|
|
|
The "Remembrance of Things Past" in an Age of Competition for School Time: History in Western Australia's Primary Schools and in Other Realms of the Anglosphere
Mark Dupuy
Edith Cowan University, Australia
ALTHOUGH HE MIGHT SCOFF at the invocation of popular culture in modern education, perhaps Australia's Prime Minister John Howard would be happy if the school children of Western Australia might one day sing, as did Lisa Simpson in the course of her fictional primary studies on The Simpsons:
In 1215 at Runnymede, do da, do da,
The king and nobles they agreed, oh di do da deh
|
1
|
|
Intellectually, the mnemonic device has everything Howard desires for Australian students, and possibly more. It respects chronology and dates, serves as a pithy reminder of the origins of English parliamentary and democratic traditions, and – for good measure – is sung to a Stephen Foster tune.1 Recent comments by the Prime Minister serve as a useful introduction to a general discussion of the process of curriculum reform, the lurch towards 'national curricula,' and the expectations of the discipline of history and historians within these broader trends. The three are far more interrelated than ever before, particularly in politically federated countries like Australia and the United States. The first and third of the issues can only be understood, not merely in the light of local control of curricula,2 but also in the context of various national efforts at "educational reform," which, intentionally or otherwise, have begun to shape and effect content areas like history and its broader counterpart, social studies. Although the primary focus of this article will be on recent curricular changes in the state of Western Australia, and on a survey of how local teachers have implemented those changes with regards to the field of history, that information will be contextualized with studies involving similar trends in other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It will become clear that I believe that the teaching of history should begin in some form in the primary schools and continue to be taught in subsequent grades, and I will discuss various threats to that ideal, some with deep roots in the past, some looming in the present. |
2
|
| |
|
John Howard and Australian History Curricula: Australia Day 2006 | |
|
At a National Press Club meeting shortly before Australia Day 2006, John Howard presaged an upcoming naturalization service by noting that most inductees sought to be part of the "Australian achievement," which he associated mainly with its citizens' "sense of balance" in personal, professional, economic, and public endeavours.3 Yet for Howard, cognizance that this achievement was in danger of being undermined by the way in which history was being presented to Australian school children was important. Howard's statements on the occasion followed a familiar theme throughout his ten-year reign as Prime Minister.4 That evening on the Australia Broadcasting Company's "7:30 Report," he seems to have intimated that important dates, like the Battle of Hastings, often go unaddressed in most classrooms. |
3
|
|
History teachers at the university and pre-tertiary level were quick to respond, some to what was regarded as the next salvo in the culture wars, but others to what was deemed as a slight to the profession and their own methods. Teaching representatives from New South Wales and Victoria rightfully pointed out that Howard's obsession with dates ran counter to current orthodoxy about how history is best learned by students, and that their own curricula were rigorous. In New South Wales at least, the state had several history courses which were mandatory for compulsory years students (before years eleven and twelve).5 |
4
|
|
Of all the states in Australia, New South Wales had in fact done the most to safeguard the teaching of history as a distinct discipline, even in its middle school curriculum, which Anna Clark attributes to Bob Carr's willingness to play on the political issue of educational standards by promising to overhaul the state's curriculum.6 Yet at a time when history as a discipline is not so much under attack in schools as it is the victim of long, protracted processes of attrition or absorption into broader curricular categories known collectively as social studies, most experts agree that the only way to safeguard the discipline's place is to teach it as a stand alone subject.7 Doing so is still possible at the senior years, but is increasingly difficult for earlier levels. |
5
|
|
If New South Wales has maintained a well-defined niche for history at the middle and senior school levels, the case is less promising in Western Australia. This lack is particularly pronounced at the primary level. Here, the themes history might address have long been subsumed under the general category of social studies, most recently under the Western Australian Curriculum Framework which mandates a course called Society and the Environment, a rubric associated in some ways with aborted plans to develop a national curriculum in the early 1990s. At the primary and middle school levels, history remains relatively shapeless within this framework, and a recent survey of how current teachers understand and implement history within their lesson plans is revealing. |
6
|
|
At the inception of the Curriculum Framework in Western Australia, local scholars noted that teachers were likely to find implementing the Society and Environment areas problematic,8 and affairs seem to have changed little since then. A significant majority (sixty-four percent) of respondents to the current survey of teachers in Western Australia had no undergraduate course work in history, but slightly more than one-fifth (twenty-two percent) had between one and four history units as undergraduates. There was little correlation in this sample between experience and the amount of history one was likely to have taken as an undergraduate; those who took degrees three decades ago were no more likely to have had more university history than those who took degrees three years ago. |
