The Australian Curriculum

The concept of badges to acknowledge skills and competencies is not new as anyone who has been in the Scouts of Girl Guides can attest. The term digital badge, however, has only recently emerged and is fast gaining momentum as a potential system for credentialing skills, knowledge and accomplishments achieved by individuals within and across businesses and learning organisations.  Digital badges evolved from the gaming industry as a form of digital reward, however, it was only when the MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with Mozilla, created the concept of Open Badges and launched the ‘Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition’, that its potential value as a legitimate and creditable accreditation tool has been considered. Universities here in Australia and overseas, as well as organisations such as the Smithsonian are engaged in rigorous discussion and debate about the merits of this new indicator of learning.

In 2008, the vision of a national curriculum was foreshadowed in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008) – widely hailed as setting directions for the type of schooling that would prepare young people for life in the twenty-first century. Initial documents from the NCB and ACARA referenced the Melbourne Declaration, offering hope that the national curriculum would be not only inspiring and challenging but also visionary and timely.
Now, in 2011, as the first phase of the Australian Curriculum is rolled out, it’s appropriate to start asking whether the promise is likely to be realised in practice.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 goals defined by the United Nations (UN) to tackle the world’s biggest problems by 2030. This paper explores the goals and how they can be used within the curriculum to develop a range of learning outcomes. It shows links to the Australian Curriculum, most specifically the General Capabilities and provides an extensive range of support materials now available to help teachers uses these goals in their classroom programs. The paper also posits the question of whether we have a responsibility as educators to ensure students learn about these goals.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation’s (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed data from remote education stakeholders across Australia with a view to identifying ways that outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote schools, can be improved. Of the many findings that have emerged, the need for contextually and responsive approaches to teaching stands out as one vehicle for improving the relevance and results for remote students.
But in an era of increasingly codified and standardised approaches to education (for example with Professional Standards, NAPLAN standardised testing, and an Australian Curriculum) what scope is there for remote teachers to (or indeed systems) to contextualise curriculum to meet the needs of remote learners? We have used the term ‘Red Dirt Curriculum’ to encapsulate the ideas and practical responses that remote education stakeholders perceive as important for learning. Our respondents have suggested a number of practical ways that curriculum can be made more contextually responsive. The question though, is whether a contextualised curriculum stands opposed to our Australian Curriculum. Does the Australian Curriculum constrain teachers? Do the prescribed content areas limit teachers to flexibly respond to communities’ wishes for a meaningful education in remote parts of Australia? And given that remote students tend to be ‘behind’ those from urban areas, how should we meaningfully assess remote students using the national curriculum?
This lecture firstly examines the context of a standardisation and codification of education in recent years—and the implications of this for remote schooling. It then presents findings from the RES project about what remote education stakeholders want from education, and in particular, what a contextualised or ‘red dirt’ curriculum would look like. Finally, it considers how teachers’ use of a national curriculum for teaching and then for assessment, could be contextualised to better meet the learning needs of remote students. There will be opportunities for questions and answers after the lecture. Light refreshments will be provided.

Australia is a signatory to United Nations legislation that requires state parties to educate children and young people about human rights, through human rights and for human rights.  To assess how Australian curricula address human rights education, evidence of key civil, political, social and cultural rights relevant to children’s lives was sought through curricula analysis of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and the Australian Curriculum (Foundation to Year 10). References to ‘rights’ were searched for and surrounding content read for relevance and implications. Illustrative quotes from the curricula documents were analysed for inferences pertaining to prioritisation and interpretation of civil, political, social and cultural rights and to how children and young people are positioned as rights holders and claimers in education in Australia. Significant discrepancies were found between the Early Years Learning Framework and the Australian Curriculum, conveying incongruent messages to children as to how, when and where they can be rights holders and claimers, along with signalling wide gaps in rights education. Propositions are thus offered for how continuity in education about, through and for human rights could be sustained from the early years and then throughout schooling.

The new Australian Curriculum aims to prepare school leavers for the 21st century and in doing so, its curriculum documents mandate the development of critical and creative thinking in school leavers as one of its priorities. Identified as one of the general capabilities in the curriculum, critical and creative thinking is also seen as a key dimension in preparing ‘students to live and work in the 21st century’ as well as being ‘fundamental to effective learning’. More broadly, the AC is also envisioned to be a curriculum that is inclusive and one that embraces learner diversity, especially in the context of increasing student diversity in Australian classrooms.  However, an examination of the understandings of critical thinking in the AC suggest that they are underpinned by Western traditions and epistemologies. Such Western notions of critical thinking are the norm and prevalent in numerous global educational reforms. However, what might require further examination is how such Western understandings of critical thinking and their undergirding epistemologies might engender tensions in the Australian context of learners of increasing diverse epistemologies and cultures which includes the non-Western. It is in light of this that this paper examines the implications and tensions that could be engendered between the distinct Western epistemologies underpinning the understandings of and approaches to critical thinking, on the one hand,  and learners’ of non-Western epistemologies and cultures, on the other.

