Creating an Australian Curriculum: English: National Agendas, Local Contexts

This book cuts through the rhetoric about a national curriculum in order to raise important questions about the implementation of the Australian Curriculum: English. The aim is to inquire into the claims made on behalf of this curriculum through critical accounts generated by people working within a range of educational sectors and jurisdictions across the country.

Key questions posed by this book are:

• How can the Australian Curriculum be implemented in a principled, ethical, research-informed way for the benefit of all Australian students?
• How are teachers, educators and professional groups across the country anticipating, engaging with and planning for the new curriculum? How will it connect with the lived experience of teachers and students in Australian schools?
• What challenges does it pose for developing and implementing curriculum at a school and classroom level
• How might the three strands – Language, Literature, Literacy – be integrated in a meaningful way?
• How will educators be able to ensure that young people in schools engage with the curriculum on terms that are relevant to them?
• How might a single national curriculum that privileges the use of 'Standard Australian English' meet the particular needs of Australian students within diverse communities?
• How does the new national English curriculum, compare with existing state-based curriculums?

The book seeks to productively engage with issues that are likely to emerge as systems and schools implement the curriculum, re-envisioning curriculum as something that teachers and their students create within their local school communities.

Contents:

• Introduction

1. The new curriculum for English in Australia and student achievement
2. 'Australia, you're standing in it': curriculum in its place
3. Classrooms, creativity and everyday life: a continuing inquiry
4. Literature, hospitality and wreading
5. 'The visitor, the learner, the guest': an Australian teaching in England
6. Reimagining poetry: innovative literacies, national agendas and digital landscapes
7. From literature to literary practice:teaching texts in the Australian English curriculum
8. Literature teaching in The Australian Curriculum:retaining key practices
9. What happened to the education revolution? new media technologies and The Australian Curriculum
10. Youth literacy development through applied learning and the national curriculum
11. As if they could be otherwise… : Finding spaces for creativity in the enacted curriculum
12. Making sense of The Australian Curriculum: one school's journey
13. Creative writing and/in/beyond The Australian curriculum
14. The future of diversity and difference: Can the national curriculum for English be hospitable?
15. Grammar, Standard Australian English and The Australian Curriculum: English: what could principled implementation look like?
16. Castaways, aliens and colleagues in a new curriculum world:reading and implementing The Australian Curriculum: English