7
|
|
When respondents reported that they did integrate history lessons into their strategies, Australian history fared best of all the options, being explored 'frequently' by better than half (fifty-three percent) of the teachers; aboriginal history followed closely, with better than one quarter (twenty-eight percent) of respondents spending time with it "frequently." As one might anticipate, undergraduate preparation seems partially to play a role in these numbers because of those with any amount of university training in history, all save one taught Australian history "frequently." One respondent commented that in this regard, his/her "major in multi-cultural studies/aboriginal history has certainly helped." |
8
|
|
Asian and European history were taught "infrequently" or generally seen as inapplicable by better than half of the respondents. If we consider those who taught either of them "occasionally," the numbers change, generally in favor of European history, which was twice as likely to be pursued "occasionally" as Asian history. Asian history fared badly, in spite of the 1992 creation of the Asia Education Foundation and the resources at its disposal.9 The relative absence of European history was evident in spite of the Prime Minister's fear that Australia's European antecedents and achievements would go unnoticed and be disregarded in the curriculum. The fact that Asian history still seems to lag a bit behind European history crystallizes one of the great conservative dilemmas, the clash between the idea that schooling should reflect the demands of commerce and globalizing economies and the "traditionalist" desire to encourage historical study of Western traditions and institutions. The problems inherent in using history to establish national identity and using school curricula to address the concerns of 'business stake-holders' serve as a good segue for the multifarious problems involved with teaching history at any level. |
9
|
| |
|
National Identities, National Curricula, National Standards: Patterns of Divergence and Similarity | |
|
The link which Howard made between good Australian citizenship and history was never explicit, but was always slightly more than implied. Even as it affords one line of defense for advocates of history in pre-tertiary curricula, the use of history to enforce broad curricular goals that center on citizenship, civic participation and the like can be highly problematic. Nevertheless, such broad social goals are cornerstones of some drives to create national curricula in many parts of the anglosphere, examined below when discussing the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. |
10
|
|
The centralizing tendency in contemporary curriculum development is usually more complex and less simplistic than sometimes portrayed, often unfolding over the watch of more than one political party and involving reports drawn up by several different administrations. If this story has a single narrative with an ultimate efficient cause, it is one in which contingent circumstances – and canny manipulation of them – rather than outright attempts to hijack the process of education have the greatest explanatory power. One might find the ultimate efficient cause of these trends in deeper, structural phenomena, namely the self-perception of economic decline in western industrialized nations and their concomitant desire to transform educational, and even constitutional, structures in an attempt to compete commercially. |
11
|
|
Nonetheless it is not uncommon to see in western conservative governments a singular drive to control education. Some have even linked such programs in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to a general New Right desire to introduce market principles into the educational arena.10 It is not uncommon to see efforts to mandate curriculum content on any level, as a form of societal control and control of schools. Yet close analysis sometimes casts doubt on the degree to which this is a partisan issue. The issue of national curricula, and the allied problem of national standards, is even more complex. |
12
|
|
As for Australia, history curricula in most Australian states have been partially the product of an aborted attempt in the late 1980s and early 1990s to establish a national curriculum.11 The states then ultimately walked away from any sort of national structure of control and oversight, but all emerged from the discussions with a series of general ideas about how they might individually tinker with their own curricula, and since that time each state has generally charted its own course. The failure of the national curriculum proposals of the early 1990s was viewed by more conservative educational pundits at the time as a "near miss," which underscored the dangers of centralized authority in educational affairs, and whose success would have doomed all Australian children "to suffer the same mix of progressive, left-wing education so beloved by the academics of the Woodstock generation."12 That being said, the current national Liberal Party has again, since its rise to power in 1996, made various noises about instituting a national curriculum.13 |
13
|
|
In Britain, Cunningham's description of this centralizing tendency and the taking of authority away from the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) involves a similar contingent process. For example, in 1974, the LEA based on Leeds absorbed other surrounding LEAs in a structural reorganization. A commission from the University of Leeds criticized several aspects of the implementation of Leeds's own "good primary practice" into its newly-absorbed districts, and this criticism was used by Kenneth Clarke (then Thatcher's Secretary of State for Education and Science) to commission a subsequent national investigation. Its findings "formed the basis of a political consensus which resulted in the eventual adoption for primary schools of national literacy and numeracy strategies, albeit implemented only five years on under a Labour government."14 The most recent stage of this centralizing process in England actually has manifested itself as a privatization process in which corporate sponsorship of individual schools has the effect of removing them from the oversight and supervision of the LEAs and in the specializing of their curricula in line with corporate and community desires.15 The phenomenon is thus strangely the product of the seemingly divergent forces of centralization and privatization, but the outcome is largely to wrest authority away from the LEAs. |
