Stories matters. How we tell stories matters. How we listen to and respond to stories matters. How we share stories matters. How we understand what stories have to say matters. Being able to connect with, critique, and debate stories matter.

It is through stories that we make sense of the world. Stories about everyday events, places, fantasies, imaginary worlds, problems, and ways of living. Stories that are passed on from generation to generation. The creation of new stories and new ways of telling stories. Stories preserve and pass on cultural knowledge, for many an important way of keeping cultures alive. They challenge us to consider change and different situations. It is through stories that we learn about and share our understandings of the world with others.

In the formal schooling system, reading and producing stories and learning about how stories work have been the responsibility of the English curriculum. While there have been and will continue to be debates and contestations about what stories should or should not be considered and who should decide, the work of reading and producing stories, both imaginative and those about what is happening in the world, remains a central focus of schooling.

The presence of English in the school curriculum has a long history. There was a time when rather than being known as “English”, there was an emphasis on specific elements, each having pride of place on the student report card: spelling, reading aloud, comprehension, and composition. The latter being a piece of writing completed in one go, about a teacher-determined topic, with corrections heavily marked with a red pen. What is now called English is given a much more expansive role. The rationale for the Australian Curriculum: English states that:

English is the national language of Australia, and as such is central to the lives, learning and development of all young Australians. Through the study of English, individuals learn to analyse, understand, communicate and build relationships with others and the world around them. It helps create confident communicators, imaginative and critical thinkers, and informed citizens (ACARA, n.d.a).

This intent locates children and young people in an increasingly globalised and connected world. The ambition expressed in the rationale is situated within diverse linguistic, social, and cultural contexts, together with an increasing array of textual modes that demand diverse and complex reading and writing knowledges and practices. The glossary of the Australian Curriculum: English provides the following explanation of the term “text”:

A means for communication. Their forms and conventions have developed to help us communicate effectively with a variety of audiences for a range of purposes. Texts can be written, spoken or multimodal and in print or digital/online forms. Multimodal texts combine language with other systems for communication, such as print text, visual images, soundtrack and spoken word as in film or computer presentation media (ACARA, n.d.b).

While there continues to be a focus on linguistic print text in schooling, the Australian Curriculum: English emphasises learning about and using multiple forms and modes that provide a range of language and textual experiences and events both in schools and in daily lives. A focus on the expanding ways of producing text using a range of shared technological platforms and social media provides a new and engaging multiple and multimodal opportunities to access both fiction and information. Children and young people use multiple languages, text forms, and technologies to both read and produce text both in and out of school. Books, magazines, film, television, games, social media, and websites are constantly changing forms featuring multiple modes. An online news story may include a print section, photographs, and a video. The world and stories of Harry Potter are offered as books, films, plays, digital games, and Lego. Through social media platforms and everyday technologies such as mobile phones, children can talk to scientists in the Amazon, the astronauts on the Space Station, or interview an author that they are studying.

New and multiple forms of text provide new demands in terms of both learning about the codes of the text, strategies for meaning making, and the ways in which meaning is represented. For example, video games and virtual reality provide opportunities to be immersed in both fictional and real-world stories. In his book Literature, Video Games and Learning, Andrew Burn highlights the ways in which video games reframe the ways in which we understand what it means to read and write, drawing on a body of research that goes beyond the instrumental consideration of games. He considers the literary elements of such texts and the rich affordances for learning about the literary elements through which stories are made and unmade (Burn, 2022). Lucinda McKnight (10play, 2022) has recently argued in media interviews that a platform such as TikTok provides new and engaging ways to examine and remake stories, such ways include the codes, structures, and meaning making processes of texts.

The Australian Curriculum: English sets out content and a structure that will provide a framework for teachers to develop classroom programs to realise the ambitions stated in the rationale. To develop an official curriculum that attends to the complexity of both purpose and multiple multimodal texts forms while accounting for diverse social, cultural, and political contexts is a challenge. The Australian Curriculum: English began with the development of a Shaping Paper in 2009 (ACARA, n.d.c) followed by the introduction of a curriculum that has had ongoing version development and modifications. The Shaping Paper identified the scope of subject English and identified three strands that would provide a conceptual basis for attending to contemporary text forms and be open to future innovations.

