Remaking the professional teacher: authority and curriculum reform

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Remaking the professional teacher:authority and curriculum reformJessica Gerrard & Lesley FarrellPublished online: 10 Dec 2013.

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Remaking the professional teacher: authority and

curriculum reform

JESSICA GERRARD and LESLEY FARRELL

Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations areshaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasingturn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curricu-lum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one inwhich understandings about teacher professional authority is being redefined. In thispaper, we examine how judgements about teachers’ professional authority are used todefend, promote and explain the AC. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents andinterviews with high-level policy-makers, we argue that the AC is opening space in thepolicy field to reposition teachers’ work by promoting a view of teachers’ professionalauthority as constrained and defined through the written curriculum documentation.

Keywords: curriculum reform; national curriculum; teacher professionalism;policy reform

Introduction

Internationally, nation states are responding (and contributing) to thegrowing influence of global accountability measures and market-basededucation reforms. For many, a significant part of this response is consti-tuted by a move towards centralized standards-based schooling reform(Hopman 2008, Yates and Young 2010). Mediated by diverse histories ofschooling and schooling knowledge, countries such as Scotland, England,Finland and Norway have recently, or are currently, devoting significantresources to large-scale curriculum reform (e.g. Germeten 2011, Priestleyand Humes 2010, Whitty 2010, Young 2011). In keeping with this cur-rent trend, in 2008 under a Labor government, the Australian Federaland State/Territory governments agreed, in principle, to Australia’s firstnational curriculum. Following this, a series of policy settlements betweenthe Federal and State/Territory jurisdictions have secured a stutteringimplementation of the ‘Australian Curriculum’ (AC) nationwide. Indeed,at the time of writing, the AC ‘implementation phase’ is understood verydifferently across Australia’s eight States and Territories and is by no

Jessica Gerrard is a McKenzie postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Mel-bourne, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, 100 Leicester Street, Parkville, 3010;email: [email protected]. Her research interests centre on education andsocial change, policy sociology and critical social theory.Lesley Farrell is professor and associate dean (Research and Development) at the Univer-

sity of Technology, Sydney. Her research focus is on the impacts of globalization on localworkforces and work practices, and on knowledge mobilization across spatial and temporaldomains.

� 2013 Taylor & Francis

J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2014

Vol. 46, No. 5, 634–655, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.854410

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mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.854410

means a settled policy programme. Moreover, it is yet to be seen how thenewly elected conservative Coalition government will proceed with theAC. The move to a national curriculum is, nonetheless, a profoundly sig-nificant one for Australia where primary responsibility for school educa-tion rests legislatively with the individual State governments. The ACpolicy reform is clearly provoking a recalibration of systems-level relation-ships as part of the broader renegotiations of federalism. It constitutes asignificant policy site in which the Labor government advanced a widerproject of federal control over a range of areas, including health andeducation (Harris-Hart 2010).

At the same time, it is less obviously, but perhaps equallyimportantly, opening up negotiations around teachers’ role in relationto curriculum. In particular, it provides the opportunity for a newarticulation of what teacher professionalism—and teachers’ work—entails, especially in relation to professional knowledge, authority anddiscretion over official curriculum documentation. Indeed, internation-ally, the trend towards centralized standards-based reform representssignificant interventions into educational practices, at the systems andschool levels. Not only do such reforms mark the knowledge parame-ters for schooling, they also frame the professional practice of teachers.In other words, these reforms unsettle and potentially reconfigure previ-ous policy settlements surrounding curriculum knowledge and profes-sional expertise, however tenuous they may have been. It is important,then, to examine the ways in which these reforms open the space forpolicy to reiterate, and perhaps remake, understandings and practicesof teachers’ professional knowledge, authority and discretion in relationto the curriculum.

In this paper, we consider how curriculum reform intersects with therecalibration of teacher professionalism through examining the ways inwhich the AC policy reform constructs teachers’ work.1 We begin with adiscussion of contemporary challenges to—and dimensions of—profes-sionalism generally, and teacher professionalism particularly, provoked bymanagerialism and globalization. We consider recent shifts in thepractices and governance of teachers’ work globally and in Australia, andthe relationship between curriculum and the professional practice ofteachers. We then move to an analysis of AC policy documents and inter-views with high-level policy-makers charged with the task of producingand implementing the policies to support the AC reform. Examiningpolicy documentation alongside interviews with policy-makers, the focusof our analysis is on the ways in which ‘text and talk’ within the policyfield articulates understandings and representations of teachers’ profes-sional authority in relation to the emergence of a national curriculum.Our analysis is structured around three interconnected themes:

(1) The standardization of the curriculum(2) The reach and force of systems-level authority in relation to

curriculum(3) The contested relationships between teachers, curriculum and

pedagogy

REMAKING THE PROFESSIONAL TEACHER 635

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We argue that the scope and scale of teachers’ professional authorityis inevitably ambiguous in curriculum policy documentation. It is, none-theless, both contested and produced as the tensions between the author-ity of the standardized curriculum, the authority of competing educationssystems and the authority of teachers in classrooms are negotiated andmanaged amidst this significant curriculum reform.