14
|
|
Perhaps the most well-known and contentious of centralizing efforts are those associated with George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, which is generally seen as the single greatest assault on the constitutional tradition of local control of education in the United States. Careful analysis shows that while NCLB requirements have admittedly expanded some aspects of federal regulation, they work within the patterns established by most recent federal approaches to education. It is noteworthy that even Bill Clinton's policy instruments necessitated a "heavy reliance on achievement testing to spur the reforms [associated with his 1994 Improving America's Schools Act] and monitor their impact."16 |
15
|
|
This last point might best be underscored by returning to the debates surrounding the development of a national curriculum in Australia. Terri Seddon suggests that the idea of a national curriculum in Australia is a red herring, and that Commonwealth funding from the federal government, rather than outright curriculum control, has become the main neo-Federalist lever for exercising control of schools.17 As noted before, though, very often the difference between parties in power and opposition parties on such issues is very slight, and while Seddon wrote in the shadow of recent Liberal declarations about the construction of a national curriculum in Australia, similar processes were at work in Labour's ranks just a decade before. In 1992, in the midst of the creation of national curriculum for Australia, even the Labour government at the time seemed "prepared to release all funding for disadvantaged schools to the states in return for the rights of national testing."18 |
16
|
|
The broader topic of national curricula raises two significant points for the place and future of history. The first has caught the attention of numerous observers, and deals mainly with the squeeze placed on any time not spent by teachers dealing particularly with numeracy and literacy. National curricula, as they are commonly understood, must have mechanisms of accountability if they are not to represent another example of what rhetorically are referred to as 'wasted money and failed programs,' and those mechanisms generally involve some form of testing. Under NCLB structures, testing will be invariably linked to the determination of Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks. If the greatest emphasis is to be placed on numeracy and literacy testing, other content areas are likely to suffer, unless they can be linked or harnessed to broader immediate curricular goals, like literacy. Promoting literacy will thus become the major means by which history must now be pitched in order to maintain any standing in test-rich environments. Tertiary teachers of history in cash-strapped universities already engage in similar behaviors as they flog history courses to undergraduates by emphasizing the universality and applicability of generic skills honed by the particular study of history. Those who advocate the peculiarity of historical modes of inquiry, like Sam Wineburg, thus unintentionally risk the ability of historians to preserve their place in test-oriented, crowded curricula.19 In primary environments, where districts might mandate specific amounts of time to be dedicated daily to literacy, and where commercial literacy materials in use make no significant reference to history or social studies, they (and other areas) will invariably be marginalized. |
17
|
|
Nonetheless, instructors interested in salvaging history at the primary and middle level might help themselves by emphasizing the universality of skills, including literacy, which it emphasizes. Beyond that, their greatest redoubt can be found by linking the study of history to components of social studies, such as citizenship and civic virtue/responsibility. Such linkage raises a whole host of issues which can make professional tertiary historians uncomfortable. Two decades ago, even an advocate of the singular place of Social Studies in school curricula could note that, "When social studies leaders claim social studies has the burden for education for responsible citizenship, they may be making claims that transcend their authority."20 It also returns the debate back to comments made by the PM about the proper relationship between history, citizenship, and nationalism. |
18
|
|
In 2001, Tony Taylor's inquiry into history teaching in Australian schools noted that many teachers believed "that school history provides an important, if not the most important, element in an integrated approach to civics and citizenship education."21 The respondents to the current survey in Western Australia were largely anomalous in this regard, as only a small minority believed the 'Active Citizenship Learning Area' of the Curriculum Framework could be efficiently addressed by lessons involving history.22 The influence of undergraduate preparation seems to have had little effect on their opinions in this regard. Of survey respondents who saw some link between history and Active Citizenship, there was only a difference of two percent between those who had and who did not have some university history. There are few good explanations for this. One might suggest that the relative demise of political history, known anecdotally by most but given statistical validity by a recent survey of Australian history departments,23 could account for such a lack of linkage by even those who have had undergraduate history. The death of political history, though, has not necessarily been accompanied by the death of