‘You’d be surprised how some people probably feel uncomfortable’: the compliance–resistance continuum of planning integrated Australian History curricula

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to present a problematising and exploration of how teachers educated within settler-colonial systems are positioned to analyse critically and resist whitewashed curriculum when planning for school-based learning. Since the 2013 implementation of the Australian Curriculum: History, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies have been a mandatory, albeit subsidiary, focus area of study. While publications have explored the purpose of, the need for, and the possibilities offered up by cross-curriculum education, very little attention has been paid to how curriculum is enacted within schools. Through a poststructuralist lens, and a non-Indigenous researcher positioning, this article illuminates a discursive analysis of ways in which six history teachers in Victoria, Australia, perform their subject positioning along a continuum of compliance–resistance within the Australian education system.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-cultural education
• discourse analysis
• teacher development
• curriculum planning
• history

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Koorie is an Aboriginal word that means ‘person’ and is a ‘contemporary collective [that denotes] people whose traditional lands and waters exists within the boundaries that today frame the state of Victoria’ (Victorian Aboriginal Education Association Inc. 2015) and southern areas of New South Wales.

2. A Diploma of Education – often abbreviated to DipEd or GradDipEd – is a teaching-specific postgraduate qualification that qualifies graduates for registration to teach in Australian schools.

3. Renamed Federation University Australia in 2014 as a result of an amalgamation between the University of Ballarat and Monash University Gippsland Campus.

4. The term Countries – instead of Nations, groups, tribes, etc – is used here to signify the 349 individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups identified on the AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia. It is estimated that over 350+ Countries existed before European arrival; however, because the map was created from historical records with date ranges between 1988 and 1994, the nuances of community structures viewed from a non-Indigenous lens are contested (https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/aiatsis-map-indigenous-australia).

5. The belief, often an unconscious one, where non-Indigenous peoples of a society see their group ‘as responsible for [the] illegitimate advantage held' (Iyer, Leach, and Crosby 2003, 118) by their race over others.

6. ' A set of beliefs granted to those of us who, by race, resemble the people who dominate the powerful positions in situations' (Kendall 2002, 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Weuffen

Dr Sara Weuffen is a Research Fellow on the Culturally Nourishing Schools Project at the University of New South Wales. She is a non-Indigenous woman of German, Scottish, and Welsh descent born on Gundijtmara County in Warrnambool, Australia. Dr Weuffen’s research and teaching centre on poststructuralist inquiry to interrogate power/knowledge and normative processes of cultural education, history, and educational policy. In particular, her research and teaching pedagogy focuses on interrogating binary discourses to uncover productive, respectful, and ethical processes for shared-learning and social movement.