Knowing and acting: teachers’ authority and curriculum

The work teachers do with curriculum is a central part of theirprofessional work. When a teacher encounters a mandated curriculumpolicy, what do they do with it? Do they implement it? Do they enact it,interpret it, resist it, translate it or animate it? They might even make ordevelop it. The word we choose to describe the actions they take matters.It reveals what we understand (or wish to assert) to be teachers’ level ofauthority and discretion in relation to mandated curriculum policy. Corre-spondingly, the ways in which these actions are inscribed within curricu-lum policy reveals much about what governments understand (or wish toassert) about teachers’ work. Curriculum policies and curriculum textshave powerful effects in their implicit and explicit depictions of teachers’work. The ways in which they describe, position and authorize teachers’use of the curriculum text, frames how teachers might exercise discretion,autonomy and expertise within their classroom practice (see Luke 1995).

Autonomy is a classical marker of professional authority. A traditionalcriterion for defining ‘professional’ status is the level of control individualsretain over the organization, and everyday performance, of their work(Freidson 1970: 185). In many respects, to be a professional has been his-torically perceived as having ‘ownership of an area of expertise and knowl-edge’ outside of the coercive control of organizations and externalmarkets (Evetts 2011b: 30, Freidson 2001). For teachers, their commonlocation in relatively large-scale, and largely public sector, organizationshas always made their membership of the professions ambiguous.Influenced by gendered notions of status and authority, traditional socio-logical approaches of the 1950s, for instance, often defined teachers as‘semi-professionals’ or ‘quasi-professionals’ (Leggatt 1970). In decadessince, re-conceptualizations of—and active occupational struggles over—teachers’ professionalism have repositioned their work (see Bascia 2009,Mausethagan and Granlund 2012). Asserting their professional knowledgeand their authority to make professional judgments, often workingthrough professional teaching associations and unions (Hilferty 2008),teachers have publicly struggled to be understood as ‘professionals’(Smyth et al. 2000). Yet, the position of teachers within the state hasalways meant that teachers’ work, and the understanding and expressionof professional ‘authority’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘discretion’ have always in someways related to the political and social struggle to define, organize, regu-late and control state systems of schooling.

Most recently, shifts in governance practices across national contextshave brought yet another reconfiguration of teaching as a professional

636 J. GERRARD AND L. FARRELL

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field (Gewirtz et al. 2009). Indeed, it is now the case that even those pre-viously unambiguous professions, such as medicine and law, are underchallenge from the twin forces of globalizing technologies and economicglobalization (Evetts 2011a, Fauconbridge and Muzio 2007). Such shiftsopen space for the redefinition and re-coordination of work practices. Theexpansion of managerialism and its attendant practices of target settingand performance management, for instance, have significant repercussionsfor how the traditional markers of professionalism—discretion and auton-omy—are understood and practiced (Evetts 2011a: 59).

These shifts are particularly important for teachers, as governmentsacross national contexts combine a long-standing interest in defining andmonitoring teaching and learning practices with competitive market-basedreforms, like ‘quality teaching’ and performance management and appraisal(see Evans 2011, Gray and Whitty 2010, Placier et al. 2002). At the sametime, internationally there is a continued and growing move towards cen-tralization and standardization of schooling curricula. These global changesin the nature of schooling and education reconfigure the institutional andprofessional boundaries of teachers’ work across different national contexts.Such openings generate a range of challenges to the ways in which teachers,teacher-educators, policy-makers and educational researchers, might cometo understand the work, and authority, of teachers.

From the UK, for instance, Woods and Jeffrey’s study of changingteacher identities signals the intimate connection between standards-basedreform, national curricula, and teachers’ professional identity (2002).Writing two years after the establishment of the English National Curricu-lum, Silcock (1990) also highlights how the implementation of thenational curriculum caused significant professional dilemmas surroundingteachers’ curricula authority. From the USA, Placier et al. (2002) study ofcurriculum writing in Missouri, points to the ways in which curriculumknowledge and documentation is invariably underpinned by particularepistemological standpoints related to teachers’ work. The contestationmet by teachers attempting to develop curriculum around a ‘constructiv-ist’ view of knowledge in this study, demonstrates that curriculum knowl-edge can never neutrally declare ‘standards’ that can float above teachingpractice.

In Australia, the political slogan ‘Education Revolution’ is associatedwith an extensive policy reform suite initiated by the Federal LaborGovernment to create a national architecture of schooling whilst in powerfrom 2007 to 2013 (Harris-Hart 2010, Lingard 2010). Since the constitu-tional responsibility for schooling rests with the states, this suite of policyreforms represented a significant bid to shift the weight of authority inrelation to schooling to a more centralized and standardized model. Thisnew national architecture included a school buildings scheme, theNational Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN),the national school comparison website ‘My School’, National Profes-sional Standards for teachers and of course the AC. The rhetoric aroundthe introduction of this more centralized model of schooling is associatedwith academic standards, equity and global competitiveness (e.g. Ruddand Gillard 2008).


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Despite this, the move towards a national architecture of schooling ispolitically contentious. Each of the eight States and Territories has itsown distinctive history and legislative requirements for curricula (Yateset al. 2011). We have not yet reached a policy settlement in relation toschooling, but a new federal ‘field’—in the Bourdieuian sense—of educa-tional governance and policy practice is clearly developing. Within thisfield Federal-State relationships, State-to-State relationships and relation-ships between responsible education bureaucracies are recalibrating.These recalibrations may be part of far-reaching changes in the politicallandscape in Australia as negotiations between the States, and betweenthe States and the Federal government, proceed. In addition, the recentelection, held in September 2013, which ousted the Labor Party from thefederal government, and brought the conservative Coalition Party topower, will undoubtedly have ongoing repercussions for the roll out ofthe AC. Whatever the outcome in relation to Federal-State relations,however, the introduction of the AC involves a contest over the scope,scale and knowledge base of teachers’ work. Indeed, even the ‘collabora-tive’ reform approach taken by the Labor government created new config-urations of consultation. By encouraging individual teachers to logresponses to draft curriculum documentation through on-line portals, theAC policy process arguably displaced—or at least modified—previous sys-tems of collective and representative consultation that have typicallyoccurred through teacher unions and professional associations.

