confirm or challenge each emerging theme.

The enablers the study identified were strikingly human. Teacher preparedness and familiarity topped the list: teachers who felt confident connecting a concrete tool to the underlying concept used manipulatives, while those who did not simply avoided them. One participant admitted that when unsure how to use a particular tool, she did not use it at all; another confessed to avoiding manipulatives out of fear that learners would get confused. Knowledge of learners mattered too, with teachers calibrating tool choice to prior knowledge and the spread of fast and slow learners in a class. Perhaps most unexpectedly, linguistic flexibility emerged as a decisive asset: because Grade 3 learners are taught in vernacular languages and switch to English in Grade 4, teachers who could code-switch explained manipulative-based place value content far more clearly, positioning the tools as language-independent representations that work across linguistic boundaries.

Material availability played its part, but in a soberingly minimal way. The abacus was the only manipulative physically present in most sampled schools, and its mere existence enabled whatever hands-on teaching occurred. One teacher stated plainly that she used an abacus only because it was the only tool available at school. Yet the lesson plan analysis complicated the interview findings: across the documents, the most commonly listed resources were place value charts and textbooks rather than concrete manipulatives, indicating that even where a tool existed, planning documents did not consistently build it into instruction. Availability, the authors conclude, functions as either an enabler or a constraint depending on how it interacts with teacher knowledge and pedagogical purpose.

The barriers, by contrast, were structural and overwhelming. Nine of the ten teachers identified overcrowded classrooms as the dominant obstacle, with class sizes reaching about seventy learners. At that scale, teachers cannot give individualised attention, monitor each child’s manipulation of materials, or even ensure that children at the back can see the demonstration. One teacher described having to stop lessons repeatedly to enforce discipline amid noise and disengagement, then starting over; another noted that learners constantly fight for the chance to come to the front and use one of the school’s two abacuses. The classroom ecology itself, not the teacher’s willingness, defeats the resource-intensive pedagogy.

Professional development deficits compounded the problem. Six of the ten teachers had never attended any workshop on manipulatives or any mathematics workshop at all during their careers, and the four who had received training reported that it consisted of a single pre-service session on the abacus, the only manipulative their university introduced for place value teaching. Left alone, teachers turned to self-directed learning: one fourth-year teacher described going to YouTube to watch videos whenever lesson planning exposed a gap in her knowledge, while a thirteen-year veteran reported that the only workshop of her career concerned curriculum reform, not manipulatives. The researchers read this as a systemic failure operating simultaneously at pre-service and in-service levels, with teachers improvising expertise through informal platforms.

Time pressure and resource scarcity closed the trap. Under the platooning system, lessons last only thirty minutes, which pushes teachers back toward lecture methods and traditional teaching despite Namibia’s learner-centred curriculum ambitions. Teachers reported that selecting appropriate materials requires thinking, comparing and searching, all time-consuming activities, and that teaching place value with manipulatives could stretch the topic to two weeks because learners progress slowly, a pace the timetable cannot absorb. Improvisation offered only partial relief: one teacher built her own abacus, but it was fragile and sometimes broke before reaching the classroom. The authors caution that even the ubiquitous abacus deserves scrutiny, since poorly integrated representations can produce a redundancy effect that raises extraneous cognitive load and harms learning, as documented with Multi-base Arithmetic Blocks.

The study’s central conclusion is that manipulative integration is not primarily a resource problem but an interaction among pedagogical preparedness, learner characteristics, classroom ecology and material availability. Improving it, the authors argue, requires simultaneous systemic interventions: targeted professional development that builds pedagogical confidence, review of class size norms, equitable resource allocation, curriculum support, and reconsideration of scheduling structures such as platooning that make hands-on teaching structurally impossible. Teacher education institutions should strengthen pre-service preparation in the pedagogical use of manipulatives across primary mathematics topics, not just a single tool. The findings also carry weight beyond Namibia, adding rare empirical evidence from the Global South to a literature dominated by high-resource contexts and illuminating how contextual conditions mediate the enactment of learner-centred pedagogy wherever classrooms are crowded, budgets thin and time short. Future research, the authors suggest, should follow up with intervention studies measuring whether targeted training changes teacher confidence and competence, incorporate learners’ perspectives, and add classroom observation to corroborate teachers’ self-reported accounts.

Subject of Research: Enablers and barriers to teachers' selection and integration of manipulatives in Grade 4 place value teaching in Namibia

Article Title: Enablers and barriers to manipulative selection and integration in primary school place value teaching

Article References: Hailulu, R. K., & Kanandjebo, L. N. (2026). Enablers and barriers to manipulative selection and integration in primary school place value teaching. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02164-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02164-8

Keywords: manipulatives, place value, mathematics education, primary school, Namibia, Grade 4, teacher professional development, overcrowded classrooms, abacus, Global South, qualitative case study, cognitive load

Researchers Gerard R. M. Scholten and Jeroen D. H. van Wijngaarden of the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam examined how Value-Based Health Care, commonly abbreviated as VBHC, is implemented in Dutch hospitals. Their findings, published in BMC Health Services Research, come from a qualitative multiple-case study conducted across four Dutch hospitals, drawing on 68 semi-structured interviews with people working at every level of the hospital hierarchy, from board members to frontline clinicians. The interviews were analysed using the widely used thematic analysis approach developed by Braun and Clarke in 2006, allowing the researchers to identify recurring patterns in how the concept was understood and enacted.

