Abstract
ᅟThis Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture contextualises in the broadest sense the creation of the Australian curriculum. As such, this sociological account will argue that the national curriculum is both a response to and articulation of globalisation, set against the intricate complexities of Australian educational federalism. The analysis will demonstrate how this emergence had a long and slow gestation and was enabled by the political contingency in 2007 of all Labor governments at the federal, state and territory levels. The Australian curriculum now has an institutional home in the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and appears to have bipartisan political support, apart from ideological debates about what should be included. The lecture considers the Australian curriculum as working together what knowledge students need to know (disciplines) and what sort of people they ought to become (cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities). The argument will situate the national curriculum against the broader national schooling policy assemblage (NAPLAN, My School, Melbourne Declaration, teacher and school leader standards) and interrogate it in terms of the limitations imposed by this contingent framing. These limiting factors include lack of an intellectual rationale, the distance of ACARA from schools, classrooms and teachers, and the restrictive legislative and compositional character of the Australian Institute for Teachers and School Leaders (AITSL), which frames standards for teachers, who are central to the productive enactment of the Australian curriculum. The overall argument is set against Garth Boomer’s innovative curriculum theorising
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Notes
The sociological imagination argues for imbrications between social structures through time and individual practices of agency. This is a relational ontology. Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical work is a very good example of such a relational ontology.
This is also evident if one reads the ACARA document, The Shape of the Australian Curriculum 4.0 (ACARA 2013).
Think, for example, of President Trump’s “America first”, and his assertion of an almost xenophobic ethno-nationalism.
Of course, the emergence of the Common Core State Standards was used by the federal Obama administration in relation to its Race to the Top policy agenda that linked mandatory testing to the Standards and to federal funding.
I would also argue that for valid comparisons of state and territory performance on NAPLAN and PISA that similar statistical work is required to take account of the reality that each of the states and territories is a different demographic and socio-economic entity. Additionally, international large scale assessments also work as technologies to construct talk of a national schooling system in Australia. Think here, for example of Australia’s PISA performance.
The success of Gonski 2.0 will depend on targeted strategies for improvement with a very specific social justice and equity focus. The question is how best to spend the extra funding for greatest impact.
See Baroutsis and Lingard (2017) on how policy usage of PISA data neglects the equity implications of the data. Much more effective policy use could also be made of NAPLAN data re equity.
There are also potential dangers of the enhanced commercialisation of Australian schooling with these developments. See here Lingard et al.,- 2017.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Fazal Rizvi for his very helpful comments on an earlier version of this Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture.
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This paper was delivered as the 2017 Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture at the 2017 ACSA Annual Conference.
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Lingard, B. The Australian curriculum: a critical interrogation of why, what and where to?. Curric Perspect 38, 55–65 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-017-0033-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-017-0033-7