At the same time, assumptions about what teachers can and shoulddo in the contexts of their schools and classrooms—what their profes-sional practices are and should be—are articulated in the AC document.Thus, whilst the ‘Education Revolution’ policy suite more explicitlyaddressed professional teaching standards through the Australian Institu-tion for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL, see AITSL 2011), theAC will also impact upon teachers and their work. This is because curric-ulum is developed in order to permit and constrain what happens in theclassroom; it is a powerful regulator of teachers’ work (see Harris-Hart2009). Curriculum documents have a ‘permanence—an immutability andduplicability—that is directly linked to their ability to be taken up across amultitude of classrooms and schools at any one point in time’ (Gerrardand Farrell 2013: 8). Curriculum documents are institutional texts—‘spe-cial coordinators of people’s activities’ (Smith 2005: 66). They are createdto regulate, frame and determine the work carried out in classrooms (seeBernstein 1996, Ladwig 2009). Teachers, ‘by virtue of their role and posi-tion, are expected to honour the intent of curricular authority in theirclassroom-based and school-based interactions with the students forwhom the curricular initiatives are intended’ (Campbell 2006: 111).

The realization of this expectation is, however, never straightforward.Curriculum reforms routinely rest on claims over teachers’ inadequateprofessional knowledge and practices. Calls for greater stipulation of cur-riculum documentation often carry with them assertions of teachers’ defi-ance or inability to ‘implement’ curriculum materials ‘correctly’ (seeAutio 2009). In addition, a range of school-based research indicates thatteachers’ use of curricula is far from a neat process of ‘implementation’.


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Teachers enact, animate, interpret and in some cases ignore, resist anddismiss, the policy directives handed down to them (Braun et al. 2010,Heimans 2012, Levinson et al. 2009). It is the intersection between thecurriculum document—the material text—and teachers’ everydaypedagogical and curricular decisions in the classroom that is important.Teachers are both the targets and the agents of curriculum reform.

Curriculum policy, teachers’ work and authority

The focus of our analysis is on the mechanisms by which the AC policyproduction process simultaneously draws upon and constructs under-standings of teachers’ professional work. Methodologically, we developthis analysis based on an understanding of curriculum policy productionas a practice (Gerrard and Farrell 2013; see also Heimans 2012 see alsoHeimans 2012). Understanding the social practices and meanings createdthrough policy reform, such as the AC, requires analysis of both policydocumentation and the meanings and understandings generated by workwithin the policy field. Because we are interested in understanding theways in which high-level policy-makers act upon the AC reform, it isimportant to consider the inter-relationship between the production ofpolicy texts, and the meanings and intents that are brought to this pro-duction (and eventual implementation). Just as curricula texts have pow-erful effects on teachers’ work, policy texts play an important—but lessoften researched—role in the meanings and understandings developed bypolicy-makers in the process of policy production. Following from this,our data includes interview transcripts and policy documents, and ouranalysis aims to identify and describe the ways in which AC policy reformprocesses constructs conceptions of teachers’ work. It is important to notethat the final AC policy documents were subject to intense productionprocesses involving debate, contestation, and compromise, and are, as wehave argued above, part of wider discourses and practices of governanceand power. The AC reform constitutes an important terrain upon whichpressing debates around the relationships between State and Federal gov-ernments have been, and are, prosecuted. We are therefore interested notonly in policy documentation itself, but the ways in which the social andinstitutional practices of policy production come to bear on its produc-tion, reception, and enactment.

To do this, we are informed by the methodological approaches ofDorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography and Pierre Bourdieu’s fieldanalysis, the conceptual basis of which we have developed elsewhere (seeGerrard and Farrell 2013). We suggest that bringing these twoapproaches together provides a generative methodological pathway forinvestigating policy reform. Both, for instance, bring focus to the ways inwhich curriculum policy reform is positioned within, and framed by,wider political and social contexts (and structures). At the same time,their particular approaches assist to generate distinctive, yet complemen-tary research analyses and understanding. Smiths’ focus on the operationsof institutional governance in the everyday ‘up take’ of texts in people’s


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work practices provides clear avenues for tracing the uses of policy textsin their production (Smith 2006). In particular, institutional ethnographysuggests tracing the intersections between policy texts and policy-makers’understandings and uses of them. Correspondingly, Bourdieuian fieldanalysis reminds us that these institutional processes are part of the widerdynamics of the educational and political fields, and the taken-for-grantedunderstandings of teaching and learning that underpin them (Bourdieuet al. 1991).

