AATE Submission to the Review of the Australian Curriculum February 2014 Page 1

AATE Submission to the Review of the Australian Curriculum February 2014 Page | 1

DRAFT 4

Introduction
The Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) is the national umbrellaorganisation unifying autonomous state and territory professional associations for teachers of school subject English. Established in1964, it is a not-for-profit professional association run mainly by unpaid volunteers to promote and support secondary school English teaching.
Current membership isapproximately5000 including both individuals and institutions.AATE has no provision for direct membership and individuals and schools are members by virtue of their membership of one of the state or territory English teacher associations. Members are mainly:
individual secondary school English teachers,
secondary school English departments, or
university staff involved in pre-service teacher education for English teachers and other teaching and research related to secondary school English teaching.
Because of the school institutional membership, the number of teachers represented is significantly more than the raw membership number.While not all English teachers in schools are members, it can be reasonably claimed that those who are members are those who are most professionally involved.
Members of AATE’s national council have extensive experience of teaching secondary school English. In addition, the eight state and territory delegates were able to draw on the considerable collective classroom experience of the members of the governing bodies of their constituent associations. A draft of this submission was made available for member input.
Scope of this submissionThissubmission relates mainly to the English Curriculum but also touches on the General Capabilities and the Cross Curriculum Priorities.
Timing of the review
AATE thoroughly endorses the proposition that curriculum documents need to be routinely reviewed on a regular basis and necessary amendments made so that they can be kept up to date and best serve the interests of students. AATE is on record as initiating and supporting a range of ongoing reviews of and research into the Australian Curriculum. Results of these are published in its professional and research journals, in regular state and national conferences and in forums across the country.However, the process of change in schools needs to be carefully managed. Too much change in too short a period in fact militates against real improvementin teaching practice and potential student learning achievement because is an unproductive distraction from the important business of quality teaching.
The F-10 section of the Australian Curriculum is only now starting to be implemented in all jurisdictions across the country and the Years 11 and 12 section has not yet been translated into courses and taught anywhere at all. AATE thereforebelieves that this current review is premature and risks wasting the finite resource of teacher time and effortthat would be better directed to actually teaching students.
When curriculum documents/syllabuses are significantly different from what preceded them, it takes considerable time for them to be comprehensively understood by teachers and for teaching programs in schools to be adapted accordingly. This is decidedly the case with the Australian Curriculum: English. Minor changeswill be able to be accommodated, but it would not be genuinely putting the interests of students first to institute major changes so early in the implementation of the current version of the national curriculum.
We acknowledge that a review of the curriculum was a Coalition election promise but believe that the appropriate time for the Abbott Government to have directed that a review be conducted would have been in the latter half of its second term.
Part of the rationale given for the current review is that there has been a recent relative decline in Australia’s performance in student achievement in international measures such as PISA. It is too soon for these results to be reasonably attributed to the ACARA Australian Curriculum. It has not yet been implemented in all jurisdictions and, where implementation has begun, it simply has not been in use for long enough.
We note that it is proposed that the final report from this review be submitted by 31 July and then the amended curriculum implemented in 2015. Our collective experience in Australianschools - and this is confirmed in international studies of curriculum change- tells us that it will not be possible to perform the necessary preparation tasks well in this time frameunless proposed changesare minimal. For this reason alone, we strongly recommend that any changes to the English curriculum should be minimal and the same applies to the General Capabilities and Cross Curriculum Priorities.
Independence of the review
One of the Terms of Reference involves the principle of independence. In relation to the regular, routine review of the national curriculum, AATE considers this principle to be of the utmost importance. For this reason, reviews should be conducted under the auspices of ACARA.Furthermore, such reviews need to draw on a thorough knowledge of the needs of all students across the country. Professional teacher associations such as AATE, whose teacher and researcher members have an informed understanding of what happens in schools, should be central to any national review of the Australian Curriculum.
It is often said that justice should not only be done but should also be seen to be done. In the same way, independence in the processes of routine review of the national curriculum needs to be apparent as well as real. It is therefore far from ideal that this review is being conducted by two people who have been outspoken in the media in their criticism of the existing national curriculum. Rightly or wrongly, it is inevitable that there will be doubt in the educational community about the degree of impartiality that will be involved in the review.
AATE considers it to be unfortunate that the manner in which this review has been set up does not seem to fully comply with the important principle of independence cited in the Terms of Reference.
Robustness of the English curriculum
The Terms of Reference do not make clear what meaning is to be attached to the noun robustness and the adjective robust in relation to the curriculum. In formulating this submission we have taken the following meaning for robust from the Macquarie Dictionary: “able to withstand critical analysis: a robust report; a robust argument”.
In this sense, AATE believes that the English section of the curriculum is definitely robust and so too are the General Capabilities and Cross Curriculum Priorities.
Some press comment has suggested that there is too much detail in the national curriculum for it to be deemed “teacher friendly”. AATE does not believe this to be the case with the English curriculum. On the contrary, the amount of detail in the Content Descriptions and Elaborations constitutes a rich resource to guide teacher planning and professional development. The on-line presentation of the Australian Curriculum makes it easy for teachers to locate the material relevant to their current concerns. For English it may have been better for desired student learning to be detailed for phases of schooling rather than individual year levels.However, once that decision on structure is accepted, the degree of detail in the English curriculum should, in our view, be seen as a decided strength and an example of the robustness of the document. The on-line presentation of the curriculum is also a notable strength.
