Module 6: Resource 6:1
Curriculum Policy for Equity Futures
CURRICULUM POLICY FOR EQUITY FUTURES
PART A.
A contemporary view of equity to inform and shape curriculum policy renewal.
The SACSA Framework emphasises the role of education in the creation of a better society.
That is, a society that is fair and just and which pursues happiness, opportunity, sustainability
and the achievement of success for each and all of its members; ‘The SACSA Framework
reaffirms a long-held belief that education is central to the making of a fairer society.’
The recent DETE Equity Statement supports this vision with its focus on ‘a cohesive,
enterprising society in which all citizens can fully participate’.
A commitment to curriculum renewal as a key to improved futures for all is also highly visible
in national documents including The Adelaide Declaration of the National Goals of Schooling,
'…schooling should be socially just.'
Such commitments are founded on a belief that, in concert with other agents of social change,
educators can make a positive difference for individuals, for groups of learners, and for society
as a whole.
The contribution of educators includes a commitment to ensuring that:
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all learners experience teaching and learning and care of high quality in order to
maximise their chances of success prior to school, at school and in post-school life
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the curriculum supports learners to be civil citizens who understand and actively care
about each other, their society and the societies of others.
These goals are highly complementary. A civil society pursues success for all of its members,
partly through the provision of high quality education services that enable all young people to
achieve, both socially and academically. These education services then contribute to the
development of citizens who have a productive, creative and responsible orientation to their
communities, able to contribute to social capital on both a local and a global basis.
Equity Past and Present
When exploring current and future directions for curriculum policy renewal and equity, it is
both useful and inspiring to consider the progress on which educators are building.
For instance, the social and legislative change of the past 20 years has been accompanied
by:
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a range of education policies and programs designed to provide supportive and
equitable learning environments for all learners
differential resourcing practices to direct resources to those most in need
targeted initiatives to improve the learning outcomes of those seen to be least
advantaged by our schooling system.
This range of current and past policies, programs and resource allocation strategies includes:
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School Card Resource Allocations
Sexual harassment policy (1984) and grievance procedures, Education
Department of South Australia 1988
Social Justice Action Plan, 1992-94
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Commonwealth Country Areas Program
The plan for Aboriginal education in early childhood and schooling 1999 to
2003, DETE, 1999
Allocations to sites under the Equity Components of the Global Budget
The curriculum enactment of such initiatives has taken a range of forms in response to
theories, research findings, political imperatives, labour market demands and wider social
change.
For instance, a fundamental aspect of curriculum policy has focussed on access and
participation. From this perspective, curriculum is viewed as a valuable resource from which
all learners will derive benefits. Equity strategies are aimed at ensuring that all students have
access to, and participate in, the teaching and learning of the valued curriculum. A traditional
access and participation approach focuses on ‘getting the kids to school and getting them
involved.’ Such an approach may, of course, take for granted the value of the curriculum on
offer, eg.;
Educators teach literacy and numeracy. Learners who attend and participate will be more
literate and numerate as a result. Therefore, a crucial aspect of equity approaches should be
to ensure that all learners attend and participate in the literacy and numeracy curriculum on
offer.
Regular attendance at school is recognised as a crucial component of social and academic
success. Therefore, access and participation remains an essential aspect of equity policy.
A further development of access and participation approaches recognises that physical
access does not guarantee learning; that curriculum access and participation require teaching
and learning practices that ensure the inclusivity of the curriculum.
Inclusive approaches have involved the identification of content and practices that
discriminate against particular groups of learners, followed by approaches designed to
address this. For instance, the curriculum has often been defined as a set of middle class
practices that exclude learners whose knowledge and background does not match that valued
in schools. Strategies for inclusivity have aimed to address this by making the curriculum more
explicit or transparent. Again, such approaches may not actually question the value of the
curriculum being delivered.
A useful example of this approach is provided by practices of ‘explicit teaching’. This includes
the genre school of literacy teaching and learning which defines particular written and spoken
texts as ‘literacies of power’. These texts are seen as vital to learners’ achievement both at
school and in the wider world. Accordingly, these texts or genre should be deconstructed and
explicitly taught to learners as a way of enabling them to have power over the valued
curriculum.
A further refinement of approaches to inclusivity has sought to reform curriculum through the
acknowledgement and inclusion of learners’ diverse experiences and learning, and the ideas,
literacies and behaviours they engage with in their homes and communities. These are
attempts to make the curriculum permeable, to enrich and increase the relevance of
curriculum content and delivery.
