Introduction

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) invites teachers to embed the cross-curriculum priorities (henceforth CCP) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Knowledges, Sustainability and Asia, and Australia’s Engagement with Asia into their curriculum. This reflective paper focuses on the integration of the CCPs into the Arts curriculum. These priorities highlight a socio-historical and political responsibility that is long overdue. Yet, the responsibility of such important educational work is held by teachers who may not have had time or understanding to undertake deep learning about the various epistemologies and ontologies that exist within the disciplinary fields of the CCPs. This paper draws attention to the problematics of a national curriculum and the sub-text of responsibility. A case in point is the persistent challenge of the CCPs that requires immediate attention, but instead, the focus has been on upgrading to version 9 of the ACARA website. This highlights the increasing technicist and digitalisation of education and the relegation of the production of knowledge into unpredictable territory where mandatory learning is experienced in contradictory ways (Ewing, 2010).

This paper frames this conversation with recognition of the diversity of Australian teachers, the greater need to support all teachers, and to challenge the way in which policy decisions can add layers of complexity for teachers. Importantly, teachers have been called upon to embed the CCPs with limited time or space to embody new knowledge on an ontological and epistemological level. Globalisation and neoliberal frameworks are anathema to integrationist, site-specific Indigenous knowledge and pluralist world views that are a required way of thinking for educators working with the priorities. Furthermore, schooling is grounded in white middle-class habitus (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) that operates through pedagogy, curriculum, and practises that move horizontally through schools into the wider community as a normative ontological model.

Teachers hold responsibility for shifting curriculum expectations, and the subtext of this responsibility is that all teachers embed the CCPs within a framework that is framed by institutional whiteness. This discourse of responsibility reveals the contradictory expectations placed on teachers as knowledge producers and curriculum designers. There is little wonder that teachers are leaving the teaching force due to high expectations, limited support or time to acquire new knowledge and ways to integrate the CCPs, as well as accountability for student learning outcomes that are represented through high-stakes testing.

The Arts curriculum is well suited for the inclusion of the CCPs, but in order for it be done authentically it also requires a standpoint (Harding, 2004) shift for many non-Indigenous teachers to acquire understandings of Indigenous knowledges for example. Technological upgrades and system changes such as those recently published in version 9 of ACARA are often met by teachers with a sense of exhaustion (Wrigley et al., 2012). Furthermore, most teachers embrace the CCPs as an ethical and philosophically sound approach to curriculum. However, little time has been allocated to learn ways to embed such an approach authentically. This paper outlines the persistent challenge and opportunities of the CCPs and the importance of time and space for all teachers to undergo their own professional learning and transformations in order to authentically embed the CCPs with a particular focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Knowledges.

Authentically embedding the CCPs requires an epistemological shift

Whilst the teaching force is increasingly diverse, it is still largely white, classed, and gendered. Porter highlights how white middle class values, ‘knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours’ are inculcated as dispositions or ‘habitus’ and are increasingly expected the higher one ascends schooling and university (1986, p. 4). Furthermore, curriculum design and content knowledge are informed by western knowledges, and therefore many non-Indigenous Anglo teachers have limited embodied knowledges of cultures not of their own.

Arts education is informed by western art practises and art histories such as realism, the modernists, and postmodernists. The pedagogical practices in the arts include creative exploration, inquiry based learning, drama based instruction, studio pedagogy and design thinking that lead towards divergent outcomes. Arts dispositions are produced through co-designed curriculum, art pedagogy, and embodied strategies (Dinham, 2020; Garrett & MacGill, 2019). The arts are well-suited for the integration of the CCPs, and there are some outstanding ways in which this is done in schools. Yet, this does not address the subtext of responsibility that has been placed on teachers when many do not have time or a deep understanding of the three priorities.

Immersion and support for teachers and students

Immersion in local and contextualised workshops, camps, or retreats gives time for teachers to absorb new pedagogical practises, for example storying on Ngarrindjeri Country and working with Elders at Camp Coorong. Such experiences shift people’s worldviews through the embodied strategies led by Ngarrindjeri weavers such as Aunty Ellen (MacGill et al., 2012). However, these camps and retreat sites also need to be fully funded and supported as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are often overwhelmed by the demand and have to find funding to keep their organisations open. A case in point was Camp Coorong in South Australia, which did this explicit pedagogical work to support students and teachers but was not financially supported by the State to ensure its longevity. Those that were privileged to attend learned about sustainable practices and Ngarrindjeri knowledge, history, and art practices through walking on Country. This is very different from learning about such knowledge systems through digital tracks online.

