Towards Asia “curriculum-as-lived”: Amplifying student voice in the Asia literacy curricular landscape

ABSTRACT

For the last five decades, the development of “Asia-literate” students has been a key objective in Australian education policy. The contentions surrounding this educational goal have been well documented by academic literatures, policy documents and media commentary. This paper seeks to redress the absence of student voices in these debates by examining students’ experiences with Asia-related curriculum in the context of Languages and History teaching and learning in secondary schools in Victoria, Australia. Engaging the lens of curriculum inquiry, we use select thematic episodes from qualitative interview data to interrogate students’ understanding and evaluation of planned and experienced Asia-related curriculum. Their stories highlight the incongruences of Asia learning as framed by (and within) formal sites of learning, and students’ lived experiences in other spaces. We argue that in order to effect a shift in the current expressions of Asia-related curriculum policy towards a more student-centred articulation, students’ roles in shaping curricular knowledge warrant more attention and scrutiny. As our analysis suggests, a deeper understanding of students’ experiences of curriculum-as-lived may be the catalyst for a long-overdue reorientation towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity, where new and authentic possibilities for Asia learning could be envisaged.

KEYWORDS:

• Asia literacy
• curriculum
• student voice
• Australia
• senior secondary school
• studies of Asia

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr Matthew Richards for his valuable contributions as Research Assistant to this project.

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Cairns

Rebecca Cairns is a lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. Her research spans curriculum inquiry, history education and studies of Asia. She examines how constructions of race, culture, nation and subjectivity shape and are shaped by curriculum policy processes of the past and present. Her current project explores Asia as a curriculum discourse, from which a forthcoming co-authored book with Dr Michiko Weinmann (Deakin University), Rethinking Asia-related Curriculum, will be published by Routledge in 2022. Twitter: @cairnsrebecca

Michiko Weinmann

Michiko Weinmann is a Senior lecturer in Languages Education, and Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages (CTaLL) at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She has researched and published widely on multilingualism and multilingual education, Asia literacy, teacher education and teacher mobility, and internationalization in Higher Education. An important focus of her work is the fostering of the theory and practice nexus in Languages education through collaborations with schools, professional and community organizations. Weinmann curates the resource website and blog The Language Teacher Helpmate.