The Australian curriculum: continuing the national conversation

The purpose of this article is to identify some key areas of the Australian curriculum that remain sites of struggle and contestation. We propose that there remain a number of contentious points in relation to the national curriculum. These points relate variously to the content and form of the curricular documents; assumptions about knowledge, learning, teaching and assessment; ques-tions about the aims and rationale of these documents; and whether the documents deal with wider economic, cultural and technological changes. These points set the scene for a continuation of the conversation about the national curriculum and provide a framework for considering the issues raised in the remaining five articles in this Special Issue on the Australian curriculum.. Bernstein (1975, p. 85) argued that the stakes are high in the struggle over the selection, organisation and assessment of what a society counts as valid knowledge. This is because what knowledge is selected, how it is taught and how it is evaluated in schools go to the very heart of issues of individual and social identity. As Moore (2007, p. 3) argued, ‘what we know affects who we are (or are perceived to be). Issues of knowledge entail issues of identity’. Questions around the Australian curriculum have focused on issues of content (the question of what is selected a