A world-class curriculum? historical thinking and twenty-first century skills in the Australian curriculum: history

© 2018 Ashley Keith PrattThe Australian Curriculum represents significant work by educational authorities in Australia to create a curriculum that will serve the needs of young Australians for years to come. This thesis explores the extent to which the Australian Curriculum: History achieves its goal in constituting a world-class curriculum that prepares students for life and work in the twenty-first century. The thesis adopts a document content analysis method in order to evaluate the extent to which the explicit curriculum reflects the prevailing research on historical thinking and twenty-first century skills. Judgements are made on the basis of the frequency and context of how skills and concepts are expressed within the document and how they reflect the research. The thesis finds that the Australian Curriculum: History does not reflect the research as its articulation of historical thinking is unclear and lacks coherence. Furthermore, its articulation of twenty-first century skills fails to embed these into the document in ways appropriate to the discipline. This thesis lays bare the failings of the curriculum design process and recommends that future revisions of the curriculum more clearly reflect the research on historical thinking; and that further work be undertaken to determine how twenty-first century relate to the concepts of historical thinking and how these can be expressed in the explicit curriculum