Conference Agenda

This paper examines the contribution of a group of critical curriculum scholars – among others, Michael Apple (1990), Henry Giroux, 1981), and Peter Mclaren (1986) - in the struggle for a U.S. curriculum and their commitment towards a more just society and education. The paper situates such a group of critical thinkers within a radical critical curriculum river framing a particular generation of utopia (Paraskeva, 2022; 2021). The paper frames such a generation as a substantive part of a great legacy of struggles in the field against inequality, segregation, poverty, and oppression. In so doing, the paper scrutinizes the accomplishments and frustrations of such a generation in the struggle against the epistemological privilege of positivist and functionalist curriculum impulses (Walker, 1985). In this regard, the paper highlights how such a generation coined the field politically and championed a new vocabulary, as well as their erroneous persistence in laboring fundamentally within a Modern Western Eurocentric platform to smash curriculum as a eugenic sorting machine (Selden, 1999). The paper also underlines how the wrangles between dominant and counter-dominant traditions not only could not avoid the epistemicidal nature of the curriculum but also drove the field into a theoretical involution, a regression, a dead-lock (Paraskeva, 2016; Schubert, 2017; Jupp; 2017). To address such regression, the paper argues for the need to decolonize Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant approaches and advances the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a new influential discourse (Pinar, 2013), a just approach to champion the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide; the paper places ICT as a decolonial curriculum theory turn (Andreoti. 2022). The paper ends by questioning some of the ‘silences’ produced by the critical curriculum hemisphere and calling for ‘the death’ of traditional/conventional ways to produce critical curriculum theory - Eurocentrically fully saturated - to de-link the critical theoretical out of the coloniality matrix. While honoring the rich legacy of the generation of utopia, the paper advocates the itinerant curriculum theory as a just path capable of responding to the world’s epistemological different differences (Paraskeva, 2022)

Education systems across international contexts are currently challenged with requirements to include representation of diverse perspectives, understandings and knowledges into their school curriculum and pedagogy. These calls result from insights about the importance of ensuring that equity initiatives are not just focused on redistribution of resources, but also foreground the recognitive and representational dimensions of an equitable, socially just education system (Fraser, 2008). In Australia this is playing out within the national curriculum space, with the call to include content about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and knowledges supposedly being met by their inclusion as cross curriculum priorities within Australia’s national curriculum. Despite these inclusions, public and political debates about Indigenous content in the curriculum continue to swirl within the media, and research suggests that few teachers are engaging their students in this dimension of the curriculum. These same curriculum contestations are evident in education systems across the globe, where traditionally marginalized groups are voicing their expectations for the curriculum to represent a more diverse range of knowledge systems, languages, social, cultural and religious practices than has occurred until now.

There is currently limited empirical understanding of secondary school teachers’ approaches, attitudes, and capabilities for teaching the curriculum content that is not from the dominant culture of a society, and the disciplinary structures that underpin these. In this paper we report on a study of these relevant issues, where the focus was on the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content into the national curriculum. While the study looked closely at the Australian context, these issues have global relevance in policy landscapes of hyper diversity. Prior research has considered the barriers to teachers taking on more inclusive curriculum practices as relating to curriculum structures (Beresford & Gray, 2006); lack of confidence on the part of teachers (O’Keeffe, Paige & Osborne, 2019) and their fears of ‘offending’ community sensibilities (Burgess & Evans, 2017); and the impact of the disjuncture created for teacher practice by the socio-political, epistemic and cognitive constraints built into the curriculum (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013) and the curriculum design (Maxwell, Lowe & Salter, 2018). This systemic, socio-political work of the curriculum foregrounds the dominant, disciplinary knowledges and their structures and delegitimises other ways of knowing and being.

The study aims to answer the following research question. How, why and what issues affect the development and impact of teachers’ meaningful engagement with curriculum content from diverse perspectives?

To do this, the study brings together ideas about epistemic cognition to understand how teachers assess the validity, certainty, reliability and limits of their own knowledges, with a focus on the development of the secondary subject orientated curriculum and its adherence to the core knowledge claims of the disciplines (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). The focus on Indigenous ways of knowing requires a third conceptual element to unpack what Nakata (2007) has termed the cultural interface. Within this framing, the tensions between Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and the claims of western schooling systems play out as alternative knowledge systems that vie for attention in the curriculum and in classroom settings. Nakata’s framing of the cultural interface acknowledges the damaging impact of western disciplinary knowledges on Indigenous thinking and identity, but also provides insights into understanding the socio-cultural potentialities and limitations of the teaching and learning content that is other than western disciplinary content within the current curriculum structures. The positive potentials frame a context where two or more knowledge systems might exist in the official curriculum in ways that create new knowledge without the dominant disciplinary knowledges making all other knowledge systems subservient.

Since the introduction of public schooling, Bildung has been and still is a central concept in education theory and curriculum policy in Continental and Nordic Europe. Presently, for example, the concept appears in the latest Norwegian, Swedish and Danish curriculum frameworks. In this article, we rely on ongoing systematic review of educational research on Bildung to explore different and evolving conceptions of Bildung in educational scholarship published in English over past 30 years and what implications those conceptions have for present day curriculum theory, policy and practice. The main research questions are: (1) What are the main themes and topics elaborated in literature regarding Bildung and curriculum? (2) What are main arguments and conclusions of the scholars regarding Bildung and curriculum? And (3) How do Bildung and curriculum shape curriculum theory, policy and practice nationally and trans-nationally?

Theoretically, the paper draws on Bildung-based Didaktik to frame the discussion on Bildung more generally (Hopmann, 2007; Klafki, 2000, 1998), but it will also build up from the conceptions and frames found in the articles included in the final pool for analysis that specifically address Bildung in/and curriculum.