Spring 2007

Curriculum for the 21st century

English 'next'?

Terry Hayes explains that English teachers should welcome the proposal that English be a core subject in any future national curriculum as an opportunity to affirm their professionalism.

What next? That’s what interests me? ‘What now?’ is no fun anymore…

D H Lawrence

The discussion of a national curriculum provides one of those historical moments that allows the profession to engage in a collective act of reflective practice, to pose the kinds of questions Bill Green asked the international English teaching community to consider at its IFTE Conference in Melbourne in 2003: ‘Where are we now? Where have we come from? Where are we going?’

These are the kind of questions that inform the submission of the national association, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE), to the Senate inquiry on academic standards and school education. The submission begins by highlighting the evidence, both national and international, of the achievements of the profession: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, which rated Australia favourably on the reading literacy of 15 year olds when compared to other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and the national benchmarking of literacy. It cites the work English teachers have done in embracing the communication implications of the Mayer key competencies because teachers are mindful of their responsibility to provide young people with the literacy skills required in a dynamic and flexible workplace. It affirms English teachers’ commitment to the importance of functional, cultural and critical literacy, the aesthetic and personal pleasure to be had from the study of both classical and contemporary literature (and cultures), and the exploration of literacies associated with emerging technologies and multimedia.

The submission reads very much like an ambit claim about what the profession would like to see recognised in a national English curriculum before the real ‘negotiation’—the conceptualising and the consulting about the shape and substance of the curriculum— with the powers that be begins in earnest.

Building on the Senate submission I would suggest that the profession undertake the following strategies.

English teachers can reach national consensus

One, remind the powers that be that English teachers have a good record of thinking ‘nationally’. The STELLA project, the work English and literacy teachers did on developing professional standards of knowledge, practice and engagement for Australian English and literacy teachers, demonstrated how the profession could achieve a national consensus on principles while endorsing the importance of local context in their application. More recently the DEST/ACER report, Year 12 Curriculum Content and Achievement Standards reported a considerable degree of consistency in senior English courses throughout Australia, even if the report seems a little bewildered by the diversity and choice of content within that consistency.

The report noted the following common objectives: communication in writing, the study of a range of traditional text types such as prose fiction and non-fiction, drama (including Shakespearean), poetry, film, the importance of making meaning through texts, understanding ideas, values and beliefs and good control of spoken and written English. The report also questioned: ‘whether (English) teachers had been given too much choice about what to teach (i.e. include or exclude).’

English as part of the national curriculum

Two, embed considerations of a national English curriculum in the general discussions currently circulating about the desirability of a national curriculum. Alan Reid, probably the most authoritative commentator to date on past and present national curriculum collaboration, envisages a ‘capabilities curriculum’. The starting point for its development should be ‘the identification of the capabilities needed to live enriched lives and to participate actively in democratic life in the 21st century.’ Such capabilities would include: knowledge work, innovation and design, productive social relationships, active participation, intercultural understandings, interdependence and sustainability, understanding self, ethics and values, and communication and multiliteracies. Many of these capabilities are already familiar terrain to English teachers, as they work to articulate their visions of English in the ‘essential learning’ frameworks of their States/ Territories’ educational agendas.

Individual potential and nation building

Three, insist on the kinds of caveats Malcolm Skilbeck alludes to, to ensure that the developing mantra about a national curriculum, ‘consistency not uniformity’ has real substance.

Little has been said about how, through homogenised syllabuses and standardised tests, we are able to sustain the diversity, creativity and imaginative experimentation that are the bedrock of innovation. Nor is it clear how account is to be taken of the diversity of the student population’s ability, interest, home circumstances and cultural background.

Skilbeck reminds us that a national curriculum must be as much about developing individual potentiality (human development) as it is about nation building (human capital). Again it’s hard to conceive of an English curriculum that doesn’t recognise the importance of ‘creativity’, ‘imaginative experimentation’, ‘innovation’ and its responsibilities to meeting the literacy needs of the ‘diversity of the student population’.

A rationale and a theoretical framework for an English curriculum

Four, a suggested starting point for a rationale is Gunther Kress’s ‘English for a period of radical instability’:

In a period of intense change we have a duty to be involved in design: the design of socialities; of forms of economic life; of ideas of pleasure and of value systems… English is the subject in which the resources for the design of the future are the stuff of everyday interaction… [because]…the school curriculum needs a subject in which meaning, value, style, ethics and aesthetics are the issue.

A suggested starting point for a framework is Mark Howie’s transformative model of curriculum planning using a series of ‘frames’— subjective, structural, cultural and critical—which draw on the historical traditions of English teaching such as personal growth, cultural heritage, language study, critical literacy. The task of the English teacher would be to help students to understand the features and purposes of those ‘frames’ and to provide them with learning strategies and practices for working within and across them.

A dynamic concept of literacy

Five, underpin the rationale and the theoretical framework with a concept of literacy which is dynamic, flexible and responsive to change. The STELLA project cited the Luke and Freebody’s concept in Literate Futures:

Literacy is the flexible and sustainable mastery of a repertoire of practices with the texts of traditional and new communications technologies via spoken language, print and multimedia.

What is meant by ‘flexible and sustainable mastery’? What ‘practices’? How do we strike a balance between teaching ‘traditional’ texts and those of the ‘new communication technologies’? In such questioning is an English curriculum defined.

Debate about the curriculum…

Six, expect, indeed encourage, a robust debate about the curriculum within the profession. A ‘constructed’ curriculum will inevitably come down to arguments about what to include and what to leave out, even more so if a ‘consistent’ form of assessment is proposed at the senior levels. The recent ‘English Lite’ debate about the senior English course in Victoria, was essentially an argument about tinkering with the number of traditional texts to be studied yet the debate was fierce.

…jargon-free debate

Seven, be absolutely frank and open in that debate. Graeme Turner considers some of the political and media criticisms of the ‘faddism’ of the Queensland English curriculum well founded because of a too heavy handed approach to theory where it became an end in itself at the expense of the literature. Discussions about a national curriculum give English teachers, Turner suggests, an opportunity to answer these criticisms, not defensively, but by redressing the balance in curriculum documents that are both jargon free and more responsive to how English teachers might actually put theory into practice.

References

Howie, M (2004). ‘The quest for coherence in 7–10 English’ in EQ Australia: Talking English, Issue 1, Autumn, pp.12–13.

Kress, G (2006). ‘A Continuing Project: English for a Period of Radical Instability’ in B Doecke, M Howie, and W Sawyer (eds), Only Connect: English teaching, schooling and community, Wakefield Press/AATE, Adelaide, pp. 27–30.

Kress, G (2006). ‘Reimagining English: Curriculum, identity and productive futures’ in B Doecke, M Howie, and W Sawyer (eds), Only Connect: English teaching, schooling and community, Wakefield Press/AATE, Adelaide, pp. 31-41.

Matters, G and Masters, G (2007). Year 12 Curriculum Content and Achievement Standards, Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne.

Reid, A (2005). Rethinking National Curriculum Collaboration. Towards an Australian Curriculum, DEST Research Fellowship Scheme.

Skilbeck, M (2007). ‘Plan must also look out of school’ in The Australian Higher Education supplement, 14 March, p. 27.

Turner, G (2007). ‘Another way of looking at it’ in The Australian Higher Education supplement. 30 May, p. 25.

Web reference

www.stella.org.au/

Terry Hayes is a former president of both the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English and the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au