Phillip Poulton Archives

How we could stop the blame game now

Much has been written about the failure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross Curriculum Priority (CCP) to translate into meaningful inclusion of Aboriginal knowledges in Australian classrooms.

This has come with a fair dose of both criticism and blame of teachers for their perceived inability to integrate the CCPs in their teaching of disciplinary subjects. But what if this wasn’t about the failure of teachers, but instead about a curriculum that is structured in ways that make the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges an impossible task from the outset? That’s the question we explore in this new paper just released online with the Australian Educational Researcher.

Aboriginal knowledge in Australia’s national curriculum

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems are highly complex, deeply relational and transcend Western, colonial understandings and definitions of knowledge to include relationality via both the human and non human world. Australia’s first national school curriculum was introduced alongside a promise to recognise the richness of these knowledges through the mandated teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. Developed at a time of momentum and hope for the national Reconciliation movement, the Australian Curriculum was designed to be “three-dimensional”, consisting of eight learning areas as well as three cross-curriculum priorities and seven general capabilities.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content was written into the curriculum as one of the Cross-Curriculum Priorities, alongside Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia and Sustainability. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP articulates three different aspects: Country/Place, Culture and People. Each of these aspects includes sets of organising ideas embedded within subject areas intended to support teachers’ engagement with the CCP. In practice, this means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are to be taught within school subjects like Maths, English, Science and History.

Solutions are more than resources

Critiques of the success of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP have typically taken aim at teachers – painting them as reluctant, unwilling or even unable to engage with Aboriginal knowledges in their classrooms. In the most recent review of the Australian Curriculum, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP was singled out by ACARA as having significant concerns regarding “implementation support and clarity.”

Solutions have focussed on providing teachers with ready-made teaching materials and student resources. These resources are necessary in helping build teachers’ confidence in engaging with Aboriginal knowledges and providing students with opportunities to explore diverse perspectives and ways of knowing. However, as helpful as additional resources are, we are concerned that the continued focus by ACARA on the ‘implementation’ of CCPs neglects the more significant, structural barriers that exist in the very design of the Australian Curriculum. Our analysis revealed that teachers have been set up to fail in their implementation of the CCP by the very structure of the curriculum itself.

Teachers navigating conflicting curriculum

Although the Australian Curriculum claims to be ‘three dimensional’, in reality it is built around a core structure of school subjects which very clearly prioritise Western disciplines, which are described by ACARA as “essential” knowledge for students. The curriculum in relation to subject areas is highly organised and teachers are provided with a high level of precision and clarity in the organising of learning area content into year-level descriptions, achievement standards, content descriptions, and content elaborations.

By contrast, there is not a lot of clarity offered for teachers around the CCPs. Over a period of 10 years they have variously been described as ‘perspectives’; a ‘continuum of ideas’ and more recently as a ‘set of organising ideas’, with ACARA at pains to point out that they cannot exist as distinct learning areas in their own right. Rather than being a clear and necessary component of this ‘three dimensional’ curriculum, they sit as vague ideas beside the very clearly expressed subject areas. As an example, a teacher wanting to explore the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP in relation to Country/Place, Culture, and People will need to look for ‘aspects’ for exploration in ‘relevant’ moments in their classroom while they are teaching content in one of the recognised subject areas.

An impossible task

This framing of Aboriginal Knowledges as something only to be encountered through ‘relevant’ content in subject areas is problematic for a few reasons, most notably because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges represent a highly complex way of understanding the world, and one that pre-dates subject disciplines by some 65,000 years (give or take).

Our analysis highlights that ACARA’s efforts to combine a very structured approach to curriculum (in relation to subject areas) with a very vague approach (in relation to the CCPs) creates an impossible task for teachers seeking to meaningfully teach Aboriginal knowledges in their own right. We suggest this is a deliberate, rather than accidental design choice, reinforcing a colonial perspective which diminishes the significance of Aboriginal ways of knowing, and one that ultimately creates barriers to students developing a rich appreciation for the oldest continuing culture in the world.

What should be done differently?

The blame game on teachers as the ‘problem’ in the implementation of the Aboriginal CCP needs to stop. Our research shows that no matter how much teachers want to do this work well (and we know that they do), the curriculum thwarts them at every turn. Instead of quick fix professional learning opportunities and classroom resources, we need to reconsider the very assumptions embedded in the design of the national curriculum – assumptions about whose knowledge is considered ‘foundational’ and thus prioritised.

The overwhelming failure of the 2023 referendum shows we still have a long way to go in fostering a deep and enduring understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge history and culture in Australia. It also says a lot about the failure of the national curriculum to live up to its promises in supporting reconciliation. We think it’s time to reimagine new curriculum structures which place Aboriginal knowledges front and centre, not as ‘other’ or ‘optional’.

Kevin Lowe is a Gubbi Gubbi man from southeast Queensland. He is a Scientia Indigenous Fellow at UNSW, working on a community and school focused research project on developing a model of sustainable improvement in Aboriginal education. Claire Golledge is a lecturer in education and the co-ordinator of HSIE Curriculum (Secondary) in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work. Prior to taking up her position at the University, Claire worked as a secondary teacher of humanities, and in school executive leadership roles, leading teacher professional learning. Phil Poulton is a teacher educator and curriculum researcher in the School of Education, RMIT Melbourne. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney exploring early career teachers’ curriculum-making experiences in schools. Katherine Thompson has taught in a variety of secondary and tertiary settings in the United States, Australia, and Tanzania. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydney.

