Abstract:
The Australian curriculum, as a policy imagining of what learning should take place in schools, and what that learning should achieve, involves the imagining and rescaling of social relations amongst students, their schools, the nation-state and the globe. Following Harvey's (1996) theorisations of space-time and Fairclough's (2003, 2004) operationalization of these theories in the texturing of spatio-temporalities within policy texts, this paper seek to critically explore the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian curriculum. These priorities - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia, and Sustainability - collectively provide a ‘futures orientation' to the curriculum. They also mediate and assemble conflicting spatio-temporalities, aligning the purposes of Australian schooling with an instrumentalist concern for ‘Asia literacy', whilst simultaneously recasting the space-times of neoliberal capitalism within ‘sustainable' social, cultural and environmental constraints. We suggest these conflicting space-time constructions come to an uneasy resolution with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures priority, where Indigenous peoples are represented as anchoring a reconciled nation-state in a particular place, while it is re-mapped within an Asian economic region. Such curricula constructions potentially diminish student recognition of Indigenous peoples' ongoing struggles for self-determination and steer student knowledge of ‘Asia' towards the acquisition of a set of skills to exploit future economic opportunity. This presentation draws on research funded through an ARC Discovery grant, Schooling the Nation in an Age of Globalization: DP1094850, First Investigator Professor Bob Lingard.