A document that compares the F-10 and 7-10 Sequences for German side-by-side for Years and 8 in the current version of the Australian Curriculum: Languages (German). It allows teachers to see a breakdown of each thread from the official document, including possible topics, key processes and possible tasks. It also allows German teachers to see the Achievement Standards as statements rather than in paragraph form.

Language, Literacy, Literature; cross curriculum priorities; personal and social capabilities; intercultural understandings; closing the gap... is it any wonder that teachers are feeling challenged as they face implementing the Australian Curriculum? This workshop presentation on Literature explores the way in which well selected, quality literature can not only underpin a valuable and engaging English programme within our schools, but can be a vital key in achieving the broader objectives and expectations of the Australian Curriculum. Through linking best practice instruction with recognised research into the value and use of literature, participants will explore the magic of literature and how it can be well used as a vital key in the implementation of the Australian Curriculum.

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Drawing on archaeology to map 50,000 years of Australia’s ancient past, Ancient Australia Unearthed traces the evidence etched into the skin of this country to reveal the rich and complex history of this unique island continent.

Ancient Australia Unearthed directly addresses the Australian Curriculum: History topic ‘Ancient Australia’. It will also have a broad appeal for anyone wishing to gain an understanding of, and a deeper appreciation for, one of the world’s greatest stories of isolation, resilience and survival.

Given the Digital Technologies rationale of the Australian Curriculum, it is critical that both teachers and students use design thinking to be creative and innovative producers of digital solutions and knowledge. Teachers and students are increasingly being required to self-produce films and digital content across subject areas. Their productions are often used as a catalyst for discussion in the classroom or to illustrate mastery of curriculum content. Producing films and digital content that are engaging and also successfully conveying educational messages is challenging. Filmmakers engage audiences by using film techniques to activate different emotions. Producing learning content that is engaging and activates those emotions that support learning requires an understanding of the craft of the filmmaker and those academic emotions that learners experience when learning. We present an evaluation tool based on those emotions that learners experience when learning (Pekrun, Goetz, Ti...

The flow caused by a point sink immersed in an otherwise stationary fluid is investigated. Low Froude number solutions are sought, in which the flow is radially symmetric and possesses a stagnation point at the surface, directly above the sink. A small-Froude-number expansion is derived and compared with the results of a numerical solution to the fully nonlinear problem. It is found that solutions of this type exist for all Froude numbers less than some maximum value, at which a secondary circular stagnation line is formed at the surface. The nonlinear solutions are reasonably well predicted by the small-Froude-number expansion, except for Froude numbers close to this maximum.

Abstract The new Australian Curriculum (AC) aims to prepare school leavers for the twenty-first century and the development of critical and creative thinking in school leavers is seen as a key dimension in preparing “students to live and work in the twenty-first century” and “fundamental to effective learning”. More broadly, the AC is also envisioned as a curriculum that is inclusive and one which embraces learner diversity, especially in the context of increasing student diversity. However, an examination of the understandings of critical thinking in the AC suggests that they are underpinned by Western traditions and epistemologies. While such Western notions of critical thinking are common and prevalent in numerous global educational reforms, what would require further examination is how such Western understandings of critical thinking and their undergirding epistemologies might engender tensions in the Australian context of learners of increasing diverse epistemologies and cultures which evidently includes the non-Western. This paper explores these implications and tensions.

Reversing a global megatrend such as the climate emergency that is wreaking havoc on Earth's natural and human systems presents unprecedented educational challenges. Indeed, the planet's probable future, particularly for children and young people, is looking increasingly dire. The Australian Curriculum: Technologies offers an unexpected timely response to the climate emergency through its overarching key idea, 'creating preferred futures'. In a preferable future, the kind for which we hope this Point and Counterpoint section will be a catalyst, educational institutions urgently introduce climate change education into the curriculum, and then invite students to engage in possibility thinking or curiosity-driven co-creative exploration to identify authentic problems related to the climate emergency that they want to address. Through possibility thinking, students can push back against the education currently on offer and learn to be anticipatory. With an anticipatory disposition, they can engage in strategic foresight to anticipate the digital literacies they will need not only to solve their climate emergency problems, but also to identify pathways and reward for a future of work that schools are not preparing them for in the present. Rather than waiting for the future to happen, students need viable opportunities to think about what their preferred future might look like, and how they can collaborate in a productive manner to co-create that future over the probable one. Such a stance requires students to take on an anticipatory disposition and articulate the digital literacies they will need in order to act with agency and conviction to be co-creative, co-imaginative and co-enterprising. We argue that a wise, humanising creativity (WHC) is central to children and young people engaging in collaborative thinking and ethical joint action to co-create their preferred futures.