Will the Australian curriculum up the intellectual ante in primary classrooms?

• Allan Luke
• Australian Education Union

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09 August 2010What is surprising in the last two years of debate over an Australian national curriculum has been the failure to engage with research on the enacted curriculum: on what actually goes on in Australian classrooms.

Important contributions to this edition of Curriculum Perspectives will focus on the specific inclusions and exclusions of the draft versions of the Australian Curriculum. My brief comments here set out to refocus attention on the shaping of classroom practice: on the potential impacts of the Australian Curriculum on everyday teaching and learning.

Specific content aside, any official curriculum – its developmental skill and knowledge taxonomies, textbooks and learning materials, standards and levels statements – comes to ground via an enacted curriculum of teaching and learning events ‘lived’ by students and teachers. Practically, the new national curriculum will trigger a set of institutional interventions (e.g., teacher education, national and state dissemination and implementation, professional development, monitoring and evaluation). These processes will set the resources and contexts for the face‐to‐face recontextualisation of the officially designated ‘stuff’ (i.e., knowledge, skill, capacity) into actual teaching and learning. The results could have significant material, institutional and educational consequences for learners, and, reflexively, for teachers, schools, communities and, if we are to take this curriculum on its word, the nation. They could, alternatively, confound an already difficult situation.

Professor Allan Luke, Centre for Learning Innovation, Queensland University of Technology.

This paper was presented at a national symposium in Sydney, entitled, Advice for Ministers and ACARA on NAPLAN, the use of Student Data, My School and League Tables.