A review of the Australian Curriculum was conducted in 2021 (ACARA, n.d.c) and informed the development of Version 9.0. The revisions for this version maintained the original curriculum structure of three strands, language, literature, and literacy. It is through these three strands that the depth and scope of the ambitions for the curriculum can be realised. The conceptual frameworks informing the strands are concerned with the ways in which language works, its elements and structures, the multiple ways we read and produce coherent and meaningful texts, and developing a deep understanding of literary concepts and practices for reading and producing literary texts. The rationales provided for the Version 9.0 revision (ACARA, 2021) claim to provide further clarity, depth of explanation and remove repetition. Content descriptors have been removed or consolidated in the interests of clarity and removing repetition. A summary of the revisions in V.9 highlights an increased emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content.

The Version 9.0 revisions to the Australian Curriculum: English produced a flurry of social media posts about the worthiness of the changes made, some focusing on the specific details of inclusions and exclusions while other more concerned with its intent. Submissions to the review provided a range of advice, some advocating truth claims, while others offered ways to make the documents more coherent and manageable.

In recent times, a political focus has been on “literacy” and the question of what counts as literacy continues to be highly contested. These contests occur within a policy environment where there is a reliance on the testing of literacy as a measure for student, school, and systemic success (see Lingard et al., 2015; Hardy, 2014). This emphasis risks narrowing the context of literacy within the curriculum and disrupts consideration of how the affordances of the Australian Curriculum: English can attend to the multiple forms of storytelling that children and young people encounter both in their daily lives and at school. The rationale for the English Curriculum states, “The study of English plays a key role in the development of literacy” (ACARA, n.d.a). Through an understanding of how language works from text to word level, of purposes and context, and an engagement with rich literary and authentic texts, students can learn about, explore, and use a range of literacy practices.

Traditionally the English Curriculum is informed by research from across a range of disciplines including literary theory, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, and the debates both within and across such disciplines. Such debates continue to contribute to providing a robust context for decision making. Efforts to limit what is valid research in the interests of political point scoring is not helpful in considering how a range of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies offer rich affordances for attending to contemporary language and storytelling purposes and practices, or to the multiplicity and complexity of textual experiences and practices. To lose sight of the purposes and principles of English curriculum, in favour or technicist or scripted approaches within a narrow form of measurable literacy, together with a devaluation of the role and judgment of teachers, puts at risk the opportunities for student to engage in a robust English curriculum (McLean Davies & Sawyer, 2018).

In 1975 Lawrence Stenhouse offered the following, tentative, definition of curriculum:

A curriculum is an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to the critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice (p. 4.).

Any attempt at developing an official curriculum is a configuration of histories, beliefs and values, practices, and ambitions. Further there is an intent that that it will do something, that classroom practice will be guided by it, that it will form the basis for teachers to develop classroom programs. Priestley et al. (2021) offer a reminder that official curriculum texts, such as the Australian Curriculum, are already “products of interpretation” influenced by a range of historical contexts and ideological perspectives. School leader’s and teachers engage in “further cycles of interpretation” as they “re-interpret such official curriculum and for their local contexts and schools” (p. 1). Furthermore, that in classrooms, curriculum is further interpretated through pedagogic events and transactions.

Stenhouse (1975) argues that while a curriculum can be clear about the educational purposes and principles, it relies on the judgment of the teacher (p. 96). The Australian Curriculum: English demands a high level of teacher knowledge and pedagogical practices. It is informed by a range of theories and metalanguages about texts and textual practices, language, literature, and literacy, within the complexity of linguistic and cultural diversity. A commitment to supporting teachers through professional development is critical in realising the ambitions of the curriculum. Initial teacher education postgraduate programs and ongoing professional development for practising have a responsibility for providing ongoing opportunities for meaningful engagement with the knowledge and practices across the curriculum.

