Spring 2007

Curriculum for the 21st century

New lens: New vision

Interactive multimedia and the Internet challenge many aspects of teaching practice and assumptions. Catherine Beavis looks at a website that will support teachers and stimulate students.

What counts as knowledge, what counts as literacy, the ways we teach and even the relationships we form, need to be considered anew, coloured and reshaped as they are by changing cultural practices brought about by global commerce and ICTs.

Two key frames of reference for thinking about these changes and their implications for education are the notion of an ‘information revolution’ (Castells, 1996) and the changing nature of literacy, with its shift towards multiliteracies, or thinking of literacy as design (New London Group, 2000). Both have powerful implications for how we conceptualise curriculum, and teaching, and for the ways in which we ask students to work with the new technologies

Questions about what should constitute curriculum, and what kinds of skills and knowledge young Australians need, are prominent matters in contemporary debates around the desirability and feasibility of a national curriculum. Literacy and history in particular are at the forefront of a highly visible set of arguments about Australia’s cultural and national identity and the role of schooling in developing particular ways of understanding these. Much of this argument is couched in terms of whether consistency can be achieved in ways that provide for diversity, local ownership, imagination, flexibility and creativity at the same time as identifying common principles and potentially content.

Whether a national curriculum will eventuate, whether guidelines can be developed that will provide commonality and agreed structures that will strengthen schools’ and systems’ capacity to prepare students for a world undergoing rapid change remains to be seen. While much debate rightfully centres on questions of structures and management, of equal importance are debates about how curriculum might be imagined and what kind of knowledge and orientations it should contain.

Questions about national curriculum are also questions about schooling in Australia and what it means to be Australian—about cultural heritage and diversity, about how we have seen ourselves in previous times, and about how we see ourselves now and what we might think about ourselves in the future.

Issues around curriculum content and perspectives are linked to questions about the role of schooling in prompting students to understand, reflect on and respond to Australia’s past, present and future; about constructing a curriculum which is both engaging and engaged with the contemporary world, and about preparing young people to become active, critical and skilled participants in their present and future worlds. At issue is how to create a bridge from the past to the present in relevant and productive ways; how to link what has been culturally salient in the past with presents and futures that are in many ways profoundly changed; how to manage change and continuity and prepare students in and for the globalised networked world of the 21st century.

The need for an Australian context

Most curriculum areas call for students to develop knowledge and understanding of Australian texts and contexts, and see it as important that students have some sense of what it means to be Australian and how Australia is located within the contemporary world. To do this effectively, texts and resources introduced to students need to include but go beyond iconic representations and historic moments in Australia’s history, so that complex, layered and contradictory texts and representations form part of students’ worlds.

Equally important is the provision of forms of pedagogy that are engaging and connected to young people’s experiences of the world. As screen-based texts and literacies increasingly become a central part of the contemporary world, ready access to high quality and engaging resources is fundamental in creating a challenging learning environment and in helping students become powerfully literate in multimodal as well as traditional print forms of literacy.

The Australianscreen site encompasses a vast range of excerpts from Australian feature films, documentaries, newsreels, short films, home movies and animations, together with notes from the curators of various categories—feature film, documentary, Indigenous material, children’s film and television and so on, and teachers’ notes providing further background information, observations and ideas. In most instances, three clips of approximately three minutes each have been selected by the curators from each text chosen, with clips selected to both reflect central themes or moments and also to provide a relatively complete mini-narrative within each clip individually.

There are a number of ways to access material, including searching by individual titles or filmmakers, or via the ‘Educational categories’. They are organised under 11 categories: environment, film and media, history, identity and culture, Indigenous Australia, science and technology, society, sport and health, the Arts, values and citizenship, and war.

A broad selection of clips

The scale and diversity of content means the site can be used in most curriculum areas to provide high quality resources and support, and through the incidental provision of Australian exemplars build up a complex and layered set of knowledge and understandings of what we have done and how we have seen ourselves. The length of most clips means that they can be incorporated within a given lesson alongside other material or as exemplars or objects of study in their own right, or as springboards for student activities.

Curators’ notes and educational value statements provide additional support and information to help with curriculum planning or as further resource materials to use with students. The opportunities for cross-referencing between texts and between topics, provides impetus to explore further, while the immediacy of online access enables close examination and analysis of individual clips, or the capacity for students to create their own pathways and responses as they navigate around the site.

To take one subject as an example, the study of texts and representations occurs in many subject areas, but is centrally the province of English and literacy curriculum. The need to incorporate digital texts and literacies is now well established in Australia as well as internationally. Guidelines for English curriculum nationally and at State level recognise the importance of multimodal forms of text and communication, and the need for students to become literate across a range of screen- as well as print-based forms of literacy.

The Australianscreen site provides the opportunity for close examination or incidental use of all three categories of text mandated within English curriculum—imaginative, information and argument texts—in multimodal form. In a context where English is itself undergoing redefinition and change, the site provides for the exploration of dimensions regarded as constant— the study of language, in all its forms (including multimodal and visual literacies), thematic studies and the analysis of rhetoric and argument, imaginative and creative engagement with texts, as both reader/viewers and writer/makers, and considerations about matters of ethics and identity.

The site provides opportunities for both student-centred and teacher-directed forms of teaching, and for the ready integration of ICT-based forms of pedagogy alongside more traditional forms. It encompasses textual exemplars from across the century of a broad range of culturally salient texts, snapshots of different times, a wide range of topics and points of view, multiple genres and highly crafted and creative texts that provide the opportunity for both teachers and students to build rich and complex curriculum, insights and pedagogy. A massive archive of all manner of our audiovisual heritage, it provides a wonderful repertoire of resources for us all.

References

http://australianscreen.com.au/

Castells, M (1996). The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell, Cambridge MA.

New London Group (2000). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing social futures, in B Cope & M Kalanatzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures, Macmillan, Melbourne.

Catherine Beavis is associate professor of Education at Deakin University.

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