Curriculum Inquiry in Australia

7/31/2019 Curriculum Inquiry in Australia

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TOWARD A LOCAL GENEALOGYOF THE CURRICULUM FIELD

Chapter 7

Curriculum Inquiry in Australia


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Curriculum inquiry in Austria is relatively recent as adistinctive (sub)disciplinary formation.

In the early 1980, the Australian Curriculum Studies

Association (ACSA) was created to addressAustralian initiatives in both curriculum inquiry andcurriculum work.

ACSA seeks to provide a certain measure of

leadership with regard to formal curriculum inquiry.


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There is an emerging presence in curriculum inquiryper se, in the work of curriculum scholars such asNoel Gough, and a growing sophistication in the field

that warrants attention in this context.


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Reflexive scholarly accounts of the curriculum fieldin Australia are still are.

There are as yet no major synoptic texts on the

distinctive story and character of Australiancurriculum and schooling, although there arecertainly some that more that usefully gesture in thedirection.

The field of curriculum is very young in Australia,certainly no more than a decade (Marsh, 1987).


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Curriculum theory has foothold in Australia at thepresent time (Marsh, 1987).

As Pinar and his colleagues (1995, p.42) wrote: thestudy of curriculum history has emerged in the1980s as one of the most important sectors of

contemporary curriculum scholarship.


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Musgrave (1987) pointed to the fact that curriculumresearch and development as a distinctive field is notonly relatively recent, dating back at most to the1970s, but, until recently, largely unorganized and

without a supporting archive.


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A younger generation of curriculum scholars eitherbased in Australia or with Australia connection havesought to build on earlier historically oriented work.

Ranging across both general and applied curriculumareas and topics, their work draws eclectically onpost-New Sociology of Education literatures and

various postmodern critical-theoretical positions andperspectives.


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There is increasingly acknowledgement and

exploration of reconceptualist thinking and someindications of a willingness to countenance movingaway from a more or less exclusively technicalinterest.


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A further initiative bridging the 20th and 21stcenturies in Australian education is the New Basicsproject an ambitious attempt to review andredesign curriculum and schooling in and for

Queensland. Specifically directed at and initiated by the public

education system, the project brings together newprinciples and practices of curriculum making,

organized around the conceptual and rhetoricalcategories of new basics, rich tasks, andproductive pedagogies.


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Important, the projects principal architect is AllanLuke, at once a distinguished academic scholar inliteracy and curriculum studies and (at the time) asenior education-administrative leader in theQueensland Education Department.

Luke has worked from within the public educationsystem to change it.


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A major and enduring feature of the curriculum field inAustralia is its bureaucratic and administrativecharacter.

It is quintessentially representative of what Pinar et al.(1995) called the Curriculum as Institutionalized Texttradition in curriculum inquiry and curriculum workthe dominant form, in fact, for much of this century.

Enormous effort went into reconstructing, in particular,public education during the first several decades of the20th century (Spaull, 1998; Turney, 1983)


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Commentators point to the persistence ofcentralized, efficiency oriented curriculum decisionmaking (Marsh, 1986, p.210) as a recurring featureof Australian education, distributed since the 19thcentury across seven states and territories.

The emergence of a nationalcurriculum debate inthe late 1980s compelled some attention to what was

happening national across the various jurisdictions.


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In an important account of distinctive discourses,frames, or mentalits in different state (provincial)cultures, Collins and Vickers (2001) pointed to what theycall an educational archetype in the Australian scene,

manifested for them particularly in New South Wales asthe largest and arguably most bureaucratic of the statesystems.

In short, this comprises and sustains a competitiveacademic curriculum structure, formalized (high-stakes)

testing and assessment regimes, and a stringent finaltertiary-entrance examination, along with prescribed,centrally produced syllabi.


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What is to be noted here is the bureaucracy,centralization, and uniformity are presented as apractical solution to the linked problems of scantresources and the so-called tyranny of distance.

There has been a consistent efficiency orientation inAustralian education, as Marsh (1986) and otherobserve, is partly due to the influence of overseascurriculum specialists and educational thinkers,

notably from US, thus paralleling the story ofcurriculum contestation that Kliebard (1986) to theNorth American scene.


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The 1970s can be seen as the period of emergence ofthe formal curriculum field in Australia.

Reviewing a number of initiatives and developments,including the importation and influence of new workin philosophy and sociology of education, Musgrave(1987) pointed among other things, to the

Commonwealth Governments establishment of theCurriculum Development Centre in Canberra in1975.


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It is clear what is at issues here is essentially thewritten, preactive curriculum (Goodson, 1988) .

Although curriculum and syllabus are seen asseparate, distinguishable terms, at least in principle,the point is made nonetheless that no good purposeis served by trying to maintain a distinction between

these two terms (Connell, 1954, p.16).


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A further category addressed is the notion of course ofstudy, presented as the details of subject-matter to bestudies in a given time or for a particular purpose, aformal statement of a curriculum arranged to show the

desired sequence ofstudy (Connell, 1954, p.19).

What is immediately noticeable here is that this remainsfamiliar territory seven decades on. This is the languageof current-traditional curriculum discourse: theoryfollowed by context and system, to practice (or methods),followed by testing and assessemt


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The early decades of the century were marked by anintense interest in thinking education anew a

veritable fever of reform.

Central to this was the rich discursive field of the so-called New Education a somewhat uneasyamalgam of different traditions, perspective,

theories, and ideologies gathering force andmomentum over the 19th century mainly in Europe(Selleck, 1968)


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As Turney (1983a) wrote: In general the NewEducation represented a decided reaction

beginning in the late nineteenth century againstthe prevailing narrow, mechanical, and subject-

based instruction tightly controlled byprescription and inspection (p.1)

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Curriculum Inquiry in Australia