Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the many principals, teachers, parents, students and community members together with personnel in Victoria's DEECD for commenting on earlier drafts of this section.

Introduction

There is broad acceptance of the need for a national curriculum. Centrally mandated curricula can reduce duplication, remove unnecessary differences, make subject results comparable across Australia and result in greater consistency and higher standards.

But this can still beg a question: what is a truly 21st century curriculum? As is discussed below, a curriculum for our times is:

1. Content-rich and coherent, i.e., it has a comprehensive core that covers a range of key learning areas and includes steps toward a more coherent, spiralling P-12 curriculum
2. Inclusive, i.e., it challenges the old educational, cultural and social divides that get in the way of success for all students
3. Part of a broad framework for 21st century education, which brings to the fore the powerful mix of the very best content knowledge, pedagogy and learning technologies guided by clear, specific aims, principles and values
4. Empowering and future-orientated, i.e., it supports teachers, students and others to routinely talk and take action about the challenges that communities and nations face
5. A creative mix of local, national and global innovations, i.e., local curricula evolve within national guidelines and draw upon international and cross-cultural good practices.

Such a curriculum would add value to the quality of all students’ learning as distinct from the ‘quality’ of students that schools may attract (e.g., filtering student intake via scholarships and select entry and separating students based on early indicators of ability).

A key problem is that old curriculum models can have the effect of sorting and selecting students rather than adding significant value.

In Victoria, Teese and Polesel (2003) reveal how the intersection of students’ social background and the type of curriculum strongly impacts on who succeeds and who under-performs at school.

Two approaches

In seeking to respond to the challenges of improving educational performance and reducing the achievement gap, there are two different approaches to the development of a national curriculum:

1. A pragmatic approach, e.g., arguments for reducing duplication, removing unnecessary differences and making subject results comparable across Australia. The focus of curriculum development would be on aligning what currently exists rather than developing anything really new
2. A more strategic approach, i.e., the view that deep changes in the economy, technology, knowledge and learning, coupled with challenges such as tackling the achievement gap and equipping all students with the knowledge and skills for lifelong learning, require a more ambitious approach.

It is difficult to identify a single, coherent way forward that may command a large degree of consensus.

A tried-and-true pragmatic approach has much merit, i.e., besides being less risky, it would bring to the fore the common content in state-based curricula as a practical basis for tangible reform.

For example, analyses by the Australian Council for Educational Research have shown that 95 per cent of senior secondary chemistry content, 90 per cent of advanced mathematics content, and 85 per cent of physics content is common to all states and territories. But as Geoff Masters points out,

“Presumably, it would be a relatively straightforward matter to reach agreement on national curriculum consistency in senior subjects such as these. It may even be possible to achieve national agreement on common standards and methods of reporting student results, and agreement on some common assessments and examinations. But would this alone produce more positive student attitudes, larger numbers of students studying science, or higher levels of science attainment? It seems unlikely” (2007).

Given that education is a ‘whole-of-life experience’, in light of the urgent need to build high-quality, high-equity education systems and schools, and cognisant of the continuous acceleration in the pace of technological and economic change, there is much that inclines toward the direction of a more strategic approach.

Such an approach would also deal with more immediate challenges (as with a pragmatic approach), but it would push the change agenda further to address a myriad of unresolved issues.

This approach would ask: what kind of 21st century curriculum would serve to inspire and challenge all learners and prepare them for a future of profound change and lifelong learning?

A 21st century curriculum

Based on the good practices of educators, educational research and inquiries and forums such as the Cambridge Primary Review and the National Curriculum Symposium, a 21st century curriculum comprises on-going progress with the following. It is:

1. Content-rich and coherent
2. Inclusive
3. Part of a broad framework for 21st century education
4. Empowering and future-orientated
5. A creative mix of local, national and global innovations.

In what follows we briefly discuss each of these good practices.

1. Content-rich and coherent

A comprehensive and content-rich education, rather than just a narrow focus on the 'basics' or literacy and numeracy, is the optimum strategy for raising student performance and, indeed, for enhancing literacy and numeracy.

This recognises the importance of the arts, history, literature, music, science, geography and languages other than English. This rejects an undue emphasis on English and maths skills per se that may ultimately constrain student learning outcomes right across the board.

