Curriculum as invader: Normalising white place in the Australian curriculum

Smith, Bryan (2024) Curriculum as invader: Normalising white place in the Australian curriculum. The Curriculum Journal, 35 (1). pp. 108-124.

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Abstract

Curriculum, as a policy and way of moving through educational experience, is entwined with an ongoing history of invasion in Australia and similar invader- colonial contexts. As a result of this, the conceptual foundations of curriculum in Australia reproduce colonial epistemologies as normative modes of knowing and consideration. One way of seeing how this is possible and easily reproduced is through a consideration of how renderings and representations of “place” – the complex entanglements of lands, histories, and identit(y/ies) – mediate both how (a) invasion can be normalised as a historical, geographic, and political “placial” reality, and (b) students and teachers might experience education in and of place. Indeed, “place” is a central guiding concept in official curriculum policy just as much as place is an experienced curriculum both within the school and in the broader world. In this respect, this paper looks to unpack how the concept of place is represented in curriculum policy and the attendant assumptions and implicit discourses that this (re)produces about the experiences of people in/of invaded place. Through a look at the coming revision to the Humanities and Social Science's learning area of the Australian Curriculum, I look to how the curriculum as policy frames place as synonymous with invader place epistemically and how this mediates what students can know and themselves feel about the em- bodied experience of learning about/in/of place.

Item ID: 79218
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1469-3704
Copyright Information: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Author. The Curriculum Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.
Date Deposited: 05 Jul 2023 02:03
FoR Codes: 39 EDUCATION > 3901 Curriculum and pedagogy > 390107 Humanities and social sciences curriculum and pedagogy (excl. economics, business and management) @ 100%
SEO Codes: 16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1603 Teaching and curriculum > 160399 Teaching and curriculum not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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