Developing upon institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian fieldanalysis, our research focuses attention on the positionality of teachersand teachers’ work within curriculum policy documentation, and in theuses and understandings of this documentation by those charged with itsproduction and dissemination at the systems-level (see Gerrard and Far-rell 2013). Understanding, with Smith, that texts carry significant author-ity, we start therefore by analysing a range of policy documentation inorder to trace in particular the ways in which teachers’ work is mobilizedwithin AC policy. In this analysis of the policy documentation, we exam-ine the ways in which policy texts identify, describe and demarcate theauthority of the AC, and correspondingly, how teachers are positioned inrelation to this authority. Drawing on Bourdieuian analysis, we also exam-ine the ways in which these policy texts are positioned in a changing fieldof practice surrounding state systems of education.

Following from this documentary analysis, we examine the transcriptsof interviews and focus groups with, and presentations of, 12 high-levelpolicy-makers. All of these policy-makers worked directly with the AC inthe state or Catholic education sector in either the emerging federal edu-cation field, New South Wales (NSW—the largest schooling jurisdiction),Victoria (the second largest) or the Australian Capital Territory (ACT—the smallest). We have described these interviewees as ‘high level policymakers’ as their work, unlike others we also interviewed as part of the lar-ger research project, is largely organizational in nature, concerned withsystems-level management of the AC. Interviews and focus groups weresemi-structured and explored the ways in which the legislative authorityof the AC, and its attendant policy documentation, was being enacted/adapted/resisted/interpreted within the policy field (see Alexiadou 2001,DeVault and McCoy 2006). Interviewees were asked broad open-endedprompts with regards to their own involvement in the AC process andtheir knowledge and experience of current and future change-processes.Pseudonyms are used for all the interviewees reported on in this paper, inaccordance with ethics requirements.

Exploration of the ways in which policy-makers understand the AC inrelation to teachers’ professionalism raises a number of methodologicalcomplexities. Each person’s institutional and personal position in relationto the AC is crucial to the ways in which they understand, and enact,their authority over and responsibility for, AC policy. This is particularlytrue for research such as ours that works across different States andTerritories, each of which has approached the AC reform distinctly.Victoria and NSW, for instance, have their own statutory authoritiescharged with the task of developing and providing schooling curricula


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(the NSW Board of Studies and the Victorian Curriculum andAssessment Authority). Since the AC, both of these bodies continue todevelop State-based curriculum (or in the case of NSW, syllabi) thatembed the AC within them. In ACT, the Department of Education andTraining had previously developed ‘curriculum frameworks’, and is cur-rently implementing the AC alongside their most recent iteration of this.Therefore, whilst we do not aim to comparatively analyse policy-makersacross different jurisdictions, we do identify the different jurisdictions inwhich they work throughout our analysis.

Our analysis across both documents and interviews generated threeinter-connected themes which we explore in the discussions below: thestandardization of the curriculum; the reach and force of systems-levelauthority in relation to curriculum; and the relationships betweenteachers, curriculum and pedagogy.

The textual authority of the AC: policy documentation

Following institutional ethnography, part of our policy analysis involvedidentifying the key policy texts that carry authority within the AC reformprocess (see Campbell 1998, Smith 2005), and thus those which areassisting to re-settle the logic of the new federal curricular field (seeBlackmore 2010). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the AC reform has come witha mass of policy documentation. At the federal level, the AC has involvedthe production and circulation of a range of ministerial communiques,fact sheets, media releases and Federal-State governmental agreements.This includes the establishment of the federal-level AC, Assessment andReporting Authority (ACARA), charged with creating the AC and Educa-tion Services Australia (ESA), charged with providing resource supportfor the AC and other federal-level education initiatives. In addition, theLabor government’s asserted ‘consultative’ approach involved the writing,distribution and consultation of general and subject-specific ‘FramingPapers’ and then ‘Shape Papers’. Ensuing from this, are a wide variety ofconsultative submissions from professional associations, individual teach-ers, academics, unions and so on, as well as a number of AC policy itera-tions, as each ‘Shape Paper’ has undergone drafting and re-drafting.Further to this, the AC has prompted a range of policy responses fromeach of Australia’s eight States and Territories, as well as the differentpublic and private schooling sectors contained within them.

For the following analysis, we have drawn on a range of ministerialdocuments and statements that aim to communicate the central ideas ofthe AC. (e.g. Gillard 2008, 2009, 2010), as well as a number of ‘land-mark’ policy documents. These key documents have contributed to estab-lishing the epistemological framework of the AC and in shaping the formand content of the policy process. This includes The Melbourne Declarationon the Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008), agreedupon by all of the State/Territory and Federal governments in December2008 and which provides the policy mandate for current interventions ineducation. This is a text that is regularly used across jurisdictions to pro-


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vide explanation of and purpose to current educational reforms, and—asis evident in the discussion below—was referenced by many of our inter-viewees. In addition, we also analysed the most recent iteration of theShape of the AC paper (ACARA 2012), a document that aims to outlinethe general parameters for the AC.

Teachers, curriculum and pedagogy. Pitched as a respect for teachers’ pro-fessional knowledge in classroom pedagogy, one of the most prominentfeatures of the AC policy documentation is the assertion that the ACconstitutes ‘what to teach’ not ‘how to teach’. As Julia Gillard, thenMinister for Education, stated when introducing the legislative Bill thatestablished ACARA:

A national curriculum will benefit teachers by giving them a clear under-standing of what needs to be covered in each subject and in each year levelduring each phase of schooling. It will also allow teachers the flexibility toshape their classes around the curriculum in a way that is meaningful andengaging for students. (Gillard 2008)

More recently, and more ardently when in the position of Prime Minister,Gillard (2010) asserted:

The K–10 Australian Curriculum will not mandate the approaches thatteachers use to deliver its content and achievement standards. Teachers willcontinue to use their professional judgment about what to cover and inwhat sequence in order to meet the learning needs of individual students.In this way, teachers can demonstrate their own creativity in their approachto curriculum delivery.