Are we now gaslighting teacher expertise?

Curriculum reform is underway in NSW, including the development and implementation of new syllabuses from kindergarten to year 12. Recent media coverage presents this reform as a ‘silver bullet’ for improving teaching and student outcomes. But there is a troubling undertone regarding teachers’ curriculum work in general – a subtle gaslighting of teachers’ curricular expertise and professionalism.

This builds on what Nicole Mockler describes, as a gaslighting of the teaching profession as a whole, in her forthcoming discussion paper “On Gaslighting, Moral Purpose, and Trust: Some Reflections on the Future of Teaching” Monash University Inquiry into the Future of the Teaching Profession.

Here’s what I’ve discovered from my own research engaging with early career teachers. They want to be curriculum-makers, not just curriculum deliverers.

Misunderstanding teachers’ curriculum work

Syllabuses are important materials in teachers’ day-to-day experiences in schools. Ensuring these official materials are clear and detailed for teachers is important and necessary. But we must also recognise teacher’s engagement with curriculum is a complex social practice.

It goes further than just listing content and outcomes in a document and believing that ‘delivery’ of these with ‘fidelity’ will resolve issues regarding teaching quality. Teachers are more than just passive conduits of curriculum.

Their curriculum work is a dynamic interpretative process. The quality of educative experiences in a classroom is dependent on teacher capabilities and opportunities that support them in transforming content into meaningful learning experiences.

Recent media coverage is largely and notably silent on this vital aspect of teachers’ curriculum work. The focus has been on the troubled nature of past NSW syllabuses being “more open to interpretation”. These comments reveal a misunderstanding by some regarding the importance and value of teachers’ curricular interpretation in ensuring a classroom curriculum that is local, contextually relevant, and responsive to student needs and lived experiences. The silence surrounding teacher expertise and interpretation of curriculum points to a broader issue – the outsourcing of teachers’ curriculum knowledge and expertise in the name of a ‘teacher proof’ curriculum.

Gaslighting teachers’ curricular expertise

Underpinning current commentary on the new NSW syllabuses is a troublesome devaluing of teachers’ professional judgement and expertise with curriculum. This is apparent in recent conversations suggesting that teachers need access to externally vetted curriculum materials, and “directions on which lesson plans to use”.

Here, mistrust in teachers’ knowledge and professional judgement is rife, disguised among seemingly innocent concerns for lessening the curriculum ‘burden’ on teachers’ workloads.

This is nothing more than gaslighting; an attempt to convince teachers that they lack the required capacity to make such decisions or are too busy for curriculum matters and therefore it is ok for this important work to be outsourced to others. In reality, teachers value this curriculum work highly. They want more time for collaborative planning with their colleagues – not less, not outsourced.

Don’t get me wrong – all teachers need supporting materials and shared resources, but they also need time and space to build their curricular expertise. This is about strengthening their understanding of the curriculum and the adjustments and transformations needed in ensuring best fit with their students and chosen pedagogical strategies (not just explicit teaching!). Time is of the essence here in how we respond to this gaslighting, raising awareness that attempts for further prescription and outsourcing of teachers’ curriculum and pedagogical work does little more than deskill our profession.

What are we wanting? Teacher as deliverer or curriculum-maker?

While the NSW Curriculum reform proposes greater clarity and guidance for teachers, the implementation of these new syllabuses should offer us pause for thought.

What kind of role do teachers want with the curriculum? What do they need to maintain strong curriculum identities? My own research with early career teachers points to their strong motivations and aspirations to be more than just curriculum deliverers, but curriculum-makers who are trusted and respected to make necessary and responsive curriculum choices within their local context.

My research also suggests that the same goes too for our preservice teachers entering the profession. Critical dialogue is crucial, then, within this current reform context. School leaders, teacher educators, and the concerned public should respect the curricular aspirations of our teachers. This requires us to push back against concerning trends for ‘cookie cutter’ approaches to teaching, and with that, an outsourcing of teachers’ curriculum expertise to others as an attempt for greater ‘fidelity’ between schools and classrooms.

Re-frame conversations

We need to re-frame conversations between teachers, school leaders, policymakers, and the broader public, moving beyond assumptions that changes to official curriculum materials offer the best and only solution. We need to listen more carefully to teachers’ voices and what they want to achieve in their curricular practice:

If I could just spend my time how I wanted to, I would obviously work hard, but if I could just spend my time planning lessons that I thought were really awesome, were really good for my learners and great for the content I was teaching, and then I could evaluate them properly, then I think I would feel like ‘ok I am benefiting society and doing the big picture thinking and fostering a love of learning in these students’ and these are the things that you go into teaching for. (First year teacher, public school in Sydney)

Creating conditions that enable this kind of work remain largely absent in conversations surrounding the implementation of the new NSW syllabuses.

Teachers need time

Teachers need time, space, and support (not prescription or centralised materials), to help them sustain curriculum as a recognisable tenet of their professionalism. The implications of enabling school-level conditions to do this are immense, not only in promoting greater trust and regard for teachers, but importantly, for student learning and equity. A curriculum made by teachers, not others, shapes the quality of students’ access to knowledge and new ways of thinking for their future.

Phillip Poulton is a lecturer in education (primary) at the RMIT University, Melbourne. He completed his PhD studies focusing on primary teachers’ classroom curriculum-making experiences and is published in a number of Australian and international research journals. Prior to working in initial teacher education, he worked as a primary classroom teacher and as a head of curriculum in a large public school in Australia. He is on Twitter @PhillipPoulton