I'm just reading through some of ACARA's information on the National Curriculum and needed to get some thoughts out. Apologies for the dot point/stream of consciousness tone of this entry.
- in theory I support the teaching of what is becoming known as "language conventions" - that is, grammar, punctuation and spelling. The poor quality of punctuation in ACARA's own "Shape of the Australian Curriculum" document is proof of the need for more explicit teaching in this area.
- my concern surrounding this content area is the risk of it being taught so explicitly that we reduce it to dry, isolated, rote-learning style attention to grammar, rather than incorporating it implicitly in our teaching of other 'strands' such as literature. Eg. considering passages from literature from a grammatical sense - What tone or register does the author use? Why? Do they use a lot of adjectives or adverbs? Why? Do they use a lot of subordinate clauses? What effect do these have on the reader? And so on.
- I like that literary texts are defined for the purposes of the curriculum as "texts that are judged to have potential for enriching students' lives and expanding the scope of their experience" ("Shape of the Australian Curriculum: English", May 2009, ACARA, p. 8). It acknowledges that there's more to literature than the canon, however it guards against treating as literature some texts that are not complex or rewarding enough to merit the label, eg. advertisements and so on.
- I'm concerned by the insinuation (ibid, p. 9) that only later year students will explore historical genres and literary traditions. Does the emphasis on 'later year students' assume that earlier students cannot process historical literary works? Is this assumption correct? I can think of certain 'historical' literary works that I would consider could be employed in classrooms from earlier years - eg. Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", etc.
- I'm also concerned that there seems to be very little discussion of assessment in the curriculum. That is, how much of the content is actively assessed; how much reporting is there in terms of ensuring that all teachers are adequately addressing the curriculum requirements; and how that reportage is used in teacher evaluation as well as student evaluation. That is, how will ACARA know/measure/assess how effective the National Curriculum is?
- "The content descriptions have been developed to ensure that learning is appropriately ordered and that unnecessary repetition is avoided. For this reason, once a concept or skill is introduced at one year level it is not reiterated, although it may be revisited and extended at a later year level." - While I understand the motivation behind this statement, that is avoiding repetition, I believe many concepts and skills require extension and revision from year to year - if they are not accounted for in subsequent years' curricula, how can we ensure that teachers will revisit or extend them?
- The identified 'cross-curricular perspectives' of Indigenous perspectives, Asia and Australia's Engagement, and Commitment to sustainable living are such a small collection of perspectives - where are the identified (Leftist) political perspectives, (heterosexual, patriarchal) gender perspectives, economic/fiscal perspectives, multicultural perspectives? The list goes on.
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Instead of Indigenous and Asian perspectives, I would have just preferred "innovative or novel perspectives." I agree that there is too much political tone in citing the need for a specific group's perspective. (I also couldn't understand the difference between traditional indigenous literature and contemporary indigenous literature. It almost seems as thought they just put traditional and contemporary indigenous...in all genres out of principle without really thinking about it.)
ReplyDeleteI am personally really keen on the Asian perspectives, not out of morality, but I find the regions very interesting and different from what I know. There is also a pragmatic benefit. If you live in a neighbourhood, it is worthwhile knowing something about your neighbours.
Chad
Thanks for that Chad!
ReplyDeleteIt's great to see someone other than me actually sees this stuff from time to time :-)
I agree that our relationship with Asia is an important and pragmatic perspective. I do worry about the political connotations involved with this decision to identify ourselves as part of Asia and think highlighting Asian perspectives could be limiting ourselves, IF it is to the exclusion of other multicultural perspectives. But I'd much sooner see our curriculum go this way than an introspective, nationalistic perspective.
Thanks again for commenting!