Chapter 7 Curriculum Inquiry in Australia

TOWARD A LOCAL GENEALOGY OF THE CURRICULUM FIELD

 Curriculum inquiry in Austria is relatively recent as a

distinctive (sub)disciplinary formation. In the early 1980, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA) was created to address Australian initiatives in both curriculum inquiry and curriculum work. ACSA seeks to provide a certain measure of leadership with regard to formal curriculum inquiry.

 There is an emerging presence in curriculum inquiry

per se, in the work of curriculum scholars such as Noel Gough, and a growing sophistication in the field that warrants attention in this context.

 Reflexive scholarly accounts of the curriculum field

in Australia are still are. There are as yet no major synoptic texts on the distinctive story and character of Australian curriculum and schooling, although there are certainly some that more that usefully gesture in the direction. The field of curriculum is very young in Australia, certainly no more than a decade (Marsh, 1987).

 Curriculum theory has foothold in Australia at the

present time (Marsh, 1987).

As Pinar and his colleagues (1995, p.42) wrote: the

study of curriculum history has emerged in the 1980s as one of the most important sectors of contemporary curriculum scholarship.

 Musgrave (1987) pointed to the fact that curriculum

research and development as a distinctive field is not only relatively recent, dating back at most to the 1970s, but, until recently, largely unorganized and without a supporting archive.

 A younger generation of curriculum scholars either

based in Australia or with Australia connection have sought to build on earlier historically oriented work.
Ranging across both general and applied curriculum

areas and topics, their work draws eclectically on post-New Sociology of Education literatures and various postmodern critical-theoretical positions and perspectives.

 There is increasingly acknowledgement and

exploration of reconceptualist thinking and some indications of a willingness to countenance moving away from a more or less exclusively technical interest.

 A further initiative bridging the 20th and 21st

centuries in Australian education is the New Basics project an ambitious attempt to review and redesign curriculum and schooling in and for Queensland. Specifically directed at and initiated by the public education system, the project brings together new principles and practices of curriculum making, organized around the conceptual and rhetorical categories of new basics, rich tasks, and productive pedagogies.

 Important, the projects principal architect is Allan

Luke, at once a distinguished academic scholar in literacy and curriculum studies and (at the time) a senior education-administrative leader in the Queensland Education Department. Luke has worked from within the public education system to change it.

 A major and enduring feature of the curriculum field in

Australia is its bureaucratic and administrative character. It is quintessentially representative of what Pinar et al. (1995) called the Curriculum as Institutionalized Text tradition in curriculum inquiry and curriculum work the dominant form, in fact, for much of this century. Enormous effort went into reconstructing, in particular, public education during the first several decades of the 20th century (Spaull, 1998; Turney, 1983)

 Commentators

point to the persistence of centralized, efficiency oriented curriculum decision making (Marsh, 1986, p.210) as a recurring feature of Australian education, distributed since the 19th century across seven states and territories. The emergence of a national curriculum debate in the late 1980s compelled some attention to what was happening national across the various jurisdictions.

 In an important account of distinctive discourses,

frames, or mentalits in different state (provincial) cultures, Collins and Vickers (2001) pointed to what they call an educational archetype in the Australian scene, manifested for them particularly in New South Wales as the largest and arguably most bureaucratic of the state systems. In short, this comprises and sustains a competitive academic curriculum structure, formalized (high-stakes) testing and assessment regimes, and a stringent final tertiary-entrance examination, along with prescribed, centrally produced syllabi.

 What is to be noted here is the bureaucracy,

centralization, and uniformity are presented as a practical solution to the linked problems of scant resources and the so-called tyranny of distance. There has been a consistent efficiency orientation in Australian education, as Marsh (1986) and other observe, is partly due to the influence of overseas curriculum specialists and educational thinkers, notably from US, thus paralleling the story of curriculum contestation that Kliebard (1986) to the North American scene.

 The 1970s can be seen as the period of emergence of

the formal curriculum field in Australia.

Reviewing a number of initiatives and developments,

including the importation and influence of new work in philosophy and sociology of education, Musgrave (1987) pointed among other things, to the Commonwealth Governments establishment of the Curriculum Development Centre in Canberra in 1975.

 It is clear what is at issues here is essentially the

written, preactive curriculum (Goodson, 1988) . Although curriculum and syllabus are seen as separate, distinguishable terms, at least in principle, the point is made nonetheless that no good purpose is served by trying to maintain a distinction between these two terms (Connell, 1954, p.16).

 A further category addressed is the notion of course of

study, presented as the details of subject-matter to be studies in a given time or for a particular purpose, a formal statement of a curriculum arranged to show the desired sequence of study (Connell, 1954, p.19).
What is immediately noticeable here is that this remains

familiar territory seven decades on. This is the language of current-traditional curriculum discourse: theory followed by context and system, to practice (or methods), followed by testing and assessemt

 The early decades of the century were marked by an

intense 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 uneasy amalgam of different traditions, perspective, theories, and ideologies gathering force and momentum over the 19th century mainly in Europe (Selleck, 1968)

 As Turney (1983a) wrote: In general the New

Education represented a decided reaction beginning in the late nineteenth century against the prevailing narrow, mechanical, and subjectbased instruction tightly controlled by prescription and inspection (p.1)