| Teachers as curriculum inquirers As the core practitioners of curriculum, teachers’ scholarship must be a central concern for any effort to regenerate curriculum inquiry. Yet the current state of curriculum in Australia tends to position teachers as mere implementers of curriculum decided elsewhere, and as needing to comply with already determined ‘standards’, responsible for student outcomes against accountability frameworks. There is little official space for most teachers to innovate, or even for whole-school innovation in curriculum, given performance-management criteria and the focus on requirements for improvement on NAPLAN scores, especially in lower-achieving schools. This does not mean that individual teachers haven’t stopped analysing their work and that of their students, nor that some schools have built significant professional learning communities to shape curriculum, including assessment and pedagogy. It does mean, however, that these tend now to be exceptions rather than the rule. Teachers need infrastructure to support their scholarship and too few are able to access the necessary resources, including time, to do so systematically and in depth. Nevertheless, as Garth Boomer (1999) always reminds us, teachers are, have been and continue to be key curriculum workers, inventors and theorists, and a (re)source of innovation and evolution of practices. In this paper, curriculum practitioners in all sectors are seen as potential curriculum theorists and knowledge-producers, alongside other curriculum workers in policy and advisory positions; however, my main focus is on schooling. Imagining new options for contemporary curriculum scholarship is assisted by historical sensibility, reminding us that practice is both conservative and also open to seemingly spontaneous shifts, only a few of which are incorporated into longer-term practices. Historical work is always a ‘history of the present’ because it is shaped by current questions, issues and needs to know, rather than a search for origins. It seeks a ‘genealogy’ to ‘account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc …’ (Foucault 1980, p. 117). Much of the genealogy of teachers’ curriculum scholarship can be connected to diverse movements of ‘teachers as researchers’, both formally developed (e.g. Stenhouse 1975 and informally (see Yates et al. 2011; Green 2003). In Australia, this movement took particular shape from the late 1960s, particularly seen as a central shift in the role of the teacher through a policy emphasis on school-based curriculum development officially established in Victoria and South Australia, and later developed in the ACT and Tasmania in particular. Here, I say less about the actual curriculum work done under these policies and more about the infrastructure made available for such work. In this short paper, I explore some of the conditions under which teachers’ curriculum knowledgemaking was constituted, with a particular focus on resources made available in the era of ‘school-based curriculum development’ to support teachers as curriculum workers. I then consider what resources might be present now and what might be missing in current infrastructure to regenerate the curriculum inquiry of teachers. As‘data’, I use my own experience as a teacher in technical schools in the 1970s, and then as a researcher in the Access Skills Project Team (ASPT), located within the Curriculum and Research Branch of the Education Department of Victoria, alongside the archive of materials produced during those years. |
