Background

The issue of writing in Australian schools has garnered significant political, media, and academic attention in recent years. A “downward trend in writing in Australian schooling” (Wyatt-Smith & Jackson, 2020, p. 1) has been noted from an analysis of the writing domain of the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).Footnote 1 In these circumstances, a call has been made for more “rigorous writing research that helps us to understand the relevance and values of existing theories and pedagogies” (Australian Education Research Organisation [AERO], 2022, p. 5) in the nation’s classrooms, including in subjects other than English. With attention being given around the nation to the question of how to effectively teach writing, and allied recognition of writing as a means of learning that can have a positive impact on students’ learning overall (Green, 2012), it is my contention that bringing specific critical interest to particular developments in NSW over recent years is warranted. The NSW experience, it might be said, has a certain emblematic quality for reasons that I will now outline.

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), an independent statutory authority with legislative responsibility for the NSW Kindergarten to Year 12 Curriculum, undertook an investigation in 2017 and 2018 of how primary and secondary teachers teach writing. The outcome was “Teaching Writing: Report of the Thematic Review of Writing” (Thematic Review) (NESA, 2018). This review was carried out for NESA by researchers from the Institute of Learning Science and Teacher Education at the Australian Catholic University (ACU). Two related research projects informed this work: the “Report of the Australian Writing Survey: How is writing taught in classrooms? (Australian Writing Survey)” and “Preparation to Teach Writing: Report of Initial Teacher Education (ITE Review)” (NESA, 2018, p. 3). ACU researchers who worked on the Thematic Review had designed the Australian Writing Survey (AWS©), which 4306 teachers from NSW completed (Wyatt-Smith & Jackson, 2020, p. 1). In their summary of the main findings of the AWS© in NSW, the authors lay claim to “[breaking] new ground in several ways” (Wyatt-Smith et al., 2018, p. 4), including new information about the teaching of writing in the different phases of schooling and subject areas.

On the basis that an issue of national importance has generated a significant response in NSW, a timely opportunity exists for critical inquiry in support of conceptualising how the teaching of writing can be strengthened in classrooms in a watchful manner elsewhere. While it is still early days, there are lessons to be learned from how NESA has set about strengthening the teaching of writing, particularly regarding the issue of pedagogy. To this end, of relevance is how it has chosen to respond to elements of recommendation one of the Thematic Review: “Establish an evidence base for teaching writing by identifying existing effective practice grounded in research” (NESA, 2018, p. 5). For it is in this response that the transformative possibilities for teaching and learning of a system-directed collocation of writing research, theory, and pedagogy (cf. AERO, 2022) can be ignited, or not, and begin to play out over time in classrooms, whether positively, negatively, or otherwise.

Introduction

It is a time of curriculum revision in NSW. Following an independent review of the NSW Curriculum (NESA, 2020) that took place from 2018 to 2020, new syllabuses are being written and released by NESA. This marks “the first comprehensive reform of the NSW school curriculum in 3 decades” (NESA, n.d.-a). A key element of this reform is to “strengthen writing content in syllabuses and create resources that give teachers clear guidance” (Baker, 2020a, para. 17). This change is impelled by a focus on improving school performance and student outcomes, including better NAPLAN results (NSW Government, 2020).

The transmission of knowledge through new syllabi is the dominant understanding and representation of curriculum in NSW in this time of reform. The new NSW curriculum will take things back to “Essential facts, concepts and principles” (NESA, n.d.-b, p.3). Structurally and conceptually, what is to be taught has been prioritised over its teaching in the guidance and detail to be provided to teachers in new syllabi.Footnote 2 With the understanding of curriculum as a product in the form of a syllabus, an “instrumental/technical approach to curriculum” (Brennan, 2022, p. 86) can be put to work. This might be said to mark the dominance in NSW of what has been termed the ‘institutional’ and ‘programmatic’ realms of curriculum making, “the state and system documents outlining curriculum policy and associated syllabi” (Green, 2021, p.215). Marginalised is curriculum as practice, an understanding which could have served as “a necessary counterpoint to current (official) constructions” (Green, 2021, p. 215), should attention have been allowed to turn that way.

An instrumental/technical curriculum is policeable through an audit culture, giving it an element of command and control over teachers and their work (Brennan, 2022). What is to be mandatorily taught in the state’s classrooms can be policed through the inspection processes that NESA has in place for registration and system-monitoring purposes and its requirements for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs. But it can also, as it has to an extent in NSW, take on a disciplinary function through its valorising in public discourse—a phenomenon integral to the prevailing “regimes of accountability” (Mockler, 2022, p. 14) in Australian educational jurisdictions.