unpoliticized history, and given the relative escalation of the culture wars in the past two decades, it is perhaps more likely that a history course taken now is more politicized, in either direction, than twenty-five years ago. The implications of this for survey respondents, though, remain unclear. Given the fact that better than half (fifty-one percent) of all respondents also believed that Active Citizenship was a learning area most appropriate to their current students' level of development, this should be a bit disconcerting for advocates of history in the general curriculum. The primary teachers in this survey believed Active Citizenship was something appropriate for their students, but saw little utility for exploring the issue through history. While current teachers sometimes do not see a link between history and citizenship, educationalists who advocate Social Studies have also historically been skeptical about wedging history into curricula in such a fashion. In 1940, Seerly Reid declared that the New York State curriculum "was too predominantly historical," and that "Social education in schools everywhere has been too concerned with the mastery and manipulation of historical facts," familiar enough accusations even at the start of the 21st century.24 |
19
|
|
While Reid and others have essentially viewed history as elitist and non-egalitarian, others have traditionally argued that it required skills and conceptual abilities beyond those of most primary and middle school students. Recent studies have begun to take issue with such ideas. Kieran Egan, an expert on childhood cognition, has recently argued that history has a place even in primary education. Even if accepted only superficially, his binary model of knowing and the examples he offers of integrating history lessons into curricula will most assuredly place him in a camp with cultural conservatives who often propose fairly whiggish interpretations of history themselves, but his analyses generally move beyond simple categorizations of 'traditionalist' and 'conservative.'25 |
20
|
|
Assuming for the moment that history lessons might be integrated into curriculum planning for the early years of schooling, we are left with the somewhat sensitive issue of harnessing the past in an effort to 'create good citizens.' In most of the Anglosphere already discussed, the last decade has seen a boom in gearing primary programs to focus on democracy and citizenship. The Labour government of Paul Keating initiated Whereas the People. Three years later, the Liberal coalition government of John Howard, just several months on the heels of its victory over Labour, initiated Discovering Democracy. In 1997, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the United Kingdom constituted the Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools,26 a group whose findings were formalized in the 1998 Crick Report. Attitudes towards the Crick Report crystallize a significant issue that rests just below the surface of many such initiatives. The report has been accused of a type of latent racism, in that its recommendations often imply that many ethnic minorities are particularly in need of citizenship training, being "less familiar with and accepting of 'laws, codes and conventions.'"27 These sentiments are also implied in the Prime Minister's comments, wherein a main focus of any education should be the cultivation of fidelity to the ideals of democracy and democratic structures. For him and a host others, these are best inculcated by respect for western traditions, history, and culture, which they see as the breeding ground of modern democratic structures and principles. In these instances, 'democracy' and national identity become intertwined with one another, although not all teachers would so wholeheartedly lash the two issues together. |
21
|
|
Moreover, the difficulties inherent in defining 'good citizens' and national identities are legion. In a number of societies, the gap between what educationalists (in this sense, broadly meaning university professors, instructors for teacher preparation, and various members of government ministries) and their charges see as vital or even pertinent is sometimes astounding. In the UK, Chris Wilkins found not only a high degree of political disengagement amongst some teachers-in-training, but also that a small percentage were actually hostile to ethnic minorities, and that even the broader body of students tended to conceive of racism in purely personal, rather than structural, terms – in contrast, apparently, to their instructors.28 A strange inversion of this model exists in Japan, where Lynn Parmenter has observed that the Ministry of Education tends to hold fast to a traditional understanding of national identity, one which, although written into national reforms as recently as 1989 and 1998, is not consonant with the views of some student teachers, who subscribe to very flexible definitions of national identity, some going so far as to question the very existence of a national identity.29 |
22
|
|
The creation of history content standards, at any level of administration, highlights the further difficulties involved for those who would want to integrate history into lower school curricula. Examples of such 'discourses' exist, often involving such brash efforts to control content as to be almost inconceivable. In Minnesota, for instance, efforts to rewrite the state's history curriculum in complete contradiction to legal processes of evaluation and oversight resulted in the ousting of the State Minister of Education, herself a former functionary in the Bush administration.30 In the 1990s, the construction of national standards for the teaching of history in America's schools generated a good deal of controversy, and their impact on curricular thinking at the school level has yet to be determined, as adherence to the standards was a purely voluntary act on the part of individual teachers, schools, or districts. Many of them might have been integrated into individual lesson plans, but not through any form of state coercion or suggestion.31 |