The art curriculum advocates that students engage with the diverse and continuing cultures, artworks, and practices of First Nations Australians and to ensure they follow protocols that describe principles, procedures, and behaviours for recognising and respecting First Nations Australians and their intellectual and cultural property. However, teachers need support to develop a discerning understanding of resources appropriate to their location and time to connect with First Nations Australian education consultative groups or other protocols accredited by First Nations Australians. (ACARA, 2022, The Arts F-10 Version 9.0; Australia Council for the Arts (2007).

Teachers and students need time. The creative process of making art, developing stories for a film in media arts, preparing a play for drama, developing a choreographed dance, or writing music takes time. Western art practices have their own sets of codes, definitive elements and principles. The inclusion of the CCPs is an opportunity that allows for transformation and epistemological shifts that lean towards new ways of seeing the world and being in relation to the world (Biesta, 2019). The artworks by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and artists from Asia offer opportunities for understanding and engaging with diverse perspectives that can sit comfortably in the centre rather than the margins of the curriculum. The opportunities for sustainable practices equally offer ways to address climate change rather than just upcycling plastic bottles for an art project.

Agentic possibilities

Agentic possibilities emerge from epistemological shifts where teachers are given time, space, and support to reread the curriculum anew and find intersectional points to integrate rather than bolt on the CCPs. Teachers have been engaging in this process of learning, relearning, and adapting curriculum to include the CCPs since 2010. While version 9.0 of the ACARA website is improved, it is equally important to match this with structural changes for teachers to bring about the potential of the CCPs. Agentic possibilities are the potential of teachers to bring to life all aspects of the CCPs within a cross-disciplinary and intersectional approach. This reflects Indigenous pedagogical approaches such as 8 ways (Yunkaporta n.d.) to be used as a way of teaching and learning. It sits comfortably with the co-design and dialogical meaning-making practises of art pedagogy.

If this process is perceived as moving along a continuum (Aveling, 2004), teachers move from one set of ideas and understanding to another that shifts standpoints (Harding, 2004). However, these opportunities can also be points on one’s continuum where the opportunity for an epistemological shift is either embraced or deferred. The possibility of deferring responsibility for the exclusion of the CCPs due to overwork or fear is problematic. The deferral of responsibility of the CCPs, problematically retains the ongoing omission of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge in the curriculum. This state of deferred responsibility may be due to the fact that some teachers do not feel that they have the capacity, time, or knowledge to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives or content about Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia. Many non-Indigenous teachers feel that they do not want to for example, offend Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through misrepresentation. Further, tensions arise between expectations of institutionalised white knowledge and habitus of schooling in parallel with the broader perspectives introduced through the CCPs, such as First Nation sovereignty, and the ethics of building a socially just education (Tannoch-Bland, 1997).

Rich art practices by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and the religiously and culturally diverse art practices from Asia offer a counter-narrative to the framing of the ‘Other’ so poignantly deconstructed by Said (1978) about western education. Furthermore, on a surface level sustainability is often identified as the easier cross-curriculum priority in the arts. Upcycled materials are routinely used in the visual art classroom; however, this does not link some of the world’s biggest challenges of ‘climate change, global warming, and the environmental crisis, huge disparities in income and wealth, conflicts between different groups, races, countries, and civilizations, terrorism and terrorist attacks, the possibility of nuclear or chemical warfare, and the need to achieve a great deal more peace and harmony in the world’ (Schafer, 2017).

The CCPs have the potential to work within this realm of change, but teachers and students need time to build authentic design thinking processes that allow for ways to work through complex problems. Megan Cope’s artwork offers an example of this possibility through her work Kinyingarra Guwinyanba. She combines art, science, Indigenous knowledge, and sustainability into living sculptures that generate sea gardens and oyster colonies designed for the future (https://www.megancope.com.au/works/kinyingarra-guwinyanba). Arguably, the arts curriculum offers exciting possibilities for the implementation of the CCPs and has the ‘potential to bring about the most essential change in the world of all—namely, a major transformation in the relationship between human beings and the natural environment’, but also ‘possesses the wherewithal to create a new course for humanity’(Schafer, 2017).

Pedagogical shift

To achieve the goals of the priorities, we need epistemological, ontological, and thereby pedagogical shifts that support ways of thinking and listening to artists; and the collective voices of children in collaboration with their teachers to conceive of such possibilities. Agentic arts sensibility is a way of thinking that can be learned as a child and remain for life in the form of embodied knowledge, including ethical ways of being and doing in conjunction with creative problem-solving. Building dispositional arts sensibilities to think, feel, perceive, and be in connection with the world requires support and education.

