ERIC Number: EJ1087437
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0362-6784
EISSN: N/A
Texturing Space-Times in the Australian Curriculum: Cross-Curriculum Priorities
Peacock, David; Lingard, Robert; Sellar, Sam
Curriculum Inquiry, v45 n4 p367-388 2015
The Australian curriculum, as a policy imagining what learning should take place in schools, and what that learning should achieve, involves the imagining and rescaling of social relations amongst students, their schools, the nation-state and the globe. Following David Harvey's theorisations of space-time and Norman Fairclough's operationalisation of these theories in the texturing of spatio-temporalities within policy texts, we seek to critically explore the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian curriculum. These priorities--Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia, and sustainability--collectively provide a "futures orientation" to the curriculum. They also mediate and assemble conflicting spatio-temporalities, aligning the purposes of Australian schooling with an instrumentalist concern for "Asia literacy," whilst simultaneously recasting the space-times of neoliberal capitalism within "sustainable" social, cultural and environmental constraints. We suggest these conflicting space-time constructions come to an uneasy resolution with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures priority, where Indigenous peoples are represented as anchoring a reconciled nation-state in a particular place, while it is re-mapped within an Asian economic region. Such curricula constructions potentially diminish student recognition of Indigenous peoples' ongoing struggles for self-determination and steer student knowledge of "Asia" towards the acquisition of a set of skills to exploit future economic opportunity.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Curriculum, Indigenous Populations, Culturally Relevant Education, Neoliberalism, Social Influences, Cultural Influences, Environmental Influences, Economic Factors, Self Determination, Critical Theory, Curriculum Development, Politics of Education, Pacific Islanders
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Asia; Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A