The distinctions between pedagogy and curricula are further supported bythe institutional configurations in (and logics of) the new federal field ofeducation policy. The separation, for example, of ACARA and AITSLdemarcates the domain of curriculum reform from the development ofprofessional standards. Adding further institutional complexity (and dem-onstrating the proliferation of federal institutions involved in enacting theAC), it is ESA that is responsible for promoting successful school ACenactment through its ‘flagship’ professional learning program ‘LeadingCurriculum Change’. This institutional separation of curricula and peda-gogy suggests an underlying presumption that teachers’ professional worklies not in formal curriculum selection, making, or development but in its‘delivery’, as Gillard puts it. And unsurprisingly, this notion is echoed inthe AC policy documentation.

System-level authority and the AC. In the ACs’ guiding document—theMelbourne Declaration on the Educational Goals for Young Australians—teachers receive a total of 8 mentions in the 20-page document, in com-parison to curriculum (24 mentions), students (37), young people (17),government (40), schools (35) and schooling (33). First appearing onpage 11 under the heading ‘Supporting quality teaching and leadership’,


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the document most often describes teachers’ professional judgment anddiscretion in terms of their pedagogical relationships. Notable also, is theemergence of the ‘excellent teacher’. Teachers ‘are of fundamental impor-tance to achieve these educational goals for young Australians’ (12), andwith ‘commitment and hard work’ alongside governments and sectors,can work to provide young Australians ‘with the opportunity to reachtheir full potential’. Meanwhile, excellent teachers:

… have the capacity to inspire and transform the lives of their students andnurture their development as learners, individuals and citizens … shapingteaching around the ways different students learn and nurture the uniquetalents of every student. (12)

At the same time, ‘assessment for learning’ will ‘enable’ and ‘assist’ teach-ers to ‘use evidence about student learning’ (14), while school principalsand leaders will ‘coach and mentor’ teachers to ‘find the best ways tofacilitate learning’ (12). Here, in one of the most formative policy docu-ments of the ‘Education Revolution’, teachers’ professional authority isdefined as ‘shaping’ learning environments, and ‘inspiring’ and ‘encourag-ing’ students.

In contrast, the Melbourne Declaration positions the national curricu-lum as the primary agent of students’ learning and knowledge develop-ment. The curriculum, rather than teachers, emerges as having theknowledge and discretion capable of engendering student learning. A‘world-class curriculum’ will:

draw on a combination of the professional judgment of teachers andtesting;enable every student to develop: a solid foundation in knowledge, under-standing, skills and values on which further learning and adult life can bebuilt;support students to relate to others and foster an understanding ofAustralian society, citizenship and national values;include practical knowledge and skills development … essential toAustralian’s skilled economy;enable advanced learning and ability to create new ideas and translate theminto practical applications;enable students to develop knowledge in the disciplines of English, mathe-matics, science, languages, humanities and the arts;support the development of deep knowledge within a discipline; andsupport young people to develop a range of generic and employable skills.

Apart from the first quote, in which the AC will draw on ‘professionaljudgment of teachers and testing’, the AC is developed without mentionof teachers’ professional knowledge, authority or discretion. Compound-ing this, it is predominantly the government, systems or schools whichhave authority to enact and develop the national curriculum: ‘State,Territory and Commonwealth governments will work together with allschool sectors to ensure world-class curriculum in Australia’. At the locallevel, it is ‘Schools and school systems’ that ‘are responsible for deliveringcurriculum programs’, and not teachers.


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Of course, the Melbourne Declaration is a systems-oriented documentthat lays the foundations for policy requirements and responsibilities ofAustralia’s Federal, State and Territory governments. It is thereforeperhaps unsurprising that the document primarily locates agency for itsgoals with the Federal and State and Territory governments and thecurriculum documents they produce, and not with teachers. However, theglossing over of teachers’ work is significant. Indeed, as the AC reformprocess has progressed, policy documentation increasingly draws a linebetween teachers’ pedagogical work and the authority of the AC to definethe knowledge work undertaken in classrooms.

Standardization of curriculum. A key aspect of the AC reform are the‘Framing’ and Shape’ papers. As well as an overarching Framing/Shapepaper, individual subject-based papers have been developed as a basis forthe AC development, and thus as a means to canvass professional discus-sion surrounding the curriculum reform. In the latest version of the over-arching Shape of the AC (2012), it is again the curriculum that ispositioned as the primary authority of classroom teaching and learningpractice. In this 26-page document, teachers receive a total of 22 men-tions, in comparison, for instance, with the AC (134), students (99),school (30) and schooling (26), ACARA (18), the Melbourne Declaration(13) and government (1). In the vast majority of these appearances, it isnot the teachers who act in any authority with or over the AC. Rather,teachers are the subject of, and are subject to, the AC. The AC and itsattendant support materials, for instance ‘makes clear’ to teachers what isto be taught (10, 13, 20), ‘supports’ teachers through its consistent lan-guage and structure (11), and ‘assists’ teachers to make appropriate judg-ments (19, 22). Where teachers’ professional authority does come to bearon AC enactment, it is in pedagogical considerations rather than curriculaones. Indeed, the document clearly states ‘Schools and teachers determinepedagogical and other delivery considerations’ (11).