A major issue is that the right of all students to a rich, broad and balanced education can be needlessly undermined by a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy. The obvious casualties are science, the arts, the humanities and languages.

This can create a dangerously divided curriculum between the so-called ‘basics’ and other fundamentally important learning areas such as science and languages. Yet these key learning areas can have a very significant, positive impact on improving literacy and numeracy outcomes for all students.

A national curriculum imperative is also the development of a more unified, K-12 learning process and, longer-term, a more unified system of education from age 0-18. A 21st century curriculum is thus associated with steps towards a “learning continuum”.

This is among the key notions in the Victorian Government’s new Blueprint for Early Childhood Development and School Reform (at www.education.vic.gov.au/blueprint).

Recent research in Victoria has explored the idea of a unified P-12 curriculum. Initiated by the Country Education Project and sponsored by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, the main findings of this research project (2007) are:

• A more unified P-12 approach to teaching, learning, and curricula is needed, but this would take a significant policy and operational shift
• The research literature and the experience of many schools suggest that this shift can significantly improve learning outcomes for all students.

A P-12 approach to schooling takes shape when primary and secondary schools work together in clusters and networks toward a shared pedagogy and seamless curriculum.

Thus, a challenge at both the national and local school levels is to plan and integrate the curriculum from a P-12 perspective, using to this end throughlines, spiral learning and increased in-depth coverage of fewer topics, ideas and concepts in the curriculum (to also enable the development of deeper understandings of concepts and principles across the early, middle and later years).

Across the K-16 learning process, articulation between all levels about curriculum content, key concepts and principles and teaching and learning methods will become critical to increasing student achievement.

A coherent curriculum would include specific goals and statements as to where best to pitch the learning activities and tasks presented to students. Such goals and statements would indicate the areas of knowledge that are critical for a student to progress along the P-12 learning process.

One indicator of a P-12 curriculum would be how well each year level builds on the learning of the previous level without major gaps in learning and duplication. This would involve the greater pooling of teachers’ expertise across the pre-school, primary and secondary sectors.

Thus, a coherent P-12 curriculum is not a ‘solution’ in isolation but would also require a more unified, P-12 approach to teaching and learning. As Stringer notes:

“Two cultures dominate schooling: a primary culture and a secondary culture. Both have sound ideas about the ways for thinking about curriculum and learning in their schools but, when placed together, they make nonsense of the learning continuum with which each of their students is involved.” (1998: 6)

While this is not true with many schools (that have long worked to blend primary and secondary school cultures and teaching methods), a continuum of learning and development from kindergarten through to university and college is the next big thing.

A learning continuum will also mean ending the old primary/secondary funding differential.

 2. Inclusive

The old educational, cultural and social divides that characterised curricula in the 20th century do not belong to the 21st century. To improve learning outcomes for all students and to reduce the achievement gap, there are several such divides that should be gradually addressed.

A 21st century curriculum would support all educators to more systematically link theory and ‘real world’ application, deep scientific knowledge and practical, hands-on skills, strong guided instruction and students’ independent inquiry-based learning and academic and vocational learning.

The quality of learning for all students and access to ‘academic’ learning (especially for students of ‘disadvantaged’ background) can be markedly improved if these links are embedded in a curriculum rather than being add-ons.

Although many teachers feel that they are unable to routinely work in this broader way because of constraints in existing curricula, this is consistent with teachers’ good practice.

Such teachers do not teach key concepts only at the theoretical level, but are always moving backwards and forwards between deep theory, principles and concepts, on the one side, and practical application and real-world problem-solving, on the other.

This is all the more important for, as Masters observes, at a time when the need for science literacy has never been greater due to the need for problem-solving around pressing global issues such as climate change and water conservation, it is difficult to attract students to study science.

Surveys of students show that they cannot see the relevance of school science to their lives and find science uninteresting and difficult to learn. Attitudes to science become less positive between Year 4 and Year 8, and by Year 10 students generally have negative attitudes to science and no interest in pursuing science as a career (Masters, 2007).

A new curriculum would open up opportunities for students to more readily make the links between scientific theory and real-world relevance as well as to develop their own personalised learning pathways (in order to straddle other educational divides such as the academic-vocational divide).

But for this to happen there would need to be a lifelong learning policy that considered school, VET and higher education as part of a more coherent curriculum framework. As well, a new curriculum would go beyond the formal institutions of education to better embrace the myriad of rich learning experiences in workplace, community and recreational settings.