In this time of curriculum change in NSW, I have found Bill Green’s (2021) published version of his Garth Boomer Memorial Address, presented at the 2021 national conference of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, to give me pause for reflection. As a secondary teacher and principal with a long-standing interest in the teaching of writing (see, for example, Howie, 2004), an interest which has intensified in my present role of leading a state-wide writing project in NSW, I am struck by Boomer having been—as Green stresses—deeply interested in questions of “the relationship of the classroom curriculum to other levels of curriculum formation” and how the “classroom curriculum-in-action” connects to “what is beyond or outside the classroom” (Green, 2021, p. 221). Green’s address and Boomer’s legacy have motivated me to give specific attention to the discursive exchanges that are taking place between different bodies and actors, as a dialectic of action and reaction plays out. A particular consideration being how, in the hurly-burly of curriculum reform, including the delivery of a new syllabus, it falls to teachers to “make things work” (Boomer, 1985a, para. 3). When there is a failure to appropriately recognise the role of teachers as curriculum workers,Footnote 3 change efforts can, and often do, stall for curriculum authorities (Boomer, 1999). The question of whether the curriculum (practice) work of NSW teachers is being given productive recognition in the development of an instrumental/ technical writing curriculum in new syllabi becomes relevant, if not urgent, as curriculum reform consolidates.

Taking up this question, I give regard to the (inter)play of “‘text’ and ‘discourse’, ‘practice’ and institution’ as a representation of the curriculum field” (Green, 2018, p. 93). I consider media reporting and commentary on the issue of writing in NSW, an important review of the teaching of writing in the state, and some key conceptual work done over time, beginning with Boomer (1985c), and moving on to contemporary contributions (Chen et al., 2020), identifying ‘composing behaviours’ that will have students ‘writing as writers’. This places my discourse analysis at the nexus between commentary on and recommendations for a writing curriculum in NSW and conceptualisations of classroom pedagogy in the teaching of writing. Consequently, writing as practice is elemental to curriculum as practice in my argument.

The respective works of Boomer and Chen et al. are significant references for me because they function as historic ‘bookends’, sitting on either side of a protracted period of contestation in Australia about what is represented in the Thematic Review to be deleterious “progressive, child-centred theoretical perspectives” (NESA, 2018, p.15). Broadly understood, these perspectives are held to have been particularly influential in NSW, both positively (see, for example, Sawyer, 2009) and negatively (see, for example, Knapp, 1998). They are often associated with writing in English, particularly creative writing, a ‘personal growth’ model of the subject (Dixon, 1967) and a rhetorical view (Moffett, 1968). They are also linked to the influence of ‘process writing’ approaches (Graves, 1983) and ‘whole language’ understandings (Goodman, 1992) in the teaching of English and subjects other than English. I will not revisit the contestation as it pertains to writing pedagogy here. These are matters that have been written about extensively over time by key figures (see, for example, Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Doecke & McClenaghan, 2009; Gannon, 2009; Knapp & Watkins, 2005; Reid, 1987; Sawyer, 1995). My choice to draw on the work of Boomer (1985c) and Chen et al. (2020) rests on a shared commitment, at two distinct points in time: the mid-1980s, when ‘progressivist’ approaches were receiving national attention, and this present time of focussed attention on writing in NSW, when such approaches have once again come under scrutiny, including in the Thematic Review. The synergies to be found between these two reference points reside in a wish to move past division and to draw from the enabling power of different perspectives to articulate pedagogical thinking that can “address more holistically the complex act of writing” (Myhill & Chen, 2020, p. 6) across the curriculum in our schools. In the final section of this paper, where I focus on ‘composing behaviours’ as an integral element of the writing process in any subject, I accordingly aspire to bring together aspects of the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ in a productive synthesis.