23
|
| |
|
The Way Forward: Advocates of History at the Primary Level | |
|
Advocates of teaching history at the primary level face a host of unrelated obstacles which collectively can seem insurmountable. Often, to advocate the teaching of the content area has the effect of getting one lumped in with cultural and political conservatives, like Howard, Diane Ravitch, and others, even though the desire to teach a subject area is not necessarily the best indicator of one's political inclinations. Moreover, in areas where numeracy and literacy concerns trump all others, merely finding time for history can be difficult. Those who find time for it face the myriad issues involved with content and the culture wars. In some places, this might prove so discouraging that instruction in history might well be all but impossible. |
24
|
|
The current situation in Western Australia is not one of those areas. Some of our respondents are apparently interested in history and teaching it. Two-thirds of those who encountered Western Australia's Curriculum Framework at the university, as opposed to field teachers who encountered the Framework in one-off administrative sessions, believed they would benefit from some further specialist training in history. This must be not be exaggerated. The seismic shift involved in implementing the Framework has left teachers thirsting for almost any sort of professional development. It also seems that those who see some benefit to further history training are already trying to integrate it into their learning strategies, and that those who see little need for further training already expend little energy trying to use history in their lessons. |
25
|
|
While our primary teachers lack much undergraduate preparation in history, many now teaching nonetheless see its value in the course of addressing one of the areas they will be required to teach – Society and Environment Learning. By most accounts, current teachers in the field and teachers-in-training are doing what they can in admittedly difficult circumstances, but the pressures associated with accountability and student performance are likely to increase with any form of standardized testing. The Curriculum Council has already fleshed out the Framework with guidelines,32 and seems to be in the process of considering a return to formal, proscriptive syllabi. When these will arrive and how they will be constructed remain to be seen. What also remains to be seen is how academic historians in Western Australia's four major institutions of higher learning will become involved, if at all. Specialist faculty at universities can actually have an enormous impact upon how these affairs unfold, although not necessarily in the forms many favor, and not without some key shifting of attitudes and perceptions. |
26
|
|
In both the United States and Australia, there are many examples of enthusiastic and seemingly effective efforts at integrating history into primary school and secondary school curricula.33 Nonetheless, in 2005, Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro chronicled what they interpreted as a long-term disengagement of the academic history profession from K through 12 issues in the post-war decades.34 Although a subsequent forum on the article received a few noteworthy objections,35 the degree to which such objections substantiate claims of widespread university involvement in pre-tertiary affairs is difficult to assess. Ultimately, the effort to introduce history into integrated curricula is often dependant on the energy and will of someone with undergraduate training or a personal and abiding affinity for the subject at the primary level. |
27
|
|
How, if at all, can these affairs be influenced by university historians? Common responses often include the creation of more mandatory history surveys for education majors, as well as participation and supervision in some type of enrichment or professional development program. Both of these have their attractions and their drawbacks, but the brutal calculus of university life makes even these options increasingly difficult.36 The first of these difficulties has been described by university historians in Australia as "tapping into the education market,"37 to increase history enrollments, but the creation of more surveys is untenable unless primary education programs can trim student unit requirements elsewhere. This often would mean requiring fewer courses taught by schools of education. Even so, many history departments are in poor condition to handle the eventuality of such increased workloads. In Australian university history departments, Millar and Peel already have described a situation in which the demand for "increased productivity" (associated in the context of their article with "heavy teaching loads") would be met "only with heavy reliance on postgraduate labor."38 Combine this with the traditionally low status accorded to teaching introductory courses for teachers in university circles,39 and we are left with a formula which will further exacerbate the problem of part-time and graduate student teaching in most universities, a problem by no means particular to Australia. |
28
|
|
