Curricular Decision Making: Influences and Interpretations

• In Event: Constructing a Common Curriculum: System, Discipline, School, and Classroom

Abstract

State authorities, school administrations and individual teachers engage in curricular decision-making. Our interest in this presentation is on the school and the teacher. What authorities or resources do teachers appeal to when planning their teaching? Curriculum documents are the most obvious authority. But what is a “curriculum document” for a mathematics teacher in Australia? Are there other authoritative sources of information that Australian teachers draw on when deciding what to teach?

In the context of the roll-out of the new Australian Curriculum, the project draws on Ball’s (1997) concern with ‘peopling policy’, and uses the broad methodological approach, Institutional Ethnography, to provide a systematic way of understanding how “the everyday world of experience is put together by relations that extend vastly beyond the everyday” (Smith, 2005, p.1). This approach allows us to combine a variety of data collection methods, suitable to investigate a national initiative with local consequences, from national survey to focus groups and classroom videos.

The results reported in this presentation come in part from analyses of the responses of over 600 primary and secondary teachers throughout Australia to an online survey on curricular decision-making. The distribution of respondents across the country suggests a resilience to the results that is very encouraging. This presentation addresses that section of the questionnaire dealing with curricular authority. Focus group interviews with groups of primary and secondary teachers provide meaning and exemplars to assist in unpacking the questionnaire findings.

The results were both surprising and reassuring. Teachers report that the results of their own assessment inform their planning in both yearly and weekly contexts. Reports of preferred curricular resources endorsed existing folklore, with commercial publications (e.g., textbooks) being accorded greater status in secondary schools than in primary schools. Finally, teachers place great reliance on experienced colleagues as arbiters of curricular uncertainty. Case study work elaborates the bases for these findings.

Three key issues emerged: (i) Australian teachers are not just curricular agents, they are required to be local curriculum developers. This places substantial reliance on teachers’ curricular knowledge. School-based curriculum leaders require all possible opportunities to develop their curricular knowledge and expertise, since their peers look to them for advice; (ii) Given the significance that teachers attached to the results of assessment, teacher education programs for both prospective and practising teachers should assist them in obtaining quality assessment information and making the best possible use of that information; (iii) It is essential that curriculum documents communicate clearly the performances that are actually valued by the curriculum and offer teachers clear indications of how these valued performances might best be promoted, developed and assessed. Given the responsibility Australian teachers have for local curriculum development, the resourcing of their interpretive acts must be seen as a national priority.

References
Ball, S. J. (1997). Policy sociology and critical social research. British Educational Research Journal, 23, 257-274.

Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A Sociology for People. New York: Altamiria Press

Authors

• David J. Clarke, University of Melbourne

• Peter Arnold Sullivan, Monash University

• Doug McLean Clarke, The Australian Catholic University