The contemporary challenge of activism as curriculum work

ABSTRACT

The history of Australian mass schooling has seen contestations over school and curriculum purposes, zig-zagging across conservative and progressive directions. In this paper, we examine how possibilities for students to have ‘voice’, ‘participation’ and ‘leadership’ in their learning are currently limited in Australia. Policy framings, we argue, dampen potentials for connecting young people’s democratic and activist impulses – manifest, in our example, in the Schools Strike for Climate movement – with curriculum activity that responds to local-global challenges such as the viral-ecological crisis. We propose an activist curriculum praxis wherein young people undertake action-research – in collaboration with diverse community actors, teachers and academics – on problems that matter for local-global future life with others. Since local-global emergencies are emergent, curriculum must build citizen-capacities to work together, apprenticing to problems that matter for social futures, creating emergently needed knowledge-in-action. This participatory-democratic curriculum approach challenges schools to become more socially just and proactive institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist curriculum
• ‘problems-that-matter’ curriculum
• Schools Strike for Climate (SS4C)
• students as researchers
• environment education

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Zipin and Brennan drew on projects funded by the Australian Research Council under [grant number DP120101492, LP100200841 and LP0454869]. Mayes acknowledges the Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, funded by Deakin University DVCR and the School of Education .

Notes on contributors

Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan is an Australian researcher, now ‘retired’; she remains active in research, covering all sectors of education, with a particular emphasis on questions of injustice. She is an Honorary Life Member of AARE, an Adjunct Professor in education at the University of South Australia and Extraordinary Professor in education policy at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She worked as a humanities teacher, curriculum researcher and senior administrator in the Victoria Department of Education in the 1970s and 1980s. After gaining her PhD, she moved to the university sector in 1991, with stints at Deakin, Central Queensland, Canberra, University of South Australia (where she had a five-year term as Dean) and Victoria University, Melbourne. She is an editor on the Bloomsbury series, Reinventing Teacher Education, and on a number of editorial Boards, including Curriculum Perspectives, Educational Action Research, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, and Journal of Critical Inquiry. Recent publications have focused on education and the ‘Anthropocene’; pragmatic-radical curriculum democracy; and problematising teacher education, higher education and schooling in light of ‘glocal’ challenges.

Eve Mayes

Eve Mayes is a Senior Lecturer (Pedagogy and Curriculum) and currently an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2020-2021) at Deakin University. Her research is concerned with exploring and problematising students’ experiences of educational institutions, through creative and philosophical experimentation with issues of ‘voice’, affect, space and materiality. Her current research is focused on school students’ political participation in the transnational Student Strike for Climate movement and draws on ethnographic, participatory and arts-informed research approaches. Her work is propelled by questions of what pedagogies and curricula that are dynamically responsive to students’ felt concerns and that make a difference with the world might look like in practice. She was previously an English and English as a Second Language Teacher in government secondary schools.

Lew Zipin

Lew Zipin is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia, and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research focuses on approaches to curriculum and pedagogy that do justice for learners from power-marginalised positions in structures of social inequality. In projects funded by the Australian Research Council, he has worked to extend the Funds of Knowledge (FK) approach that connects school curriculum to young people’s community-based knowledge, needs and aspirations for futures. Recently he has conceptualised ways for students, in curriculum activity, to research Problems that Matter (PTMs) in their local communities and globally. His writing on FK and PTM approaches are published in the journals Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Journal of Education, Education as Change, and Curriculum Perspectives; and in the books Re-imagining Education for Democracy (Routledge, 2019; S. Riddle & M. W. Apple, Eds.), and Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Essays in Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; B. Green, P. Roberts & M. Brennan, Eds.). Lew is on the Editorial Board of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.