Correspondingly, the AC is represented as encompassing all possiblecurricular considerations for teaching and learning practice. Followingfrom this, teachers’ role is represented as largely pedagogical and interpre-tive in character. For example, it is the AC that ‘enables high expectationsto be set for each student as teachers account for current levels of learningof individual students and the different rates at which students develop’(ACARA 2012: 10). Similarly, it also states, ‘Students with disability canengage with the curriculum provided appropriate adjustments are made, ifrequired, by teachers to instructional processes, the learning environment,and the means through which students demonstrate their learning’ (18).At the same time, ‘pedagogy’ is afforded minimal space within the curric-ulum documentation. In the Shape of the AC it is mentioned just once,listed amongst ‘learning’, ‘what works in professional practice’ andinternational benchmarks as part of the AC’s strong evidence base (11).Interestingly, whilst acknowledging its importance, the AC draws a sharpline between curriculum and pedagogic knowledge and practices.


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Presented as affording space for teachers’ professional expertise inmaking pedagogic decisions, this organization of curriculum knowledgehas important repercussions for how teachers are represented in ACpolicy, and indeed how they are understood as having professionalauthority. Examining this further, the following section draws on inter-view analysis to explore how policy-makers position teachers’ knowledgeand discretion in their understanding of the AC reform process.

AC policy in practice: policy-makers

In this interview analysis, we draw upon Dorothy Smith’s explication oftexts as ‘providing the terms under which what people do becomesinstitutionally accountable’ (2005: 113). By virtue of their immutability,and their authority as legitimated communiques and/or guidelines foraction, texts are the ‘key juncture between the local settings of people’severyday worlds and the ruling relations’ (Smith 2005: 101). In doing so,we understand that the textual authority of the AC may evoke multiplemeanings, as each policy-maker negotiates their own role and responsibilityin relation to its ‘implementation’. At the same time, however, common ACpolicy texts connects the practices of each policy-maker to others across theeducation field, and to the wider governmental imperatives that are embed-ded within, and that provide the policy context for, the AC. In other words,the AC reform process is subject to the logic of the field, at the same time ascontributing to its reconfiguration (Bourdieu 1990). We can see this processat work in the ways in which policy-makers, across a range of institutionalsettings, take up the meaning and intent of the AC.

Standardization of curriculum. Whilst having differing perspectives, acrossthe policy interviews, there was a common view that the AC representeda textual, and policy, instantiation of equality of educational opportunity.In a reiteration of the language and intent of the Melbourne Declaration,many interviewees spoke of the purpose of the AC as relating to the enti-tlement of students to have access to a common, consistent, and equita-ble, schooling experience. Mark (NSW, state sector), for instance, arguedthat the AC was about systems-level responsibility for the creation of acommon Australian schooling curriculum.

… the way I understood it from the beginning is … what is it that we thinkeveryone is entitled to learn, and therefore teachers are responsible to teach,and systems are responsible for ensuring that students attain.

With different emphasis, Fran ( federal, state sector) spoke of the AC asbeing primarily about promoting educational equity:

I really looked at the points within the Melbourne Declaration and they tiedin very closely with my own feelings about ensuring that we do have an equi-table system that’s available for all our students and, you know, for ourteachers to have the kind of expectation of what is expected of them veryclearly.


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Linked to this, was a perception that the AC provided a much-neededcommon standard for Australian students. For one Victorian state sectorpolicy-maker, David, the need for a consistent and centralized approachwas related to systems-level, rather than school-level, previous failures todevelop curricula. He asserted, ‘we atomized it to buggery. And I blamethe system. I don’t think it’s a teachers’ issue at all, we haven’t helpedthem at all’. Drawing on international, mainly south-east Asian examplesof curriculum reform, David connected the need for a standards-basedapproach to educational equity with the increasing imperative for educa-tion systems to compete internationally. David was only two policy-makers to refer specifically to other international systems in detail or toidentify the aim of producing an internationally competitive system as ameans of redressing increasing student inequality. Like others, however,he argued in favour of a centralized curriculum on the basis that a com-mon curriculum could assist in tackling the growing inequality in Austra-lian students’ educational outcomes. Despite differences in perspectiveand approach, policy-makers commonly spoke of the power of the AC aslying in its ability to authorize Australian students’ entitlement to a com-mon, consistent and equitable curriculum. There is, in other words, con-vergence between policy-makers’ understandings of the need for the AC,and assertions made of the AC within the policy documentation discussedabove.

This presumed need for a standardized national curriculum, whichcould both respond to educational inequalities and at the same time pro-vide the basis for a globally competitive education system, was also linkedto teachers’ work. The high-level policy-makers we spoke to connectedcurriculum standardization with a need for education systems to take con-trol of curriculum practice in schools. This concern to connect curriculumstandards to a systems-level claim to authority was particularly exempli-fied in the data from our interviews with two high-level state sector pol-icy-makers in NSW and Victoria—Mark and Sarah. For Mark (NSW,state sector), the AC provides an important opportunity to challenge teach-ers’ professional discretion in relation to curriculum stipulation. He spokeof the need to take ‘on teachers that are holding us to ransom: we’re tak-ing on the progressionists, social engineers of education, we’re going tomake it commonsense.’ He went on to argue that the AC is an importantsystems-level reclamation of common knowledge authority:

Teachers generally aren’t trained, or equipped, or want to define what isimportant within a discipline to teach. They are trained, and equipped, andwant to work on how best to get the students that learning … They mayhave their own views, but a community as a whole decides—‘this is what iscore learning for everyone’.