My focus moves in this direction because, as the quote from Baker above suggests, and as will be further explored by me in the next section of this paper, the successful implementation of an improved NSW Curriculum, or what takes place in classrooms, has to a not insignificant extent been ‘officially’ staked on a strengthened writing curriculum that will give clearer guidance to teachers in their pedagogical practice. Writing as practice is being assimilated within the NSW Curriculum in documentary terms. Practice and documentation for practice, its certification, have become largely indistinct in curriculum discourse in NSW at this time—at least in the messages being conveyed about a curriculum for writing. The ‘official’ position, it seems fair to suggest, is to seek a regulated implementation of the revised NSW Curriculum in classrooms through ensuring that the curriculum documents provide practice guidelines, while still somehow “streamlining” (NESA, n.d.-b, p. 3) the curriculum through reduced content and compliance requirements. An inherent tension might be seen here: the need to provide but also at the same time constrain detail means targeted selectivity must win out. Something will have to give regarding what is deemed to be essential and the supporting details provided for these elements. And it already has in the development of a writing curriculum, as I have already highlighted (see footnote 2) and will soon go on to say much more about.

I posit that Carol Bacchi’s (2016) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis presents a productive frame for focussed consideration of the work entailed in (re)writing the NSW curriculum for a strengthened emphasis on the teaching of writing. Parallels are drawn between Bacchi’s WPR approach and Boomer’s commitment to asking principled questions of the policy work that is curriculum development and implementation, not least in relation to subjectification or the ways in which “discourses make certain subject positions available” (Bacchi, 2016, p. 16). I conclude by exploring possibilities for curriculum inquiry involving teachers and students that might be considered by NESA in fully addressing Recommendation 1 of “Teaching Writing: Report of the Thematic Review of Writing” (Thematic Review) (NESA, 2018). Curiously, even as syllabi are being drafted, NESA has evidently chosen to not respond to key elements of this recommendation—at least not yet. Revisiting Boomer’s (1985c) “inventory of cognitive moves” (p. 139), adapting it to include composing behaviours identified in other research, potentially presents a (re)turn to practice in NSW curriculum considerations. An illustrative focus on writing behaviours could prove constructive in the investigation of “the strategies used to teach writing” (NESA, 2018, p.50), as recommended in the Thematic Review. Boomer (1985c) wrote of a key outcome of strengthened teaching practice being “specific [writing] behaviours at work” (p.139). There is a real need for making these behaviours known to teachers, as “our understanding of being a writer and the teaching of writing lags behind our understanding of the teaching of reading” (Myhill & Chen, 2020, p. 1). In keeping with the spirit of optimism brought to ‘inquiry’ by Brennan (2022) and Boomer’s representation of the writing classroom as a live(ly) social space (Boomer, 1985b), I hope that my reflections might add something generative to the curriculum knowledge work in NSW, given that the rollout of new syllabuses in NSW has been delayed with a change of government (Carroll, 2023).

Going back to the future in delimiting the NSW curriculum

In September 2020, representations of the teaching of writing in NSW as a ‘problem’ came to the fore in reporting and commentary on education. A sense of educational crisis requiring a curriculum-driven solution was being (re)stoked in NSW public discourse. Headlines suggested a state of failure and emergency, for example: “Students struggle as review finds writing standards neglected in schools” (Baker, 2020a) and “Blame game over who is responsible for writing decline in NSW schools” (Baker, 2020b). Editorials and commentary followed. One editorial asserted that students are leaving school unemployable, making it incumbent upon the NSW government to strengthen the teaching of writing to better prepare them for life and work (“Our students deserve to gain the write stuff”, 2021). Commentators opined that the NSW crisis is symptomatic of a nationwide ‘problem’, which is now a national social and economic emergency (Fahey, 2020; Knapp, 2020a & 2020b). Such ‘problem’ representations have since continued, extending into related areas such as the teaching of grammar for better writing (Harris, 2023).

Evidence for the parlous state of the teaching of writing in NSW was largely drawn from the convergence of two sources. The motivating source was the Thematic Review, which had only been made public by NESA in September 2020, after it was obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald under Freedom of Information laws (Baker, 2020c). The other significant source was the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) report, “NAPLAN Achievement in Reading, Writing, Language Conventions and Numeracy: National Report for 2019” (ACARA, 2019). This report showed writing results overall to be “still below where they were when writing was first tested, with the exception of Year 3” (ACARA, 2020, p. 1).

It seems that a programmatic approach to curriculum, one in which the syllabus is the curriculum, is prevailing in the discourse in NSW. Curriculum intention—corralling and directing teachers’ attention, effort, and will—becomes what matters and so what must be secured and enforced as a necessary response to a mooted crisis. In such circumstances, it follows that questions of an enhanced writing curriculum in NSW demand consideration of the discursive forces presently in play while new syllabuses are being written and released. Politicians, system leaders, policymakers, commentators, academics, curriculum writers, school executives, and teachers are all at different stages in navigating the complexities of strengthening the teaching of writing in the state’s classrooms. This entails, but cannot be limited to, the challenges of syllabus implementation, including the demands for consistency and standardisation that must follow for leaders and managers of change at all levels—from classrooms up to the NESA Boardroom and the Minister’s Office.

