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Now we're teaching on autopilot

By Graham Parr - posted Monday, 20 November 2006


Then there is Jessica, a pre-service English teacher whom I visited on a teaching round earlier this year. Jessica's year 8 students were engaged in work that combined the study of English with the study of history, visual arts and technology.

They were learning about World War I narratives, contemporary peace initiatives and more, through a critical study of picture storybooks and online texts. They eventually produced their own informed, imaginative PowerPoint presentations, which brought together historical and literary knowledge, human empathy, quirky humour and an earnest hope for a better future.

Whatever merits there might be in a national curriculum, it is clear that an efficient and restrictive centralised curriculum would not allow for curriculum initiatives by the likes of Natalie and Jessica. It's worth challenging the cool "commonsense" logic of an efficient national curriculum with stories like these that speak to the professionalism of teachers and the diversity of human experience.

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I welcome any debate about a national curriculum that articulates shared principles and values, and that responds to concerns about teacher professionalism. I trust that such a curriculum will allow teachers to flexibly demonstrate their accountability vis-à-vis national frameworks and principles.

I also trust that teachers will be respected sufficiently to allow them to think critically and creatively about their teaching and their students' learning.

In the US, the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) policy from 2001 introduced a powerful and worrying model of centralised curriculum control. In this model, teachers were given little room for creativity at the local level. NCLB gave schools across the country no choice other than to commit to the sorts of phonics programs that I described above.

Five years later, groups such as the Carnegie Corporation, Northwest Evaluation Association (pdf 104KB), the RAND Corporation, as well as the National Council for Teachers of English, are reporting outcomes of the NCLB centralised reading curriculum as "abysmal".

According to the reports, American students are learning to sound out words fluently. The centralised testing regimes that are established to measure the learning in the centralised curriculum are showing that. According to these tests, the curriculum is working. However, other forms of assessment are revealing that students do not understand what they are reading.

As the evidence grows, the US is poised to do a U-turn on the centrally driven curriculum for the teaching of reading. The dangers of rigid centralisation are becoming all too clear.

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As a parent, as much as an educator and researcher, I want teachers to have some scope to develop curriculum. I shudder at the prospect of a national curriculum that turns teachers into robotic implementers of an impersonal set of edicts.

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First published in The Age on November 13, 2006.



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About the Author

Graham Parr is a lecturer in the faculty of education at Monash University and a member of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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