Similarly, asserting that teachers’ professional practice did not extend todefining or planning curriculum, Sarah (Victoria, state sector) suggestedthat, ‘teachers are not actually trained to be curriculum planners so theydon’t know how to do it’. As with Mark, Sarah also understands the ACas an important, and necessary, policy event that could better stipulate


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how, and in what ways, teachers might exercise their professionalknowledge and expertise.

System-level authority and the AC. Historically, different State and Terri-tory jurisdictions have been perceived to have very different positions inrelation to curriculum authority (see Yates et al. 2011). For instance, themore directive (though distinct) curriculum and syllabi approaches ofVictoria and NSW, respectively, differ significantly from ACT, whichbeing a much smaller jurisdiction, has only relatively recently establishedcurriculum ‘frameworks’ to assist school-based curricula planning anddevelopment. Nonetheless, across these three jurisdictions, the policy-makers we talked with commonly spoke of the AC providing an importantopportunity to intervene into teachers’ current uses of curriculum docu-mentation. These policy-makers asserted that the AC provides a platformto respond to perceived discrepancies in teachers’ current uses of autho-rized curriculum. Often, this position was linked to the perception thatmany schools and teachers are currently failing to meet the needs of allstudents. Fran ( federal, state sector), for instance, explained the need forthe AC as linked to the need to address current gaps in teachers’ disci-plinary knowledge and subsequent inconsistencies in classroom practices.Speaking on the English curriculum, Fran remarked:

I worked too long with teachers who would program for writing … thenthey’d just do something completely different for reading, then they’d dosomething for speaking, well let’s hope they did some speaking!

Similar points of view were also out forward by policy-makers in theACT. Carmen, for instance talked about the AC as a positive opportunityto address variances in teachers’ implementation of curriculum, and thusstudents’ reception of it:

Certainly from my point of view in the ACT we were unique in that wehad school based curriculum so we really had a child in one school whocould have got a great curriculum or a lousy one just depending, so schooland teacher specific … So getting much more united strength across thewhole curriculum has to be positive. (Carmen, state sector)

Across these accounts, policy-makers routinely represented the AC as anecessary and welcome intervention into existing inconsistencies inteachers’ use of existing curriculum documentation. In other words, pol-icy-makers talked about the AC in terms of its impact upon teachers’interpretation and use of curriculum documents, including their pedagogi-cal enactments of curriculum in classrooms, and the ways in which theyexercise their professional authority in relation to curriculum. Forinstance, Mark (NSW state sector) viewed increased curriculum stipulationas having important ramifications for teachers’ work:

The more detailed the document, the less likely that it is to become some-thing independent of the original intention, so you can’t get a postmodernreading of something … So there is this myth that you give it to teachers,


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and they will know how to teach—they aren’t practicing sociologists, prac-ticing scientists, practicing mathematicians, they are teachers are thosedomains.

Others took a different view of the potentiality of curricula standardizationfor teachers. Two of our interviewees from the Catholic sector, forinstance, talked about the AC as promoting ‘reflective’ and ‘evidencebased’ teaching practice. Jean (Victoria, Catholic sector), put it this way:

You want teachers to be really thoughtful, rigorous, reflective, think aboutwhat’s appropriate in this time and place. In terms of students’ entitlementI think to know a rich body of learning but also know the stuff that’s inter-esting, relevant and engaging today.

Peter (Victoria, Catholic sector) echoed this sentiment, describing his sup-port of teachers’ AC enactment as endevaouring to promote an ‘evidenceengaged’ approach to curriculum enactment that focused on studentslearning needs. Emerging within policy-makers’ AC discourse, then, is thenotion that the AC might promote different professional practices ofteachers. For Dorothy (federal, state sector), for example, the AC repre-sents an opportunity for greater professional reflection and discussion,and a potential alternative to textbooks. She states:

I’m hoping that the text books will become less of a crutch for some teachersin teaching, that they can actually look at the expansion in the way they teach,or in their practice, in their pedagogy, and actually their connection withother people around Australia. I think this is the gem about the AC, that it’spromoting discussion and connection with people from all around Australia.

In discussing teachers’ curricular practice, policy-makers also expressedconcern over teachers’ different capabilities in responding to the ACreform. For Carmen, speaking here specifically about primary teachers,this concern invariably intersected with assessments surrounding teachers’disciplinary knowledge:

I do think that there will be a huge issue about retraining … It’s gettingpeople to understand, it’s one thing to understand content but it’s anotherone to be able to teach it so that’s history, that’s geography. (Carmen, ACT,state sector)

Supporting Carmen, Wendy contends:

I actually think it’s good that it’s phased in because I don’t think teacherswould be able to cope with the whole lot at any one time. (Wendy, ACT,state sector)

These policy-makers related their perception of existing discrepancies inprofessional knowledge and expertise, to the limitations of AC ‘implemen-tation’. Nonetheless, this was not a view shared by all policy-makers. Fran(federal, state sector), for instance, asserted that teachers were already suc-cessfully adapting to the new curricula. She said:

Now at the moment we have got schools that are trialing it, the feedbackfrom teachers anecdotally is very good. Systems are still seeing their place


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within it, but the teacher seem to be—the only feedback we’re hearing andhave heard by them all along have said ‘oh no, we can see this, we can dothis, we like it’

For Fran, then, reports on current enactments of the AC by teachers,supported a concurrent perception of teachers’ existing professionalpractices as being capable of translating the textual authority of the ACinto teaching and learning.