On these terms, understanding a curriculum in action necessitates understanding curriculum as a responsive reaction to the myriad forces shaping and framing it in the policy domain. For instance, Sarah Mitchell, who was the NSW Minister for Education and Early Learning, tweeted her government’s commitment to a “new curriculum that will include the explicit teaching of writing” and, more specifically, the “teaching of subject-specific writing in high schools” (Mitchell, 2020). Inherent to the change agenda, at least as it is voiced in this tweet, is the framing of the subject of teaching in absolutist, binary terms: for example, as explicit or unexplicit; and, from there, as being harmful or beneficial to students. With this, we see a necessary (re)subjectification of secondary teachers: the movement away from being incompetent to being competent and from being disinterested to being interested and invested in the teaching of writing. Here, we are, in a sense, going back to the present. For what constitutes being ‘explicit’ and ‘beneficial’ in the teaching of writing, and the sort of teacher needed to teach in this way, historically have been contested in Australia from a range of perspectives. Teachers qua teachers of writing have long been both subject to and the subjects of such contestation (Doecke & Parr, 2005; Myhill & Chen, 2020), and certainly remain so, as confirmed by Sarah Mitchell’s tweet. The present challenge for curriculum workers in NSW is to rise out of the exogenic mire that is a good deal of the commentary and opinion surrounding reform efforts. The sense of a crisis in the writing curriculum is being normalised, represented in such a way that no viable alternatives to the proposed solution are likely to be voiced in the public discourse. But, of course, representations and processes of representation are open to scrutiny. In looking at what the problem is represented to be, space can be opened for a counter-discourse in analysing curriculum and related policy work (see, for example, Gill, 2012).

Representing the teaching of writing in NSW as an institutional and programmatic curriculum ‘problem’

Bacchi’s WPR approach to policy analysis opens analysis to recognition of policy as giving shape to ‘problems’ and not in fact addressing them. Bacchi argues, “we need to initiate our analysis from ‘answers’ or ‘proposed solutions’ and inquire into the problematizations that render these answers intelligible” (Bacchi, 2015, p. 7). Productive conclusions and recommendations for policy work can then follow.

A turn to ‘problematization’, the questioning of “how something is put forward as a problem” (Bacchi, 2016, p. 277), would appear to be a timely intervention in relation to the NSW writing curriculum. Particularly when we note in ‘problem’ representations of the teaching of writing in NSW a claim such as, “For some reason or reasons we don’t know how to teach our students to write…. A close examination of curriculum and syllabus documents appear to give the teaching of writing a peripheral position at best” (Knapp, 2020b). While Peter Knapp himself has a decades-long history of developing and contributing to curriculum and curriculum support documents in different jurisdictions (see, for example, Knapp, 1992; ACARA, n.d., p. 31), it is evident that he gives (unintended) support to Bacchi’s claim that we do well to consider how ‘problems’ are “endogenous – created within – rather than exogeneous – existing outside – the policy making process” (Bacchi, 2016, p. x).

Quoted in one article (Baker, 2020a), Knapp largely attributes the ‘writing problem’ in NSW and beyond to syllabuses and curriculum frameworks that have failed to provide teachers with the necessary levels of detail and direction.

Our national and state curriculum documents lack any real precision on how writing should be taught…. They constantly seem to be under review to change, re-orient and re-direct so that teachers, in all honesty, will have difficulty knowing what needs to be done, and there is a view that the changes will make no substantive difference. (paras. 20-21)

Curriculum, when understood as broadly poststructuralist ‘text’ (Green, 2018), has failed on Knapp’s terms by not ‘writing’ into being the sort of teacher needed to effectively teach writing. Which is to say, in its ‘official’ representation as a syllabus, curriculum has failed teachers by not effectively connecting them and their reading of the syllabus to the myriad outside referents—the structures, processes, formulations, practices, and so on— needed for them to appropriately ‘communicate’ and ‘present’ improved practice through expressively enacting an institutionally desired professional identity: namely, the being of a writing teacher. The failure of curriculum as ‘text’ is the failure of curriculum in shaping ‘being’ as identity, ‘who I am as a teacher’, and the ‘being’ that is practice, ‘what I do as a teacher’. And yet, in NSW from 2020 onwards, the originating government, NESA, and select ‘expert’ commentators all placed great faith in change being brought about in and through curriculum documents. They did so in order for a substantive, syllabus-ised solution to the ‘problem’ of writing to be realised.

