Re-examining the curriculum development centre: Coordinative federalism and Kingdon's agenda-setting (1975-87) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
Since the 1970s, curriculum reforms in Australia and in the UK have faced a number of common challenges, including drives to improve retention, concerns about unemployment and vocational preparation in a global economy, impact of international benchmarking and assessment programs, questions about how to deal with both the basics and the proliferating expansion of knowledge in the 21 st century, challenges in relation to difference and inequalities and student engagement, and highly visible and volatile press discussions about particular curriculum reforms. This paper is a discussion of findings from a project funded by the Australian Research Council that set out to examine commonalities and differences in how different Australian states developed curriculum agendas over that period, and more broadly to contribute to some more general thinking about how curriculum gets made as a public policy. The project examined policy documents for each of the Australian states at decade interval...
Commonwealth engagement with school education : a history (1901-2015)
2019
Beginning in 1911 with the mandating of school cadets for all Australian school students from twelve years to eighteen years, the Commonwealth has exerted its influence on Australian schools and colleges. This is despite the Constitution implying education to be a state prerogative. Section 51 outlines the powers of the federal government, and those not listed, such as school education, remain the residual powers of states and territories. This research attempts to analyse what is so attractive to schools and colleges for Commonwealth governments in their policy making. How might this influence of political forces be understood? Through an organisational framework adhering to the changing nature of federalism, a notion of history acknowledging political imperatives, and the analytical lens of Kingdon's Agendas, this research argues school education has become an arena of competing political forces, and has been such since the beginning of Federation. The research establishes, ho...
Curriculum Studies in Australia: Stephen Kemmis and the Deakin Legacy
When the history of curriculum studies in Australia is written, it is likely that the work done at Deakin University from the latter part of the 1970s to the early 1990s will figure significantly in it. Under Stephen Kemmis’ leadership and example, a group of researchers and educators produced at least two major bodies of scholarship, one addressed to action research and practitioner inquiry, and the other to rethinking curriculum “beyond reproduction theory”. While the work on Participatory Action Research is perhaps more well known, and internationally so, this chapter focuses on Deakin’s contribution to curriculum studies, as a distinctive field of inquiry and praxis. Three aspects are discussed: firstly, the relationship between action research and curriculum inquiry; secondly, the concept of the “socially-critical school”; and thirdly, the conceptual shift in critical curriculum inquiry from working with(in) the so-called reproduction thesis to a focus on what was labelled the “representation problem”, and beyond. Although now little acknowledged, the Kemmis-led Deakin project surely represents an important and distinctive contribution to curriculum studies in Australia, as well as constituting an object of interest for curriculum history more generally.
The Australian curriculum: a critical interrogation of why, what and where to?
Curriculum Perspectives, 2018
This 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 Keywords National curriculum. Globalization. New spatialities. Educational federalism …differences within and change in the organization, transmission and evaluation of educational knowledge should be a major area of sociological interest. (Bernstein 1971, p. 47) This paper was delivered as the 2017 Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture at the 2017 ACSA Annual Conference.
Against the Decolonisation of the Australian Curriculum
The prospect of decolonising the Australian curriculum entails firstly that the effects of Australia's colonial past are active in the present, secondly that these effects are distinct and can be identified among the vast array of other historical forces, and lastly that these effects can be reversed. This essay will take the position that these effects cannot be reversed because they cannot be reliably identified. For reasons that will be explored, this is not disastrous.
The phantom national? Assembling national teaching standards in Australia's federal system
In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the elds of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often re ect transnational traits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems.
Australian Curriculum to the Classrooms: A Mutated Journey
Over the past few decades, multiple attempts to create a national curriculum invariably failed due to the constitutional reality that the states had responsibility for the curriculum and federal government decisions could not be achieved without consent from the individual