The rationale of Version 9.0 provides a strong justification for the prominence of the literature strand in the curriculum:

The English curriculum helps students to engage imaginatively and critically with literature and appreciate its aesthetic qualities. They explore ideas and perspectives about human experience and cultural significance, interpersonal relationships, and ethical and global issues within real-world and fictional settings. Students are exposed to literature from a range of historical, cultural and social contexts. Through the study of texts, students develop an understanding of themselves and their place in the world. The English curriculum explores the richness of First Nations Australian voices and voices from wide-ranging Australian and world literature (ACARA, n.d.a).

Coats (2017) suggested that narrative theory, that is how we make sense of stories as well as how we structure and experience stories, is “something of a baggy monster, traversing multiple disciplines and picking up new questions and critical concerns”. Coats (2017) goes on to emphasise that these new questions and concerns arise as we recognise that “aesthetic, practical and practical pursuits are embedded in storied frameworks” (p. 186). It is the intent of the Australian Curriculum: English that children and young people both read and create literary texts, imaginatively, critical, and aesthetically (ACARA, n.d.d). That each of these dimensions is interrelated. Furthermore, that they are developed across all strands of the curriculum.

In the Foundation Year, children enjoy stories and begin to read a range of multimodal texts, learn about the concept of an author and the purpose of a text, begin to develop an understanding of the codes through which language works, and begin to undertake their own reading and writing. Key concepts can be identified across the curriculum that are deepened through the experiences of learning about, examining, responding to, and creating texts. By year 10, it is anticipated that students have a sophisticated understanding of the structures and processes of language, literary critiques that uses a depth of understanding of literary language and concepts, and read and produce complex text that supports their success across the range of learning areas.

The strengthening of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content, as highlighted in the summary of revisions (ACARA, 2021), provides the basis for meaningful collective and dialogic experiences through which children and young people develop understandings and capacities to participate respectfully in local and national conversations about histories, reconciliation, and matters of race and difference. The traditions of the world’s oldest living culture provide an educational model of the significance of oral stories, in passing on traditions and customs. These include stories about the foundational role of community and relationships, about living well together, and about the relationship to and care for country. These are told through old and new oral stories, through music, dance, and art. A deepening of Aboriginal content will require going beyond superficial and tokenistic approaches in order to disrupt ongoing colonial stories and practices that continue to authorise and perpetuate harm. This requires ongoing support for the curriculum and for teachers that is informed by research about decolonising curriculum and culturally responsive pedagogies as well as the production of an availability of relevant texts.

The provision of meaningful and authentic texts matters, providing texts that explore a wide range of stories within different forms and modes of texts. Texts provide for a consideration of the different intentions of authors; the representation and positioning of characters, places, themes, and problems; the social, cultural, and political context of texts; and the elements of a texts and how they work to make meaning. As such, examples of texts are required that provide for the depth of engagement that is expected in the curriculum. Such texts in multiple forms and modes must be available to all children, regardless of their location or the wealth of their family or community. Texts are to be inclusive of stories and information that acknowledges the linguistic and cultural diversity of children and young people in Australia and globally.

Stories matter. How we teach and learn about stories matters. The Australian Curriculum: English V 9.0 provides a framework for providing opportunities for children and young people to engage with stories for pleasure and for understanding how we live in and share worlds, the complexities and the paradoxes. They can learn about how the increasing array of text forms they encounter tell stories, stories that they can imagine, critique, and respond to. They can create their own stories in new and exciting technological modes that capture their imaginations and creativity. They can learn to read and write, to engage in day-to-day text practices, and to understand how language works to put together the demand for the kinds of texts they are encountering. As a curriculum, Version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum: English maintains the commitment of previous versions to meeting the challenge of attending to a complex area of knowledges and skills, within a deep understanding of the significance of the role of language as an individual, social, and cultural and political practice. There will continue to be contests as there should be. Well-considered and respectful contests are to be welcomed in the context of curriculum attending to ongoing new demands brought about by changing social, cultural, and technological conditions within a diverse democratic society.