By contrast, Garth Boomer (1985c) was alert to the problematics of valorising such a ‘solution’ nearly 40 years ago:

In the seventies the work of James Britton, James Moffett, and Michael Halliday had considerable impact on the contents and spirt of official departmental curriculum guides, but it is doubtful whether more than, say, 10% of teachers have internalized these new insights into the nature and function of writing sufficiently to change their writing programs in fundamental ways. (p. 132)

What has apparently long been the ‘problem’ is now, once again, to be the solution in NSW. This is a stifling paradox that appears not to have been recognised by the authorising champions and other vocal advocates of curriculum change for writing in NSW. Bacchi’s WPR approach brings focus to issues such as, “the conceptual premises underpinning particular problematizations; the contingent practices and processes through which certain representations of the “problem” have gained authenticity and authority; [and] the effects or implications of specific problem representations” (Bacchi, 2015, p. 7). Such matters inform the analysis of the ‘problem’ representation of writing in NSW that follows.

Problematizing the (re)emergence of writing as an institutional and programmatic curriculum ‘problem’ in NSW

The govern-mentality at work in Sarah Mitchell’s tweeted response to problem representations of writing clearly evokes, without being limited to, Foucauldian notions of discipline and control through regulation. This is not atypical of public policy with neoliberalism’s remaking of state and subject, including related curriculum reform and implementation (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2018). So, as curriculum (re)writing proceeds in NSW, it is apposite to consider how teachers might yet come to be governed in their teaching of writing through ‘problem representations’, in particular, the subject position being made available to teachers within the dominant discourse, which is promoting a techno-rational solution to the ‘problem’ of writing in the form of new syllabi. Curriculum as process, its “unfolding in time, as a matter of lived experience, grounded in the material reality of classrooms in action” (Green, 2021, p. 215), is where the stress could profitably be falling in NSW, as the authors of the Thematic Review suggested in their first recommendation to NESA. But, even here, in this recommendation, the reductive subjectification of teachers and students in ‘official’ NSW curriculum knowledge work proves inescapable.

In the Thematic Review, student learning is discursively shaped within the context and circumstances of national literacy testing in Australia. Despite gestures otherwise, writing is effectively delimited as writing for the manufacture of (teacher and student) performance data. Of course, this is foundationally a (con)textual matter: a necessary outcome of the purpose and generic form of a ‘thematic review’, which is to have external experts investigate a specific key ‘risk’ for an organisation, in this case, NESA, and in the process undertake detailed work on areas of priority for enhanced organisational focus and purpose. But the context for the writing and publication of the Thematic Review is infused with the politics and culture of performativity prevailing in education systems around the world, shaping teaching and learning in schools (Lee, 2023). The risk to be addressed in this context for NESA is ‘falling educational standards’.

My concern here is not with the genre of the Thematic Review as the key ‘problem representation’ of writing in NSW. It is instead with certain elisions and occlusions discursively operating within it, noting that other ‘problem representations’ cite the Thematic Review as the authority for the positions being expressed (see, for example, Fahey, 2020 and Knapp, 2020b). It is these absent presences that might yet go on to shape and inform the writing of the NSW (writing) curriculum in a restricted and reductive manner, an outcome some commentators are evidently, if inadvertently, positioning themselves to help bring about.

In the executive summary of the Thematic Review, the authors immediately draw a distinction between writing as a product of learning and writing as a process for learning, while indicating the necessary interrelationship of the two. They write, “At school, writing is the principle means by which students both learn and demonstrate what they have learned” (NESA, 2018, p. 3), meaning teachers are required to “devote significant time and effort to teaching and assessing writing in any given subject” (p. 5). There is nothing new being said here. The concepts of writing to learn and writing across the curriculum have a long-standing history in Australia, which has seen advocates making a case for writing as being essential to deep thinking and learning by students, as well as to their social and emotional development (see, for example, Walshe, 1986; Doecke & Parr, 2005; Green, 2012; Chen et al., 2020).