Greater participation by university faculty in professional development also has drawbacks and difficulties. Forms of professional development that essentially only replicate undergraduate or graduate course material in a compressed format are likely to be of limited utility.40 Most students trained in education programs have been geared to respect "situated learning," in which content is conveyed or discovered in such a way that it that can be immediately used with their own students. Offering this in a university setting or on-site professional development involving academic historians would likely be an ideal means of addressing some of these issues. Taylor's study, however, notes that "in-school professional development in history teaching is virtually non-existent."41 The logistics are difficult and there is little professional or financial incentive for university faculty to become involved in such affairs.42 In an academic culture where teaching even introductory university courses is often looked upon with scorn,43 getting faculty with both experience and enthusiasm to participate in this sort of outreach would be very difficult. Although the cultivation of innumerable graduate students has been questioned by some faculty,44 doing so, regardless of its other consequences, is valued and compensated in most current university structures. It may also be very short sighted in the long run, representing as it does the relative tail end of the process. We might be better off as a profession if the compensation and status we currently allot to the production of graduate students were somehow partially commuted into meaningful professional development efforts designed for primary teachers and directed to seeing the integration of history into their learning strategies. If students became more familiar and less disenchanted with history as a topic in their early years, they might be less reticent about majoring in history, and prospective teachers of early and middle school students might elect to take a few history electives of their own accord. If, as so many of our jeremiads about history in the schools claim, these systems are indeed broken, it is doubtful that the production of more graduate students majoring in history is going to fix it. Our recognition of this is up to us as individuals; our ability to make substantive changes to rectify the situation is likewise dependent both upon ourselves and on our broader intellectual and political communities. |
29
|
|
Notes
1 Accurately or otherwise, Foster's career has often been defined by several of his more well-known compositions which became part of the blackface tradition in American music. On Foster, see Ken Emerson, Do-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York, 1997).
2 Although the UK does not have a tradition of 'state' control of education, the creation of Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in 1902 had the effect of delegating certain responsibilities to these local entities, which are largely analogous to school districts. The possibility was thus created for changing patterns of central and local control of curricular and instructional affairs. On this issue, see Peter Cunningham, "Progressivism, Decentralisation and Recentralisation: Local Education Authorities and the Primary Curriculum, 1902–2002," Oxford Review of Education, vol. 28, nos. 2 and 3, 2002, pp. 218–233.
3 Text of the address can be located at http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech1754.html. This particular naturalization ceremony and address were both intimately linked to Australia Day. Australia Day commemorates the landing of the First Fleet in 1788, and also serves as a reminder about the effects of European colonialism upon native populations in Australia. Aboriginal activists protested the celebrations as early as the 1930s, with a most famous affair on the bicentennial of the landing, during which protestors flung a copy of the new bicentennial history of Australia into the harbour.
4 A handy synopsis of many of the relevant issues can be found in Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2003).
5 See for instance "Teachers reject PM's history call," The Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2006, accessed at http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,17944429-5001028,00.html; "Teachers accuse Howard of being ill-informed on the way classrooms work," The ABC, 26 January 2006, accessed at http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1555621.htm; and "Howard aims to make ancient history of modern learning," The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2006, accessed at http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/howard-aims-to-make-ancient-history-of-modern-learning/2006/01/26/1138066867536.html. Anna Clark contributed an interesting chapter in Macintyre's The History Wars, entitled "What do they teach our children?" which addresses some of these issues, pp. 171–191. As is often the case in such affairs, the sharpest focus is on New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, and the manner in which similar issues have played out in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Tasmania, and Western Australia receives very little attention.
6 Clark, The History Wars, p. 189. Tony Taylor has argued that the driving force behind changes to New South Wales's curriculum towards a more proscriptive history syllabus is the product of a backlash – even amongst Labour leadership – against 'process-driven' curricula as opposed to 'content-based' curricula; see Taylor's The Future of the Past: Executive Summary of the National Enquiry into School History-Executive Summary Chapter 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, accessed at http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/national_inquiry_into_school_history/chapter_2.htm. Clark's depiction of Labor in this process differs slightly from Taylor's, as she suggests their motives were based more on political gain than on an earnest, intellectual goal. Both are likely true, but Carr's history of cultural and intellectual conservatism are fairly well-documented; see for instance Andrew West and Rachel Morris's Bob Carr: A Self-Made Man (Harper-Collins, 2003), pp. 45, 113–115, et. al. Carr's undergraduate experience saw him come under the influence of Leonie Kramer (West, p. 32), a former professor of Literature at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney, and generally seen as a cultural conservative; see Macintyre, Wars, p. 111. As of the final draft of this paper, Carr and Howard are being brought together at a history summit convened by Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop, who has invited the former NSW premiere to help "restore a narrative approach" to history and possibly reinstate it as a stand alone subject even in years 1 through 10; see Imre Salusinszky, "Carr tops list for history summit," in The Australian, 13 July 2006.
