A content study of cross-curriculum priority of Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia in the Australian curricula

ABSTRACT

There is an identifiable gap between Australian government policy aspiration and curriculum guidance found in the content of the renewed Australian Curriculum (2018) that has been designed to support the cross-curriculum priority (CCP) of Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia. We have employed an inductive, interpretative research methodology to analyse the curriculum guidance as data to examine how the Australian government’s policies that are predicated on strengthening its partnerships with Asia are being supported by the Australian Curriculum and its State and Territory derivatives. We found that Australian Curriculum content that has been included to support the CCP Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia is minimal, unevenly distributed across the key learning areas, and that the inclusion of content is different between the overall Australian Curriculum and its State and Territory derivatives across key ideas, learning areas, and explanatory materials. Identifying a gap, we critically discuss two aspects of our findings: content real estate and its location, and the skills and knowledge assumed of teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian curriculum
• cross-curriculum priority
• Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia
• pre-service teachers
• initial teacher education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the paper, as these comments led us to an improvement of the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We chose a theme size of 52% to display the clearest vision of all themes which emerged from data analysis of Leximancer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hongzhi Zhang

Hongzhi Zhang is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His main research interests are higher education, education policy, intercultural study, and curriculum and pedagogy. Drawing on educational philosophies of Asian traditions, Hongzhi’s research about ‘Asia as method’ is innovative and influential. He has established ‘Asia as method’ as a researchable concept, and contributed influential theoretical and empirical developments in research about ‘Asia as method’ in educational studies, particularly how it can be developed in multicultural, postcolonial democratic Asia countries and for it to be culturally expansive in Western education systems as an ideal and as a practice across cultures.

Zane Diamond

Zane M. Diamond’s research investigates how wisdom might be developed in modern education systems, addressing the alienation from mainstream education that people from non-dominant cultures report, arguing that full participation as citizens requires that education enables inclusion of diverse student needs through understanding the impact of ancestry, ethnicity, and lifeways on the provision of mainstream education services. She employs theoretical perspectives drawn from Indigenist, social exchange, organizational change, and intelligent complex adaptive systems theories to develop an understanding of how to incorporate a diversity of ethnoreligious cultural perspectives within mainstream education and in the leadership and management of education services. She researches in the field of sociologyofeducation, (sub-fields of leadership and pedagogical reform of teacher education). International and comparativist in approach, her research encompasses: embedding Indigenous and ancestral wisdom traditions in modern universities and schools; negotiating critical place-based environmental knowledge into contemporary land, water, and food studies; developing inclusive pedagogies that develop wisdom and compassion; and, an overarching study of the pedagogies of wisdom development in university and school students.

Shaoru Zeng

Shaoru Zeng is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia. She works as a research assistant and a teacher who teaches students from early childhood to secondary school in Australia. She has a qualification in Education and her research interests include the Australian Curriculum, the International Baccalaureate, as well as Asia studies.