Curriculum

'Why do we have to learn this, Miss?' It's a question that comes up a lot in the classroom. It is an entirely legitimate one, since young people do have learning intentions of their own. They also learn a great deal outside of school, at home, through voluntary activities and through part-time employment As Garth Boomer - one of Australia's most imaginative curriculum thinkers -argued, what we learn in school should recognise this and should arise out of negotiations in which students' learning intentions are taken seriously (Boomer et al., 1992). Students' own ideas about what is worth learning need to be taken into account, and their questioning of why they have to learn certain things is legitimate. Was it their teacher who decided that this topic would be taught, or was she simply implementing a decision made by some state authority, such as a board of senior secondary studies? Did this topic get to be in the curriculum because some special interest group lobbied to have it included? Was the State Minister for Education influenced by a federal-level political initiative? Or was it included because the Minister amended the curriculum in order to gain a specific Commonwealth incentive grant? Between 1989 and 1993, Australia's state and territory Ministers worked together to create a series of national agreements known as the curriculum statements and profiles. Beginning in 2008, a new National Curriculum initiative was proposed, driven through the Ministerial Council on Education, Training, Employment, and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) and the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). By April 2009, learning area frameworks had been developed in English, Mathematics, Science and History, and the intention is that curriculum documents based on these frameworks will be implemented in schools from 2011. In this chapter, we provide an overview of some of the key themes of the curriculum studies field, and attempt to describe the complex mix of factors that influence what teachers teach and what children learn in our classrooms and schools