Schools will need new curriculum supports and resources to make learning more relevant to, and rooted in, these contexts outside the classroom.

Curriculum reform is also constrained by the old dichotomy of depth versus breadth. In the context of university research, for example, Grigg et al. argue that “the depth-breadth conundrum appears to be revealing itself as yet another challenge to overcome” (2003: 13).

What is required is not a choice between disciplinary ‘depth’ and interdisciplinary ‘breadth’, but rather curriculum strategies to enable more students to experience deeper learning in two ways:

1. Via the development of deep knowledge of subject disciplines
2. At the interfaces between disciplines and in emergent hybrid areas such as nanotechnology.

Just as relevant to the future of curriculum reform, as Grigg et al. suggest:

“The emerging challenge here is not breadth vs. depth, but how to adequately ensure depth and breadth” (2003: 48).

3. Part of a broad framework

A 21st century curriculum involves three overlapping areas - content knowledge, pedagogy and technology.

Real educational reform goes beyond disciplines or a description of content knowledge per se to also embrace interrelated changes and improvements in pedagogy and technology.

Thus, a major goal should be a balanced approach to developing curricula as part of a broad framework for 21st century education. As is being creatively developed by educators, 21st century education combines three things:

1. The very best teaching practices in the classroom and other settings that evolve in tandem with the very best educational values, theories and philosophies, visions and goals, evidence and research and policies (or P for pedagogy)
2. Leading edge information and communication technologies (T) as a means of individual and collective expression, experience, inquiry, understanding and interpretation together with teachers' and students' capacities to use technology
3. Curriculum content (C) that, for example, supports deep learning, fosters a coherent P-12 approach and seamlessly combines academic knowledge, concepts, theories and principles with applied learning and real world problem solving.

Supported by the right resources, it is the mix of advances in P, T and C that puts the ‘power’ into powerful learning experiences for all students and reduces the achievement gap.

For curriculum reform to be successful, technological supports (e.g., interactive Internet programs and Web tools such as Wikis) should be developed and released along with proposed new curriculum documents.

This will improve consistency, quality of delivery and provide more time for teachers to teach instead of teachers reinventing the wheel.

In this respect, two US researchers, Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler, have designed a more holistic model. They use the term ‘technological pedagogical content knowledge’ (TPCK) to refer to the interplay of these key components of learning - content, pedagogy and technology.

Reminding us also that teaching is a complex activity needing deep specialisation and teamwork, TPCK and the very practice of effective teaching and learning are obviously broader than the singular knowledge of a content or disciplinary knowledge expert, a learning technology expert and a pedagogical expert.

TPCK is worth investigating as a framework for a new curriculum. Thinking and working in a holistic TPCK way can help to prevent counter-productive ‘reform’ efforts when teachers are overloaded with massively prescribed curriculum changes that can divert their valuable time and energy from complementary strategies for school improvement.

4. Empowering and future-orientated

In the twenty-first century, no one's education should be adequate without a clear future studies component. We desperately need a future-orientated curriculum at all levels of education. Professor Emeritus Wendell Bell

The success of all educational experiences - in creating powerful learning - obviously depends on the quality of teachers’ and students’ talk. As Professor Robin Alexander suggests:

“We need to move from a view of talk as about ‘communication skills’ ... to a recognition of the neuroscientific and psychological evidence of its unique status as a sine qua non for all learning, especially during the first 10-12 years of life” (2004).

Likewise, when students feel responsible for important matters and can be actively involved in their school and community to make a difference, their learning and motivation are strengthened.

For many young people, deferred outcomes (e.g., distant goals of work, citizenship and acknowledged community roles) are not sufficient to sustain their motivation and commitment to learning.

With implications for their motivation and school 'success', students are unsettled by their deep-felt sense that their 'only value' is what they will become, not what they can do today. (For an excellent discussion of this, see Roger Holdsworth's Engaging students in purposeful learning through community action paper).

But when students' talk and school and community actions are combined, students are empowered and the educational results can be phenomenal.

Since 1999, schools in Victoria have been developing student action teams. The program began as a joint initiative of the Department of Justice and the (then) Department of Education.

A student action team consists of a group of students, their support teacher or teachers, and, where appropriate, other adults, including parents and community based workers.