These approaches, such as contextual learning, the inclusion of popular culture in the
curriculum and an emphasis on learning for real purposes, including social action, have made
curriculum more relevant and engaging for many students as well as supporting teachers to
value students’ funds of knowledge, home literacies and other skills learned outside the
school.
PART B.
Equity Futures
As old inequities continue to exist and reconfigure, and new ones develop, equity policy and
approaches continue to be reconsidered and re-framed.
For example, this is currently being recognised in anti-discrimination legislation at state,
federal and international levels where we can see a shift from the concept of individual action
against injustice to that of social community action.
The consequences of inequities and discrimination are great. The denial of opportunities to
expand the human capacities of all learners impacts on the whole of society.
As educators and policy makers develop a deeper understanding of how knowledge is shaped
by social context including power relations, attention has turned to the interdependence of
social and
academic learning in outcomes for all learners. The education community, linked with the
wider community of researchers, policy makers and social reform groups, now recognises that
the current learning offerings are not in the full interests of either the traditionally educationally
advantaged or the identified educationally disadvantaged groups.
This sets the scene for the necessity of transformative thinking and action in curriculum
renewal that takes into account curriculum justice for all learners.
The SACSA Framework centralises equity in the curriculum to promote powerful learning for
all learners. This provides for the expansion of the stages of equity as access, participation
and inclusivity into a level that can be described as curriculum transformation for all
learners.
The SACSA Framework calls for the transformative enactment of connections between Equity
Cross-curriculum Perspectives, Essential Learnings and Enterprise and Vocational Education
as learning through all Learning Areas from Birth to Year 12. The expectation is ‘that all
educators will engage with each of these dimensions of learning . . .as they construct learning
experiences for (and with) their particular learners’ (General Introduction SACSA Framework,
p 25).
For example, the topic of Shopping can provide rich learning using a range of Equity Crosscurriculum Perspectives in connection with Essential Learnings and Enterprise and Vocational
Education in Learning Areas in any Band. Learners in the Primary and Middle Years in
Design and Technology and Society and Environment may investigate how being a shopper
includes drawing on sense of gender and other social and cultural aspects of identity. They
may explore living in a consumer society and how connections are made between popular
and peer cultures based on assimilation rather than diversity (eg socio-economic status,
multiculturalism, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, abilities, location).
PART C.
The SACSA Framework presents constructivist learning approaches as the theoretical
foundation for practice to connect with learners, their diverse worlds and those of others,
locally and globally. These approaches, and particularly critical constructivism, support
curriculum transformation and provide the environment for learners to achieve the learning
qualities to enable co-investigation of ideas and their effects. For example, learners engage
with understanding how power operates institutionally and interpersonally, in relation to
advantage and disadvantage.
Learners and educators as critical constructivists together may, for example:
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examine the impact on people and society when there is a great divide between rich and
poor, the haves and have-nots, and how it could be different and better (eg questions
around why and how learning success seems to be mostly fixed by socio-economic status
consider the benefits of accepting social and cultural diversity including more flexible
gender identities as desirable and hopeful (eg wider subject choices made by boys and
girls, less sex-segregation in paid and unpaid work)
envisage preferable futures that can sustain social and ecological systems, and
pleasurable and productive lives for each and all. They identify current action that needs to
be taken (eg, on the issue of an ageing society, how can they as the young make more
connections with the old and together contribute to the community good).
Critical constructivist learning approaches closely connect with the recent research work on
what constitutes good pedagogy. This work identifies four elements of effective coconstruction of learning involving all learners:
 high intellectual demandingness
 highly supportive learning conditions
 recognition and embrace of social and cultural diversity (ie in terms of eg class, gender,
race, sexuality, ability, location)
 connectedness with learners’ lives and with local and global contexts.
For example, critical constructivist learning approaches engage with social and cultural
diversity and with understanding the contemporary constructions of child and young
adulthood, for example, the part played by consumerism and globalism.
The SACSA Framework enables educators and learners to engage in the co-construction of
learning. Critical constructivist learning approaches provide opportunities to connect this
learning with local and global contexts. Educators and learners can move past conventional
thinking to an understanding that the benefits of education can be extended beyond the
advantage/disadvantage divide where only one group can be on top. ‘. . .learners come to
recognise the nature and causes of inequality, and understand that these are socially
constructed and can therefore be changed through people’s actions.’ (General
Introduction SACSA Framework, p 7).