The central discovery is stark: there is a fundamental mismatch between what VBHC assumes and what Dutch hospitals can actually do. The original concept, developed in the United States, presumes that hospitals can measure the total costs of care for individual patients across the full cycle of their treatment. That measurement capability is the cornerstone of the model, because only when costs per patient are known can they be linked to health outcomes and used to calculate value. Yet the Dutch researchers found that hospitals in the Netherlands largely lack both the organizational structures and the financial systems required to perform this patient-level costing. Activity-based costing, the accounting machinery that makes cost-per-patient measurement possible in the American context, is simply not in place.

Despite this structural gap, enthusiasm for the concept at the top of the organizations was remarkably strong. Hospital boards endorsed VBHC wholeheartedly and wanted to see it implemented. But rather than driving the change themselves through formal managerial programs, the boards placed doctors and nurses at the forefront of the implementation process. The expectation was that clinical professionals would act as informal leaders, bridging the traditional divide between professional and managerial logics and carrying the concept into everyday practice. This reflects a distinctive feature of Dutch health care culture, in which physicians and nurses are seen as the natural agents of change in hospitals and managerial imposition is often viewed with suspicion.

However, the professionals who were assigned this pivotal role found themselves operating under conditions that made success nearly impossible. Doctors and nurses received limited resources to support their work, unclear mandates about what exactly they were supposed to lead, and little organizational support to help them translate the abstract concept into concrete practice. The researchers describe this as a prominent but unsupported role: clinicians were expected to spearhead a demanding management transformation while being given neither the tools nor the authority to do so. The gap between expectation and support became a decisive force shaping what happened next.

What happened next was a radical adaptation. Freed from the structural anchors of cost measurement and competitive benchmarking, and led by clinicians whose primary concern is patient care rather than market positioning, VBHC in Dutch hospitals evolved into something Porter and his followers would scarcely recognize. Instead of emphasizing the relationship between health outcomes and costs, hospitals reinterpreted the concept as an approach focused on shared decision-making and improved communication between professionals and patients. The competitive logic at the heart of the original model, in which hospitals vie to demonstrate superior value, essentially evaporated.

Nowhere is this reinterpretation more visible than in the fate of patient-reported outcome measures, or PROMs. In the original VBHC framework, PROMs are instruments for systematically capturing patients’ own assessments of their health status, intended to enable benchmarking between providers and the kind of cost-outcome evaluation that fuels competition on value. In the four Dutch hospitals studied, PROMs were instead used mainly to support clinical conversations. Questionnaires about patient outcomes became conversation starters between doctors and patients, tools for understanding individual experiences and tailoring care, rather than instruments for comparing performance across institutions or driving market discipline.

The Dutch experience offers a fascinating case study in what organizational scholars call the translation or hybridization of management concepts. Ideas that circulate internationally, such as VBHC, total quality management, or lean thinking, are never simply copied. They encounter local institutional arrangements, legal frameworks, financial systems, and professional cultures that either accommodate or resist their assumptions. When the fit is poor, the concept bends. In the Netherlands, the bending was so substantial that the researchers characterize it as a radical adaptation: a management model built around outcomes, costs, and competition was transformed into a patient-centred communication approach built around dialogue and shared decision-making.

The study’s most striking conclusion concerns the role of professional expectations. The authors argue that the way Dutch hospital boards positioned doctors and nurses, as prominent leaders who were nonetheless left without resources, clear mandates, or organizational backing, played a decisive role in reshaping the imported concept. Rather than producing the intended integration of professional and managerial perspectives, this arrangement allowed the clinical perspective to dominate, steering VBHC away from its economic foundations and toward its humanistic ones. The findings suggest that when health systems import management models, the expectations placed on professional groups, especially doctors and nurses, may matter more than the design of the model itself.

For policymakers and hospital leaders internationally, the message is sobering and illuminating in equal measure. A concept that appears universally applicable may in fact be deeply dependent on context-specific structures such as patient-level cost accounting and competitive market dynamics. Transplanting it into a system with different financial architecture and a strong tradition of professional self-governance may yield not implementation but reinvention. Whether the Dutch version of VBHC, with its emphasis on shared decision-making, delivers real benefits to patients is a question the study raises but does not resolve. What is clear is that the global travel of management ideas is a story not of faithful diffusion but of continuous adaptation, and that the professionals on the front lines ultimately hold the pen.

Subject of Research: The adaptation of the Value-Based Health Care management concept in Dutch hospitals

Article Title: The radical adaptation of the Value-Based Health Care management concept in Dutch hospitals: an exploratory multiple-case study in four hospitals

Article References: Scholten, G. R. M., & van Wijngaarden, J. D. H. (2026). The radical adaptation of the Value-Based Health Care management concept in Dutch hospitals: an exploratory multiple-case study in four hospitals. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15560-5

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DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15560-5

Keywords: Value-Based Health Care, Dutch hospitals, management concepts, shared decision-making, patient-reported outcome measures, hospital management, health services research, implementation, hybridization, doctors and nurses, qualitative case study, health care costs