From here, the authors of the Thematic Review move to framing the ‘problem’ of writing in NSW in terms of the academic growth and achievement of students made evident by NAPLAN results. The writing product composed under test conditions by students is given primacy over writing as a process for learning. In the second paragraph of the executive summary, the authors write, “student writing performance in NSW and nationally has remained static since 2011, with a marked decline consistently evident as students move through the junior secondary years” (NESA, 2018, p. 3). Leading into this statement is the final sentence of the introductory paragraph. Having acknowledged that “Many NSW students are very good writers”, the authors go on to conclude, “for many other students, a lack of writing ability means they struggle to show what they know, and their learning remains untapped or unseen” (p. 3). Consequently, in the exemplary ‘problem’ representation of writing in NSW that is the Thematic Review, student writing is effectively made indistinguishable from writing in and for a standardised national literacy test, where ‘learning’ is apparently made visible. Students’ being as writers is somehow fully realised not in their classrooms on a day-to-day basis, but in a public testing situation that serves the demands and purposes of the institutional and programmatic curriculum. Left unstated here are other intellectual possibilities for students, and the uncodifiable personal outcomes (social, emotional, cognitive, existential) that can develop when one is learning through writing, and which the authors of the Thematic Review themselves do acknowledge, at least in passing, impel good writing (NESA, 2018, p. 10).

Confirmed in the Thematic Review is Gale’s (2006) position that “deference for disconnected knowledge and statistical data generated from add-on assessment—championed as ‘hard data’ that informs ‘evidence-based’ practice—continues to dominate mainstream schooling in Australia” (pp. 103–104). Such deference to ‘datafication’ comes at a cost for teaching and learning, as “Pedagogy under the influence of testing regimes tends to assume a certain task orientated efficiency focused on exam performance and as such tends to ‘thin out’ pedagogy” (Lingard, Hayes & Mills, 2000, pp. 14–15, quoted in Gale, 2006, p. 104). To illustrate, recontextualising this ‘efficiency’ discourse within the teaching of writing by going back to the work of Jack Thomson (1980) on writing, an “important pedagogical question” (p. 57) for teachers is elided by NAPLAN and its marking. This is for teachers to ask, “how much has been learned by our pupils in the act of writing, when the yardstick we use to evaluate the assimilation of knowledge is the written product?” (pp. 57–58). In the public testing regime of NAPLAN, such a question is in fact impossible for teachers to ask. Here the relationship between writing and learning is situationally determined and highly regulated, serving the purposes of accountability and standardisation. The forms and features of the writing expected of students are fixed and pre-determined for them. Such are the implementation and supervision practices required of schools for compliance with NAPLAN test procedures that it is unlikely teachers will observe their students in the act of writing, and they will not get to read what their students have written in the test. The writing is not returned to students, schools, or teachers. The possibility for, as Thomson advocates, teachers “encouraging dialogue with pupils after writing” (p. 58), as such dialogue is crucial to effective learning, is stymied. Dialogue between a teacher and their students is instead limited to a discussion of test results and performance, more particularly, to the targeting of areas for improvement as identified by a student’s performance when measured against descriptors for each of the elements of writing codified in the marking criteria. On these terms, growth in a student’s capacities as a writer is equated with growth in their effectiveness in completing a standardised writing test and their being as a student writer delimited as ‘test-taker’.

When curriculum policy work is not understood and considered to extend beyond the institutional and programmatic levels, it becomes inevitable that problem representations will not effectively grapple with complex questions of teaching and learning. This is a point that Claire Wyatt-Smith, “lead author” (Baker, 2020a, para.10) of the Thematic Review, has made elsewhere when writing more directly to teachers, teacher-educators, and academics working in curriculum inquiry (Wyatt-Smith, 2012). Here, she calls for a sharpened focus in the curriculum—at all levels—on the distinctive literacies of the subject disciplines. She warns that “it is the literacy demands of assessment tasks that can present significant barriers to student success” (Wyatt-Smith, 2012, p. iv). Real and deep learning needs “new conversations to begin”, informing policy and practice, and “directly linking curriculum design and literacy learning” to a futures orientation (Wyatt-Smith, 2012, p. vi).

Such thinking is not voiced in the executive summary of the Thematic Review. Here, stress is placed on the purpose of writing as a product to represent student learning in service of a testing regime, over and above writing as a process and medium for learning. Literate futures become largely indistinguishable from the future of NAPLAN:

This review regards the existing NAPLAN data to be a reliable indicator for some key elements of student writing ability. It is the largest aggregation of student performance data available and a critical guide to inform further enquiry, and that will continue to be the case in whatever future form it takes. (NESA, 2018, p. 13)

The ‘key elements’ of writing that are not, or cannot be, assessed in NAPLAN go unstated in the Thematic Review. For the seed of a revivifying conversation about these elements to be planted and begin to bear fruit in NSW, educators and curriculum workers need to look elsewhere, beyond the Thematic Review. As I will go on to argue, it is my belief that core elements of Boomer’s thinking on writing retain great value for curriculum workers at this time.

