Remaking the professional teacher: authority and curriculum reform

Abstract

Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations are shaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasing turn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curriculum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one in which understandings about teacher professional authority is being redefined. In this paper, we examine how judgements about teachers’ professional authority are used to defend, promote and explain the AC. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and interviews with high-level policy-makers, we argue that the AC is opening space in the policy field to reposition teachers’ work by promoting a view of teachers’ professional authority as constrained and defined through the written curriculum documentation.

Keywords:

• curriculum reform
• national curriculum
• teacher professionalism
• policy reform

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project ‘Peopling Education Policy: Realising the New Australian English and Mathematics Curricula’—Jim Albright, David Clarke, Doug Clarke, Peter Freebody and Peter Sullivan.

Notes

1. The Peopling Education Policy project is funded by the Australian Research Council (LP110100062) with additional funding provided by the NSW Department of Education and Training, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Catholic Education Office Melbourne and the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. The project is a collaboration between Monash University, Australian Catholic University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of Newcastle and the University of Melbourne. The content is the responsibility of the authors and the views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the universities or the partners.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Gerrard

Jessica Gerrard is a McKenzie postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, 100 Leicester Street, Parkville, 3010; email: [email protected]. Her research interests centre on education and social change, policy sociology and critical social theory.

Lesley Farrell

Lesley Farrell is professor and associate dean (Research and Development) at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her research focus is on the impacts of globalization on local workforces and work practices, and on knowledge mobilization across spatial and temporal domains.