Summer 2010

A national curriculum: looking forward

The challenges for history in the new curriculum

Historical understanding is a powerful educational tool, and yet history lacks a secure place in Australia’s current school education: the implementation of the new curriculum presents challenges. Stuart Macintyre explains the approach taken in the history curriculum design and its present stage of development.

History, with English, mathematics and science, is one of the first four subjects in the national school curriculum. The inclusion of history as one of the first four subjects to be developed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) presents some unusual features. Like English, mathematics and science, history is a foundational form of knowledge. However, the other subjects are enshrined as key learning areas in the various national statements on school education over the past two decades. All of them are taught, however adequately, across the years of schooling, and all are available to senior secondary students in the post-compulsory years.

The teaching of mathematics and science has been an area of concern, partly for curricular reasons but more immediately because of the difficulty of recruiting and retaining qualified teachers. English enjoys the status of a compulsory subject, even if it has served as a lightning-rod for anxieties fanned by conservative alarmists. History attracts some of that attention, but it has a far more marginal status. It is offered in some schools during the compulsory years of schooling, where it is often subsumed into Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). The enrolments in years 11 and 12 have declined to low levels, except in New South Wales (NSW) where alone it is compulsory in the middle secondary years.

History shares the problem of mathematics and science in that it is often entrusted to teachers without training in the discipline. But unlike those subjects, there is no shortage of qualified graduates ready to fill the breach. The problem is rather that education faculties and schools outside NSW give limited attention to history teaching, and the hiring practices of educational systems place a low premium on expertise in history. It is commonly assumed that anyone can take a history class.

This is a problem of both demand and supply. The Commonwealth is responsible for teacher training, the states are the largest employer, and together they are in a position to ensure that history teachers are trained and employed.

I am sure I am not alone in wondering about the heavy emphasis of the Education Revolution on bricks and mortar, and the urgent need to lift the status, rewards and capacity of the teaching profession. Hard hats and safety jackets have a remarkable appeal to government ministers, and we know that the construction industry is favoured because of its multiplier effect on economic activity and employment. But teachers hardly hoard their earnings. Rather than insist on stimulus projects in education being shovel-ready, it might be better to ask that they be student-ready.

One of the immediate challenges of establishing a national history curriculum is thus that we start from a very low base. At present only a minority of students have the advantage of learning history with a qualified history teacher. If the subject is to be taken up and taught systematically and sequentially, there are serious implications for both in-service and pre-service preparation of teachers.

The implications for the curriculum are also substantial. Since we start from a low base, we can assume little. As the curriculum is developed and implemented, it will clearly be necessary to pay substantial attention to the resources and support that will be needed. Again, we have very little information how this is to proceed.

For good reasons, the development of the national curriculum started from first principles. It was not to be a composite of existing curricula, nor was it to compromise on the goal that it should support all young Australians to become successful learners with a solid foundation in knowledge, understanding, skills and values, indeed a deep knowledge that will enable advanced learning.

The national curriculum had to be clear, comprehensive, intelligible and usable by all teachers. It also had to accommodate the needs of every level of student ability. It would be taught to students from diverse backgrounds: from the Indigenous Australian, to the fifth-generation descendant of immigrants from the British Isles, and the child of recently arrived refugees with no prior knowledge of the English language or Australian ways.

The orientation of the present national curriculum—equipping young Australians for a future marked by globalisation, rapid technological change, social and cultural diversity, the challenge of sustainability and the growing importance of our position in the Asia-Pacific region—make an informed historical understanding all the more important. The initial framing paper spent some time in setting out the nature of historical understanding as a disciplined form of inquiry. At the same time it argued for a world history perspective.

There were several reasons. One is that history by its nature takes us outside our own experience to engage with people and circumstances that are unfamiliar. While nations and social movements construct their own versions of the past as a cultural resource that gives meaning and validity to their endeavours, it is in the nature of history as a disciplined form of knowledge that these accounts should be subjected to critical scrutiny. And if history is to be more than a form of solipsism it has to go beyond what is familiar and dear to us.

A second reason for the world history approach is that, as Anna Clark’s work shows, many young Australians find Australian history boring. Some of you will have read the results of her research in the book History’s Teaching, and I commend it to those who haven’t. It is based on interviews with students and teachers, and they told her they don’t like Australian history. That’s partly because they found it repetitive and unimaginative, and partly because they feel uncomfortable with the facile moralism that too often accompanies it. They want to discover an unfamiliar past and form their own response.

The third reason for world history is that we will understand Australian history better if we appreciate the long history of other places and other peoples. We often hear talk of the Indigenous occupation of this continent as unique in its undisturbed longevity, and it was; but we will understand the distinctive characteristics far better if we know more about the peopling of other continents; equally, we will better appreciate Aboriginal ecology and culture if we know more about how and why agriculture, sedentism and writing developed in other places.

The framing paper suggested how history should be taught within the early years of schooling. It proposed that in years 3 to 6, it should be taught as a distinctive form of knowledge, albeit within an integrated curriculum framework, and structured around four key questions that move between local, regional, national and global contexts. The teaching would incorporate historical evidence as well as virtual experiences, and develop understanding. On the advice of ACARA, the curriculum is based on 40 hours of teaching a year.

In years 7 to 10 the curriculum is based on an increase to 80 hours a year. That would be a considerable improvement on current practice in the majority of schools. The curriculum design is a sequence of units in world history from the earliest times to the present. The sequence will begin with a study entitled ‘What is history?’ It is here that students will be taught about the value of learning about the past, the ways that historians investigate the past, and the various forms of historical representation from museums and historic sites to commemoration and the media.

This is going to require considerable ingenuity. To make it possible, we shall employ a combination of overviews and depth studies. The overview provides a summary and background for the more intensive depth studies, which involve a closer study of a particular topic that allows time for more detailed treatment, investigation of sources, activities, and student inquiry. There will be four depth studies in each year in the four sequential units that run from years 7 to 10. Our initial instructions were to say very little about the final years of schooling in Stage 4, but on the advice of ACARA, units in Ancient and Modern History for years 11 and 12 are now being prepared.

The process has involved extensive discussion and consultation around the original shaping paper. Since then curriculum writers have been selected, and they have worked with an advisory group to develop statements of the Aims and Rationale, and a sequence of Knowledge, Understandings and Skills with content outlines. This work has been discussed in further consultations, so that a full version of the curriculum with content elaboration, outcomes and assessment standards can be completed.

It’s been a lengthy process, calling on the goodwill of history teachers who have to live with the curriculum and make it work. We’re not out of the woods yet, to echo that man in the hard hat, but we’ve passed the slough of despond and there’s a good chance of grace abounding.

Stuart Macintyre is Ernest Scott Professor of History at The University of Melbourne and a Laureate Professor of The University of Melbourne. Heis the immediate past president of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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