In what follows from here, the appropriate (re)turn for me is from the ‘externalities’ of curriculum reform to the vibrant ‘internalities’ of the writing classroom—which is not to concede that these were recognised as binaries, as they have been here for aesthetic reasons, in the arguments I have been making throughout this paper. As Green (2018) posits, inside-outside relations do not hold in conceptualising and representing the “interrelational dynamics” (p. 83) of the curriculum field.

Opening the door to questions of curriculum and pedagogy in the teaching of writing

Recommendation 1 of the Thematic Review calls on NESA to “Establish an evidence base for teaching writing by identifying existing effective practice grounded in research” (NESA, 2018, p. 16). Investigation of current ‘effective practice’ in NSW schools is urged. In the absence of a publicly available report from NESA on its school-based findings, and statements as to how these findings will inform the addition of writing content to new syllabuses or the implementation support to be provided to teachers, such investigation seemingly has not taken place. This is despite, at the time in which I am writing, the revised English K-10 Syllabus having been released (NESA, n.d.-c, NSW Curriculum). Recommendation 1 presents an opportunity for NESA to be working in schools, with teachers and students, to explore how a writing curriculum has been ‘successfully’ developed locally, when the ‘official’ syllabus being implemented did not provide the detail and direction for teachers now deemed to be necessary. A question then follows: what exactly is to be examined in such an investigation?

Boomer held it to be inescapable that teachers, educational leaders, and curriculum authorities must closely and responsibly look at the literacy performance of students: doing so for reasons that are at once political, economic, educational, and intellectual in nature (Boomer, 1999, p. 89). However, beyond ‘performance’ in and of itself, he argues that what needs to be examined are “the values, attitudes and transformative strategies …being inculcated along with the literacy” (p. 99). A significant word here is ‘transformative’. For, in relation to learning, Boomer emphasised the developmental powers of writing as a way of learning, a consequence of this being a need to recognise and value writing as a process. Boomer had a deep interest in understanding and conceptualising “what writers do when they write” (1985c, p. 132), seeking to bring greater focus to the behaviours and ‘social norms’ necessary to create a community of writers in the classroom. A motivating force in this drive to conceptualise and describe a ‘social normality’ for school writing is an express desire to bring “understanding of how writing works in the “real” world outside schools” (Boomer, 1985b, p. 61)—to collapse into each other such binaries as ‘process’ and ‘product’ and ‘school’ and ‘reality’.

Boomer’s interest in getting students ‘writing as writers’ led him to conceptualising a model of the composing process (Boomer, 1985c). A key element of Boomer’s model is that it includes “an inventory of cognitive moves” (p. 139) made by a writer. These are organised by category to identify stages in the writing process. The stages are represented to be interrelated and interdependent, dynamic, and recursive, not fixed and linear. Boomer’s inventory was adapted from his reading in the field. While writing research is “not a coherent and unified body of research” (Myhill & Chen, 2020, p. 6), one area of agreement is the staged nature of the writing process and a normative element to certain writing behaviours. This is a ‘real’ experience for professional writers, being a necessary element of their work with editors and publishers. As a senior editorial manager for a major international publisher puts it in her recent book about her industry, “recurring structures and ways of writing tell us a lot about how words get good” (Lee, 2023, p.16). For all their differences in labelling, when it comes to the conceptualising of school writing practices, “the core components [of writing models] have remained largely the same” (Myhill & Chen, p.2). Where Myhill and Chen identify planning, drafting, and reviewing as core components (see p. 2), Boomer’s stages are imagining, exploring, selecting, applying, and evaluating (see p. 138). It is not difficult to see how these, and other possible labels for the different stages in the writing process, can be brought together: pre-writing/planning/imagining and exploring, writing/drafting/selecting and applying, and post-writing/reviewing/evaluating.