7 Taylor, Future- executive summary accessed at http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/national_inquiry_into_school_history/executive_summary.htm#1.1.
8 Wally Moroz and P. Reynolds, "The Society and Environment Curriculum Framework for the new millennium: how prepared are the primary teachers?" Social Educator, November 1998, vol. 16 no. 2, pp. 42–51.
9 The Asia Education Foundation's website can be accessed at http://asiaeducation.edu.au/.
10 Brian Elliot and David MacLennan, "Education, Modernity and Neo-Conservative School Reform in Canada, Britain, and the US," British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 15, no. 2 (1994), pp. 165–185. Elliot and MacLennan, writing twelve years ago, were certainly correct in asserting that the New Right-backed free-market principles through 'school choice.' Although this is still not a plank for Australian Labour or most US Democrats, Tony Blair's "Third Way" can be said to be a clear application of free market principles.
11 A good synopsis of the processes leading to these meetings, written before the centralizing process had largely been abandoned, can be found in Leo Bartlett, "National Curriculum in Australia: An Instrument of Corporate Federalism," British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (August 1992), pp. 218–238.
12 Kevin Donnelly, "Civics and Citizenship Education: The dangers of centralised civics education," Policy, Summer, 1996–97, p. 4.
13 See for instance Lindsey Connors, "Minister short of Mark in HSC attack," editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March 2005. HSC is the Higher Studies Certificate which New South Wales students earn by completing specifically-designated HSC courses in year 11 and year 12.
14 Cunningham, 'Progressivism," p. 230.
15 The process has become intrinsically linked to the 'cash-for-peerages' scandal which has resulted in the arrest of Lord Levy, the head of Blair's Specialist Schools and Academy Trust.
16 Loraine McDonnell, "No Child Behind and the Federal Role in Education: Evolution or Revolution?" Peabody Journal of Education, vol. 80, no. 2 (2005), p. 29.
17 Terri Seddon, "National Curriculum in Australia? A Matter of Politics, Powerful Knowledge and the Regulation of Learning," in Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, vol. 9, no. 3 (2001), pp. 319–320.
18 J. Dawkins [Minister of Education], Ministerial address. NBEET Conference, Coffs Harbor (October 1990), as cited in Bartlett, "National Curriculum," p. 232, n. 7. Recall that at this stage, the states in Australia walked away from any overarching instruments of commonwealth control.
19 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, 2001), especially Chapters 1 and 2.
20 Howard Mehlinger "The Reform of Social Studies and the Role of the National Commission for Social Studies," The History Teacher, vol. 21, no. 2 (1988), p. 196.
21 See Taylor, Future-Executive Summary, section 1.4, p. v; accessed at http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/national_inquiry_into_school_history/executive_summary.htm and Carmel Young, "Civics and citizenship education and the teaching of history," Unicorn, Journal of the Australian College of Education, vol. 22, no. 1 (1996), pp. 64–71.
22 The Western Australian Curriculum Framework includes eight broad areas of instruction and assessment, called Learning Area Outcomes, which individually and collectively reinforce thirteen Overarching Learning Outcomes, which themselves include issues such as "use of language to communicate and interact with others" to the ability to "describe and reason about patterns, structures and relationships in order to understand, interpret, justify, and make predictions." Like the other seven Learning Area Outcomes, Society and the Environment has its own set of fields or areas of instruction and assessment called Learning Outcomes, which include the following seven topics: Investigation, Communication, and Participation; Place and Space; Resources; Culture; Time, Continuity, and Change; Natural and Social Systems; Active Citizenship. These Learning Outcomes can be addressed in any way and with whatever lessons the individual teacher sees fit.
23 Cathy Millar and Mark Peel, "Canons Old and New: The Undergraduate History Curriculum" History Australia, vol. 2 (2004), DOI: 10:2104/HA040014, p. 14.
24 Seerly Reid, "Education for Citizenship," Educational Research Bulletin, vol. 19, no. 6 (March 13, 1940), p. 159–60.
25 Kieran Egan, Children's Minds, Talking Rabbits, & Clockwork Oranges (Columbia, 1999), pp. 30–31 and 38–39. For similar critiques of 'expanding horizons,' which also falls under Egan's gaze, see Rahima Wade, "Beyond Expanding Horizons: New Curriculum directions for Elementary Social Studies," The Elementary School Journal, vol. 103, no. 2 (2002), pp. 115–130. Of particular interest in that same volume of the Elementary School Journal is Keith Barton's "'Oh, That's a tricky Piece': Children, Mediated Action, and the Tools of Historical Time," pp. 161–185.