Other press commentaryhas suggested that the national curriculum should be written in “plain English” and that it should contain nothing that cannot be readily understood by the ordinary citizen. AATE considers this view to be misguided. The national curriculum is necessarily a document with multiple audiences but the primary audience must be the teachers who will use it to guide their planning. Even in this regard, terminology used in the English curriculum should not be “dumbed down” to the lowest common denominator. From time to time, depending on their prior experience, some teachers may encounter terms with which they are not immediately totally familiar. This should not be seen as a problem, but rather as an opportunity for productive professional learning and the enhancement of existing competencies. AATE believes that the terminology used in the English curriculum and the on-line glossary together constitute another strength of the document and an aspect of its commendable robustness.
Balance in the English curriculum
The F-10 section of the English Curriculum is organised into the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy and these same three strands underpin the content descriptions of the four subjects in the English area for Years 11 and 12. While these three strands were not AATE’s first choice for the top level organizer of the curriculum, we believe that they satisfactorily describe the scope or “territory” of the subject and imply a highlydesirable degree of balance, one of the criteria specified in the Terms of Reference.
While literature, appropriately defined, is central to school level English, it should not be the totality of the subject and the partnering of this strand with language and literacy provides the necessary balance.
Literature strand of the F-10 English curriculum
It is our belief that some media commentary about the place of literature in the national English curriculum has been based on an inadequate reading of the ACARA document. AATE endorses the point made by ACARA Chief Executive, Robert Randall, in a letter published in The Australian of 29 October 2013:
Kevin Donnelly‘says "the English curriculum adopts a definition of literature where classic works jostle for attention alongside SMS messages". The English curriculum says literature involves "past and present texts across a range of cultural contexts that are valued for their form and style and are recognised as having enduring or artistic value". It does not suggest that SMS texts meet this definition.’
AATE believes that it is a strengthof the current national English curriculum that, up to Year 10, schools have the professional freedom to implement the curriculum with texts that they assess as being suitable for their own student cohorts. At this stage of schooling we consider it would be inappropriate for any specific texts to be mandated for use. We acknowledge that different arrangements apply in the different jurisdictions for Years 11 and 12.
Language strand of the F-10 English curriculum
AATE believes that a notably robust feature of the F-10 section of the English Curriculum is the way that content descriptions relating to vocabulary, grammar, usage, spelling and punctuation are detailed in the Language strand.
A particular strength is that learning about grammar goes beyond a narrow focus on the avoidance of errors (important though that is). In addition, it focuses on having students understand how the choice of particular grammatical patterns will produce particular effects and that such choices need to be appropriate to the genre, purpose and intended audience of the text being composed.
Literacy strand of the F-10 English curriculum
The Literacy strand is robust in that it is underpinned by a model of language use in which the language choices involved in the production of effective written, spoken and multimodal texts are responsive to genre, subject matter, purpose and audience.
Another element of robustness is that the concept of literacy in the Australian Curriculum embraces the multimodal texts now commonplace in digital environments as well as more traditional notions of reading and writing. Failure to do so would have a mid 20th century curriculum vainly trying to prepare students to operate in a 21st century world.
General Capabilities
In an opinion piece in The Australian of 10 January 2014, MinisterPyne wrote: “It (the curriculum) must be both content-rich and, importantly, focus on the 21st-century skills of critical thinking, team work, problem solving, creativity, analytic reasoning and communication.” The existing General Capabilities of the national curriculum seem to us to be so similar to what the Minister described as “21st century skills” that any change here would be simply change for the sake of change.
AATE endorses the General Capabilities as an important element of the national curriculum. The General Capabilities provide the basis for productive dialogue amongst teachers of different subjects and they promote effective whole-school approaches to teaching and learning. Too often in the past subjects in secondary schools have operated as separate, unconnected silos and students have not always been adequately encouraged to see the connections between the various areas of learning that comprise the whole curriculum.
The General Capability that most closely relates to subject English is literacy, indeed the same element is one of the three strands on which the F-10 English Curriculum is organized. In secondary schools it is reasonable that English teachers should take a leading role in developing literacy but research in Australia and across the world has shownthat best results are achieved when there is a whole-school approach to the development of literacy skills and when teachers of all subject areas accept as part of their responsibility a requirement to focus on and teach the literacy demands that are specific to their own disciplines.
Cross Curriculum Priorities
AATE considers that the existing Cross Curriculum Priorities are important issues that need to be addressed in a national school curriculum at this point in the country’s history.
Given the newness of the Australian Curriculum, someschools probably still need more time to determine the most productive ways to incorporate these elements into their programs.In addition, much good work has already been done in this area and to jettison it now would be wasteful.For this reason, any substantial change at this time would not genuinely be putting students first.
We believe that much media commentary on this aspect of the national curriculum has been based on an incomplete understanding of what the ACARA document actually says. Again, our view on this aspect is neatly expressed by part of a letter by ACARA Chief Executive, Robert Randall, published in The Australian of 29 October 2013 (also cited above):
‘Kevin Donnelly says "every subject has to be taught through environmental, indigenous and Asian perspectives" ("Conservative values deserve championing", 26-27/10). That is not so. They are identified as issues that should be addressed but only where relevant and as part of the teaching of the traditional disciplines.’
Conclusion
AATE’s very strong preference is for no changes to be made at this time to the English, General Capabilities and Cross Curriculum Priorities elements of the Australian Curriculum.
The best way for us to meet the needs of all Australian students in the 21st Century is to allow Australian teachers and schools across the country, and the professional associations such as AATE that support them, more time to understand, research and productively implement the existing curriculum.

Garry Collins

President

Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE)

February 2014

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