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THE AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM

Cross-curriculum priorities in the Australian curriculum: stirring the passions and a work in progress? Deborah Henderson 1

# Australian Curriculum Studies Association 2020

Keywords Australian curriculum . Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures . Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia . Sustainability

The school curriculum expresses a nation’s aspirations for its next generations. The curriculum must strike a balance between developing young people’s understanding of their national history and culture and preparing them for a future that is increasingly global and largely unpredictable. What constitutes essential school learning will always be contested because behind it is a debate about what knowledge is of most worth. Curriculum stirs the passions – and that is a good thing. Curriculum is never completed. It is never perfect and should always be a work in progress. As responsible citizens, we are obliged to provide our future generations with the best possible learning opportunities and outcomes. (McGaw 2014, p. 1)

Introduction This passage from a letter written by the past Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), Professor Barry McGaw, to accompany ACARA’s statement to the federal government’s review of the Australian Curriculum in 2014, encapsulates some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the construction of the curriculum. McGaw’s reflections could have been written A version of this paper was first published in Reid, A., & Price, D. (Eds.), (2018). The Australian Curriculum: Promises, Problems and Possibilities, Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. * Deborah Henderson [email protected] 1

Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Kelvin Grove Campus, Kelvin Grove, Queensland 4059, Australia

specifically for the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs) for, as will be seen later in this paper, the final report of the Review of the Australian Curriculum (Donnelly and Wiltshire 2014) contended that the CCPs emerged ‘as possibly the most complex, controversial, and confusing aspect of the Australian Curriculum’ (p. 134). How might a national curriculum be constructed as future oriented so that young people are educated to be lifelong learners capable of operating in a complex, information-rich, globalised world? And in what ways could this focus be balanced with the need to provide students within Australian schools with an understanding of those foundational forms of disciplinary knowledge that have shaped their society and culture? The council of education ministers in its Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008) nominated the inclusion of crosscurriculum priorities in the new Australian Curriculum as one of the design elements to address this question. In doing so, the council made two assumptions. The first assumption was that the inclusion of three ‘priorities’, one national, one regional and one global—namely Aboriginal a