Curriculum design by teachers underpins what is going to be taught and therefore is intrinsic to knowledge production. Determining appropriate assessment tools that measure embodied knowledge and dispositional thinking is complex, and sits on the other end of the spectrum from technicist approaches that are normalised in the neoliberal education system. Building a socially just education (Tannoch-Bland, 1997) informed by the ethical and philosophical underpinnings of the CCPs requires more than bolting knowledge systems onto the Australian curriculum.

These are big responsibilities and teachers need to be supported within an ethics of care framework (Garrett & MacGill, 2019) to sustain an authentic arts education that is culturally responsive. Ethics, ontology, and epistemology are inseparable. When teachers consider the complexity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Sustainability from a posthuman feminist perspective, epistemologies get entangled and inseparable from the knowledge-making work they do in their curriculum design (Barad, 2007, cited in Bozalek, 2016, p. 81). When teachers weave the CCPs through the process of using arts pedagogy, links emerge between the priorities. Interestingly, the ethics of care and posthuman ethics are firmly located in a relational ontology which is a required way of thinking (Barad, 2007) to inform a pluralist arts curriculum.

Think like an artist

Artists have always been the storytellers and imagined new possibilities and ways of doing and thinking that are informed by a way of being that is open to possibilities. We remember things through stories; we embody knowledge through experiences with each other and in relation to each other. We solve problems together, and we build understanding through dialogue.

Biesta’s (1994) notion of relational subjectivity in teaching and learning is not a ‘one-way process in which culture is transferred from one (already acculturated) organism to another (not yet acculturated) organism, but as a co-constructive process, a process in which both participating organisms play an active role and in which meaning is not transferred but produced’ (Biesta 1994, p. 311–312). Arts pedagogies invite students to articulate their positions in their interpretation and thereby ‘‘announce’ their interest’ (Biesta, 2014, p. 143) and new understandings of divergent worldviews. Consciousness about pluralism informed through understandings of the layers of knowledge held within the CCPs highlights the ways in which power and knowledge are interlinked. Meaning making is produced through arts based strategies that explore culturally informed semiotics code, that are deeply embedded in the arts.

Exercising the full potential of embedding the CCPs, teachers, and students can build ‘shared maps of meaning’ (Hall 1997, p. 14) within a decolonising curriculum framework. Whilst this process has elements of discomfort, it is precisely used to ‘draw students into dialogue with the world’ (Biesta, 2019, p. 15).

Let art teach

Let art teach (Biesta, 2019). Let art teach historical ancient knowledge and ways of being and doing with space and integrity. Teachers play a vital role in the transmission and sharing of knowledge with young people. Young people hold the task of working and living in a world that is complex and in crisis. Thinking through the processes and practises of art pedagogy and curriculum design provides agentive possibilities towards a way of thinking and being in relation to the world. When young people are given space and time to think and act like an artist, it builds arts sensibilities supported and scaffolded by teachers who allow for the points of resistance and challenges that arise through the creative process. As Beista states:

The arts have ways in which we try to figure out what this world is, what we are in relation to it, and in what ways and by what means we can keep ourselves in the middle ground rather than ending up in one of the extremes. This also requires that we try to get closer to these extremes in order to find out what we encounter there, and this is what the arts (can) do as well. Along these lines, then, art appears as the ongoing existential challenge of trying to be in and with the world, of trying to be at home in the world. Art, to put it briefly, is this existential dialogue (Biesta, 2019 p. 14).

Feeling the art, embodying the art, and developing agentic possibilities through the creative cycle enables teachers and students to work on process and not just product. We need to think beyond schooling and build schooling within the nexus of publicness that builds on a relational worldview that is informed by the local and specific stories that connect us and remind us of our work to sustain long-term deep learning about the CCPs that significantly alter the purpose of the national curriculum rather than just tweak websites, such as the upgrade to the version 9 of ACARA.

Conclusion

There are agentic possibilities for teachers, but they need time, space, and support, so whilst version 9.0 of the ACARA website is improved, it is equally important to match this with structural changes for teachers to bring about the potential of the priorities. Young people and their educators can develop creative and critical practices that can be shared in art hubs where aesthetic knowledge and understanding about arts practices grounded through the lens of the CCPs can be shared. An arts pedagogy informed by a posthuman relational aesthetic foregrounds opportunities for transformation that is required in the current social, political, and environmental context. This is necessary work but needs to be done within an ethics of care for those working on the frontline of education. Finally, educational institutions, policy directives, and the State need to support teachers to do this transformational work.