A team enables and supports students to:

• Decide what are important community or school issues
• Research a community or school issue
• Make plans and proposals and take actions to address the issue
• Achieve valuable outcomes for the community or school
• Learn deeply through school and community contexts.

The choice of team members will be influenced by the school’s intent for initiating the program. Schools consider:

• Where and how the action teams will be located in the school’s curriculum program
• The number and year levels of students to be involved (whether mixed year levels or a targeted age group or year level)
• The particular issue or issues that the teams will tackle.

5. Local, national and international

Internationalisation of the curriculum (some refer to this as a ‘cosmopolitan curriculum’) is a challenge for policy makers, teachers and students.

As well, both broad and in-depth knowledge of the cultures, histories, geographies and languages of countries in the Asia-Pacific region will continue to increase in importance for Australia’s teachers and students (Kirby, 2007).

All of this is reinforced by Australia’s almost unmatched cultural and linguistic diversity. With implications for the very notion of a ‘national’ curriculum, among these critical curriculum issues to be explored (Tudball, 2003: 4) are:

• Why should schools develop an internationalised curriculum?
• What essential learnings should an internationalised curriculum include and what key ideas should it be organised around?

To be effective in an interdependent world, all learners will also need to be empowered with deeper knowledge and understandings of globalisation and global issues and challenges. Curriculum reform will be pivotal in this. As the Curriculum Corporation long ago noted:

“In Australia and worldwide, it [is] ever more widely accepted that issues of global poverty and development, human rights and social justice, environmental challenges, peace and conflict, and thinking about and creating better futures, are inextricably linked. A future-focused curriculum demands approaches which see these interconnections, and fosters knowledge, skills, and values that equip young people to involve themselves in building solutions” (2002).

There is another angle to this. It is increasingly recognised, in part prompted by the greater awareness of OECD data and the success of countries such as Finland, that educational reform should be informed by global experiences of effective teaching and learning, not confined to good practices in certain countries such as those with an Anglo heritage.

This also means working out the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum. As Professor Robin Alexander points out:

“In the Anglo-American tradition, pedagogy is subsidiary to curriculum, sometimes inferring little more than ‘teaching method’. … In the central European tradition, it is the other way round: pedagogy moves centre stage and frames everything else, including curriculum (2001: 512-513).

It will be crucial that an Australian curriculum is not developed by policy makers working too narrowly within the Anglo tradition, but rather emerges and evolves over time from broader curriculum conversations inclusive of the global professional communities and local school stakeholders.

Another thing that can be overlooked is this: the very best curriculum development is a mix of local, national and global ideas and initiatives.

Not only should all three levels be developed together, but people at all three levels should have opportunities to interact.

What is needed is strong, co-ordinated tri-level curriculum development. This may have the following elements:

• Making sure that all three levels promote subsidiarity - meaning that decisions should be made at the most appropriate level
• Building leadership capacity across all three levels
• Two way tri-level communication and consultation.

A major challenge will be the development of national and local school conversations about the rationale, purposes and content of a new curriculum.

It would also be of the utmost importance to maintain a public record of as many of these conversations as possible as the basis for identifying fresh perspectives and carefully probing areas of agreement among diverse stakeholders. In this respect, as Reid has suggested:

“Australian educators are aware of the limitations of traditional approaches to the official curriculum. However, it is clear that there is not yet a well-theorised alternative. It will require a substantial curriculum conversation across the profession, informed by the results of research into the various approaches currently being trialled across Australia, before the dominant grammars of the curriculum can be challenged in more than superficial ways (2005: 60).

Besides conversations at all levels, that must include school councils and parents’ organisations, it will also be imperative that the research, policy and practice interface is strengthened and provided with adequate resources.

Indeed, a national curriculum represents a major opportunity to consider how to institutionalise educational research, policy and practice partnerships and develop a critical mass of curriculum change agents who can traverse all three terrains.

This will also mean getting right the balance between developing a national curriculum and enabling local school-based educational policy decision-making to meet student needs.

Development of new curricula should take into account what is already being done successfully in schools. Above all, teachers and schools need to be given the autonomy and the professional support to develop innovative approaches. As Mick Waters puts it:

“One of the big challenges [is] to design the curriculum so that you get a local curriculum within national parameters” (2007).

case study

To be developed.

ACTION CHECKLIST

To be developed.

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