Summer 2007

Teachers and Teaching

Time to make a stand

In a time of centralised debate, Malcolm Skilbeck argues that the teaching profession has a responsibility to ensure that the diversity of student learning needs, and regional, local and cultural differences across the nation be given due attention.

Commitment by the major political parties to what they are calling a ‘national curriculum’ alongside the development of national testing raises educational issues relevant to all teachers. Of immediate concern is the tendency to use the term ‘national curriculum’ as a surrogate for a handful of upper secondary school syllabuses. But there are more serious issues at stake. Policies already promulgated will be carried forward through a national board or its equivalent. The reach of national literacy and numeracy testing is being extended into years 3, 5, 7, and 9, and performance assessment of teachers is in the air. These, compounded by the increased use of targeted funding, signify profound changes in schooling and in the lives of teachers.

While changes are undoubtedly needed, it is questionable whether what has been outlined in recent pronouncements on curriculum, testing and teaching will address the most conspicuous of the nation’s education needs. Among the most prominent of these needs, as identified by a series of policy reviews, research and professional forums, are:

• to increase participation in schooling to the end of year 12—relatively low by best international standards
• to increase participation in tertiary/ TAFE level study especially in vocational trades areas (the ‘skills deficit’)
• to raise the standard and improve the quality of learning among lower performing students as identified for example in the international surveys of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
• to establish a more equitable balance of schooling opportunities with a focus on Aboriginal students, students with special learning needs, those living in remote areas and students from economically weak households and communities
• to continue raising the academic and professional standards of teachers targeting practical aspects of initial training, further professional development for all teachers and re-registration procedures.

These are issues that, along with widely publicised concerns about literacy, numeracy and values, require not only continued policy attention, but improved resourcing and an ever higher level of sustained professional action.

Is a national curriculum needed?

By contrast, it is pertinent to ask what fundamental needs are addressed by the proposals for prescribed national syllabuses in selected upper secondary school subjects (English, maths, science, Australian history). Three arguments are commonly advanced: to achieve greater efficiency through consolidation of syllabus-making (and examinations) in a single national centre established by the federal government; to reduce the effects of school dislocation as and when families move interstate; and the need to accept the reality that syllabus content, at least in some of these subjects, is already largely duplicated across systems. These are not of themselves educational arguments of any substance, nor do they necessarily entail control at the national level. The school dislocation claim has not been systematically appraised against the social and personal concomitants of students’ relocation, which may have as much or more effect on their educational adjustment as curriculum and assessment differences across systems.

The proposals for national syllabuses and a national year 12 certificate reflect a tendency in Australia in recent years to concentrate greater power at the federal level and not only in education. States and Territories have too often succumbed to the threat of financial sanctions from Canberra. It is often claimed that changes such as those now mooted for curriculum, testing and teaching reflect parents’ and employers’ wishes. Perhaps this signifies that educators have done too little to inform the wider public of the reasons for their practices and the stands they have taken on various controversial matters, such as Tasmania’s ‘essential learnings’ and Western Australia’s ‘outcomes’. System administrators have not taken sufficient account of the need for full engagement with the public and the profession or of the fundamental importance of sustained follow-through when introducing major innovations.

Implicit in the current national syllabus approach is that the named subjects constitute a high priority core. Does this indicate that there will be a drive toward a more traditional form of a subject-centred curriculum reaching back to the middle years of schooling, then into primary schools? Will efforts made in recent years by some State and Territory systems to develop quite different models of curriculum and year 12 assessment be suffocated under a blanket of national standardisation as teachers and administrators quite naturally conform to requirements that are bolstered by financial inducements? The teaching profession has a responsibility to ensure that such questions are not brushed aside but given close scrutiny.

The curriculum and values, goals and styles

In 1980, the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC), forerunner of Curriculum Corporation, produced a discussion paper entitled A Core Curriculum for Australian Schools. In recognition of both the broad curriculum actually pursued by Australian schools and fundamental educational values that have informed the development of schooling over centuries, the CDC argued for a framework comprising nine broad curriculum areas of knowledge and experience within which it suggested schools, teachers and systems develop diverse curriculum and assessment procedures according to perceived student and societal needs. Since content areas of themselves don’t suffice, the CDC included in its curriculum proposals goals and a range of styles or modes of student learning, thus intimately linking the ‘what’ with the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of learning. This document, widely debated at the time, was in no sense prescriptive but served as a stimulus for discussion and action. It acknowledged the need for highly educated, competent, professionally motivated teachers and recognised that such teachers can—and should—be curriculum makers not just syllabus deliverers and test preparers and supervisors.

The social, economic and educational climates are very different today, but the need remains for the teaching profession to engage actively with curriculum making—conceived as a whole school and whole of learning enterprise.

Teaching is a most demanding profession and the teacher’s day is a heavy one. In the design, resourcing, and organising of schools and in the designation of teacher ‘load’ or responsibility, systems and schools themselves have given too little attention to teachers’ roles in collaborative, school-wide curriculum development. Teaching to an external syllabus with prescribed texts can seem a comfortable option. It is for the teaching profession now to rethink just what responsibility teachers can and should have for the whole curriculum and how required syllabuses can best be built in.

Syllabuses can either be generic, with inbuilt diversity and opportunity for freedom of choice among a wide range of options, or narrowly prescriptive. The diversity of student learning needs and regional, local and cultural differences across the nation should be reflected in the syllabuses, but if they are not, teachers must give them due attention. Similarly, testing can draw upon student-learning processes and skills, creativity and conceptual understanding—or it can be content dominated, or just another hurdle to leap. Teachers should take a close interest in the form and content of the tests themselves.

Teachers’ voices

The voice of the teaching profession should be heard alongside that of policy makers, administrators, politicians, business—and the media—in the whole range of decisions that are now being made. School mission statements, goals and declared educational values abound. The evolving syllabuses and testing regimes need to be integrated into whole curriculum analysis at the school level, not treated as a set of formal requirements to be satisfied.

While many educators regret what they see as a hijacking of education by the demands of economic growth, international competitiveness and administrative efficiency that underpin much of the present debate, the changing landscape of schooling provides challenges and opportunities for renewal as well as reform. Renewal means actions, by teachers working with students, to incorporate the new and emerging systemic requirements into curricula that are centred on the continuing growth of all students as persons no less than as informed citizens and skilled workers. It is in this context that the fanfare of publicity given to nationally prescribed syllabuses in selected upper secondary school subjects is a diversion from the much more pressing issues of curriculum, teaching and learning.

Malcolm Skilbeck is an education consultant, formerly vice chancellor of Deakin University and professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of London Institute of Education.

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