Conflict and Consensus in the History Curriculum: Political, Educational and Historiographical Theoretical Perspectives

Surveying the landscape five years on: An examination of how teachers, and the teaching of Australia's shared-history, is constructed within Australian academic literature

“…Islanders' perspectives in the ACH range across several main areas: from questioning in whose interests and through which voice the ACH has been written (Guyver, 2009;Parkes, 2007), to questioning the ways in which the ACH constructs Aboriginal peoples' and Torres Strait Islanders' perspectives on Australian history (O'Dowd, 2012;Vass, 2012;Williamson & Dalal, 2007), and how teachers engage critically with such concepts (Harrison & Greenfield, 2011;Hart, Whatman, McLaughlin, & Sharma-Brymer, 2012;Nakata, 2011). In the early stages of the ACH's release, there was considerable concern about the extent to which the curriculum reflected a hegemonic and homogenising Eurocentric perspective of Australian history.…”

“…(ACARA, 2012). There are a number of studies (Burgess, 2009;Ditchburn, 2012;Guyver, 2009;Nakata, Nakata, Keech & Bolt, 2014;O'Dowd, 2012;Salter, 2010) that discuss ways in which Eurocentrism occurs through processes of exclusion, silencing, or superficial examination of other possible perspectives of the same history. In particular, Vass (2012) puts forward the argument that whiteness enables the exclusion of 'Indigenous voices by denying the legitimacy and value of non-Western epistemologies and ontologies ' (p. 181).…”

“…Yet Clark (2006) does not offer any suggestions to remedy such concerns, nor investigate the capacity to which teachers are constructed within the discourses, or ways in which subjectivities of Aboriginality, and Torres Strait Islandership are taken up/resisted in curriculum. Rather, Clark (2006) maps discursively the conditions under which political and pedagogical anxiety has converged in discourses of Australian history education since the 1960s to inform a political agenda used to conceptualise and present a particular Australian Eurocentric national identity (Clark, 2006(Clark, : 2009Ditchburn, 2012;Guyver, 2009). The politicisation of Australian identity as inextricably couched within power/knowledge relations of Eurocentrism is made visible in ACH statements such as 'the extent of European imperial expansion and different responses' (ACARA, 2012), positioning them as privileged in discourses of Australian history.…”

A window to peace and tolerance or otherwise: a multi-perspective approach to curriculum analysis

“…A very limited number of studies analyze the history curriculum, which is often deliberated as a central part of the social studies curriculum (Ross, 2006). Evaluations of the Australian history curriculum (Guyver, 2009;McKeich, 2009;Patricia, 2009) and the Turkish history curriculum (Bircan and Tokdemir, 2013;Dinc, 2011) are two examples.…”