26 An overview of the group's constitution and mandate, as described by one of its directors, can be found in David Kerr's "Changing the Political Culture: the Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools," Oxford Review of Education, vol. 25, nos. 1 and 2 (1999), pp. 275–284.
27 Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey, "Citizenship Education and National Identities in France and England; inclusive or exclusive?" Oxford Review of Education, vol. 27, no. 2 (2001), p. 293.
28 Chris Wilkins, "Making 'Good Citizens': the social and political attitudes of PGCE students," Oxford Review of Education, vol. 25, nos. 1 and 2 (1999), pp. 222, 228.
29 Lynn Parmenter, "Constructing National Identity in a Changing World: perspectives in Japanese education," British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol 20, no. 4 (1999), pp. 454–463. Although Parmenter describes the student teacher component of her survey as having involved a questionnaire, essays, and interviews, she offers little numerical information about how many student teachers conceived of national identity in this way, describing them generally as a 'third category,' and noting that amongst those respondents, "almost no reference at all" was made to the rigid Ministerial interpretation of national identity, p. 460.
30 Paul Spies, Jennifer Bloom, Michael Boucher, Carrie Lucking, Lisa Norling, and Rick Theisen, "From Crisis to civic engagement: the struggle over social studies standards in Minnesota," Social Education, vol. 68, no. 7 (Nov-Dec 2004), pp. 459–464.
31 A running chronology of the issues touched upon by these debates can be found at various stages in this journal; see for instance, Jerry Bentley, "The Quest for World Class Standards in World History," The History Teacher, vol. 28, no. 3 (1995), pp. 449–456, and James Hill, "Whatever their merits, the National Standards will not be widely implemented," The History Teacher, vol. 30, no. 3 (1997), pp. 341–45.
32 See the Curriculum Guides published by the Curriculum Council, available at http://curriculumcouncil.wa.
33 In Australia, for instance, the National Centre for History Education hosts an extraordinarily useful website, with links to each of its state members. Even in Western Australia, the History Teachers Association has recently launched a newsletter and bulletin targeted specifically at primary and middle school teachers. The inaugural run can be viewed at http://www.htawa.org/bulletins/primary.pdf. A noteworthy example of university collaboration in pre-tertiary history and curriculum affairs occurred in the early 1990s in Philadelphia under the direction of Howard Spodek; see Carol Parssinen, and Howard Spodek, "We're making history: Philadelphia Educators tackle a national issue," The History Teacher, vol. 25, no. 3 (1992), pp. 321–338. In California, the Board of Regents administers the California Subject Matters program, which involves ongoing professional development with aid from content area departments.
34 Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education," American Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 3 (2005), pp. 727–751.
35 History Cooperative (26 September-9 October 2005), AHR Forum Discussion on "From Bold Beginnings," by Orrill and Shapiro, available online at http://www.HistoryCooperative.org/ahr/Forums.html (accessed 30 October 2005).
36 Ironically, the principles of rigid economic rationalism engendered by Neoliberalism in both the US and Australia are likely contributing to a situation where students and parents will vote with their feet for the most immediately economically viable courses of study, and when that happens university funding goes with them.
37 Millar and Peel, "Canons," p. 14–3.
38 Millar and Peel, "Canons," p. 14–8.
39 David Perlmutter, "Teaching the 101," The Chronicle of Higher Education, (8 September 2004).
40 Gabriella Minnes Brandes, and Peter Seixas, "So that the two can mix in this crucible: Teachers in an interdisciplinary school-university collaboration in the Humanities," Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Challenges to Implementation (eds. Sam Wineburg and Pam Grossman, New York, 2000), pp. 161–2. A common complaint of the participants in this particular program, for instance, was finding a way to translate what they encountered in a year of theoretically-driven professional development led by university teachers, into something meaningful for their own classrooms.
41 Taylor, Future-Executive Summary, Section 1.5, accessed at http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/national_inquiry_into_school_history/executive_summary.htm#1.5.
42 See comments by Orril and Shapiro above, notes 36 and 37.
43 See note 41 above.
44 Bernard Reilly, "Generational Conflict and the Tenure Crisis," letter to the editor, in Perspectives (November 2002).
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|