A more concrete sense can be brought to this assertion of areas of commonality in a staged organising of composing behaviours by offering an adaptation of Boomer’s ‘inventory of cognitive moves’ to the present discussions of a writing curriculum for NSW (Fig. 1). The spirit in which this is offered, as Boomer (1985c) himself stressed, is to begin from the intention of “moving towards” (p. 133) a better understanding of the composing process. One which is deeper, richer, and ineluctably grounded in classroom realities. By my reading of Recommendation 1 of the Thematic Review at least, its authors would be supportive.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Composing behaviours

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Figure 1 presents dynamically interacting composing behaviours that can be used in the recursive phases of a supportive teaching and learning cycle for writing. It is adapted from Boomer (1985b), Walshe (1986), and Derewianka (2020). In this adaptation, I am advocating for a ‘practice’ turn in (writing) curriculum work in NSW. I suggest that an inventory of this nature—a set of writing behavioural indicators, if you will— is something that investigation of effective (writing) classroom practice in NSW will do well to factor in, whether such study is undertaken by NESA or other interested parties.

While looking back to the work of Boomer in this area, classroom investigation should also be built from a body of recent, rich, and generative work, such as that being undertaken by Beverly Derewianka (2020). Recognised in both the work of Boomer and Derewianka is that composing behaviours, the “basic moves or strategic elements in the act of composition” (Boomer, 1985c, p.137), are always already located in the stages, which are recursive in nature, of the composing process. In turn, as Derewianka (2020) shows from classroom study, the social interaction and shared experience upon which the writing process depends, and which essentially define it, are best supported by an enabling and supportive teaching and learning cycle. Derewianka presents a generative model for growing the maturity of students in their academic writing. Boomer (1985c), too, grappled with the question of maturity in students’ writing and offered his own “model of the learner’s journey during the composing process [and its] implications for teachers” (p. 146). In both models, the composing behaviours to which I have referred form but one part: curriculum inquiry work in NSW (writing) classrooms must be built from multilayered understandings of writing as a process and be supported by sophisticated questions and models for investigation, integrating, and giving account of writing behaviours in action. In the spirit of Boomer, we can want for nothing less than students writing as writers write.

Conclusion

In this time of curriculum change in NSW, at work in ‘problem representations’ of the writing curriculum in public discourse is a strengthening of the curriculum prescription and (re)shaping of the professional practice of teachers that has been taking place in Australia for some time. In the Thematic Review and other ‘problem’ representations of the writing curriculum, we see that the promise of improved efficiency in school education is held to be contingent on the solving of another ‘problem’: making teachers more “accountable to and for student performance data” (Lingard et al. 2016, p.1). Using Bacchi’s WPR approach, I have focussed on the discursive forces that certain representations of the ‘problem’ of writing in NSW have employed to normalise a ‘syllabus-ised’ solution. In highlighting elisions in these representations, and the essential paradox of the heralded solution, as is already evident in the NSW English K-10 Syllabus (see footnote 2), where the detail needed to guide teachers in the practice of writing cannot be accommodated, I sought to establish that curriculum has been narrowly instantiated in programmatic, techno-rational terms as intention. Such a concept of curriculum carries with it great ideological and political force, driving centralised command and control of teachers and teaching. A new, broader conversation is needed about the ‘problem’ of the writing curriculum in NSW: one which (re)turns to the classroom and a grounding in practice.

The composing behaviours identified by Boomer and others fit readily with Green’s (2022) description of practice as a distinctive form of social practice. One marked by attendant complexity: a multifaceted weaving of the lived and the living, of the corporeal and the cognitive, of judgement and intention, and of sociality, sociability, and dialogue (pp.77–78). Here, intention can be moved to actuality, (re)motivating the emphasis that Boomer (1985c) placed on writing classrooms as places where understandings of the curriculum as concept and practice are knowingly brought together— places that are marked, for students and teachers alike, by “dynamically interacting behaviours” (p.138) in getting the work of producing good writing done. Were this shift to happen ‘officially’ in NSW, it could well contribute to a ‘practice turn’ in curriculum inquiry, as championed by Green (2022) in general terms and by others—nationally and internationally—more specifically in relation to the writing curriculum (see, for example, contributions to Chen et al., 2020). There is a note of optimism and possibility here, but understanding writing as a complex social practice does not sit readily with a determination to ‘streamline’ syllabi for teachers, as the NSW case shows through NESA’s (so far) incomplete adaptation of the first recommendation of the Thematic Review. There is a lesson here for the nation about the limitations of the ‘instrumental’ and ‘programmatic’ realms of curriculum making as the primary means for strengthening the teaching of writing in our schools.