Teachers, curriculum and pedagogy. Having the responsibility of enactingthe AC, of delivering students’ entitlement to a common, consistent,equitable curriculum, teachers’ use of the AC was a common topic in ourinterviews. Some policy-makers described, in correspondence with the ACdocumentation, teachers’ professionalism as lying predominantly in peda-gogical acts: as put by Mike (federal, state sector), the ‘power of that rela-tionship between young people and teachers’. In large part, policy-makersvariously represented teachers’ professional authority as lying in the inter-sections between pedagogy and curriculum: in the space, in which thewritten curriculum document comes to be animated, implemented, per-formed in and through classroom teaching and learning activities. Richard(Victoria, Catholic sector), for example, described teachers’ work as consti-tuting a form of ‘curriculum design’:

The message that we’re delivering to our schools is we’re saying we’re notgoing to tell you how to do it and what you have to do. The decisionsaround curriculum design are at the local level not a sector level. So whatwe say though if that’s the case, that’s the expectation, then our responsibil-ity is to assist schools to have internal capacities for curriculum as curricu-lum designers as they have best practice assessment, best practice in theirteaching strategies.

Noting his own responsibilities as a policy-maker in delivering the entitle-ments inscribed in the AC, Richard represents teachers’ professional workas an embedded part of the curriculum design process.

Teachers, therefore, appear within policy discourse as having profes-sional authority in their translation of curriculum documents in order tofulfill their perceived role in consistently and equitably delivering curricu-lum to students. However, arguably these discourses were somewhat par-tial. High-level policy-makers may have conceptualized teachers as‘curriculum deliverers’ (as discussed above) or ‘curriculum designers’, butwhat this means in relation to teachers actual day-to-day engagement withthe AC text is less clearly articulated. As the logic of the federal educationfield, in the Bourdieuian sense, is articulated through the institutional andpolicy demarcations between curriculum and pedagogy, and as the AC isasserted to have textual authority (and agency), in the Smith sense, toprovide equitable schooling outcomes, teachers’ role in the AC is far fromclear. Moreover, the multiple meanings to emerge from the interviewanalysis indicate that the resettling of the curriculum field, interrupted bythe policy event of the AC, is by no means complete. Reflecting the cur-


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rent situation whereby the AC continues to be subject to debate and dis-sent, and is at various levels of implementation, policy-makers are by nomeans unified in their understanding of teachers’ role in AC school-levelenactment. Nonetheless, the arrival of the AC, as a formal document ofcurricular authority, has important ramifications for the understandings ofteacher professionalism in the field of policy production and practice.

Conclusion: remaking the professional teacher?

There is a long-standing tension surrounding teachers’ claim to profes-sional authority and the institutional claim to constrain and direct teach-ers’ work. Internationally, the pressures of a global standards-basedcompetitive education market have prompted many nation states to movetowards more standardized and centralized approaches to schoolingcurriculum. These broad shifts in curriculum policy marks an importantintervention into teachers’ work, and has the potential to remake—to pro-duce new conceptualizations and practices surrounding—the professionalrole of teachers in relation to the authorized curriculum. At the nationallevel, each individual curriculum reform requires new policy settlements,new professional practices related to managing student and teacherperformance of standards, and ultimately new ways in which policies,policy-makers and teachers’ understand teacher professionalism in relationto their discretion and authority over schooling curricula.

In Australia, the current recalibration of systems-level policies andrelationships is providing the opportunity to rearticulate teachers’ work.The Labor Government’s ‘Education Revolution’ has been a key site inwhich pre-existing policy settlements surrounding curriculum authority isbeing re-negotiated. A significant aspect of this is the assertion of federalinterest in and control over schooling practices. The AC (and accompany-ing federal educational reforms) has unsettled existing systems of educa-tional governance and practices, and has created the opportunity forpolicy-makers to reassert, and perhaps redefine, their understandings ofteachers’ work. Of course, the analysis we offer here is just one aspect ofa range of analyses required to unpick the complex web of activity sur-rounding the AC, and the Education Revolution reform suite morebroadly. Certainly, analysis of the interweaving relations between concur-rent reforms in the education sector, such as NAPLAN and AITSL, willrequire further research and analysis. In addition, as we write this, theAC is yet to be fully implemented. It is yet to be seen how teachers willinterpret and enact it. For instance, examination of teachers’ involvementin AC consultations carried out at Federal and State and Territory levels,would provide important insight into the inter-relationships betweenteachers and policy-makers within the reform process. Analysis of teach-ers’ own interpretation of their work in light of the AC is also necessaryin order to fully understand the impact of the AC reform. Moreover, atthe time of writing, it is unclear what direction the newly elected federalCoalition government will take on the AC.


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In this paper, we have analysed AC policy documentation alongsidetranscripts of interviews with high-level policy-makers to develop under-standing of the ways in which teachers’ work is being cast within the ACreform process. Drawing from the methodological frameworks of PierreBourdieu and Dorothy Smith, we have found working across policy textand interviews with policy-makers a particularly productive way to investi-gate the understandings embedded within, and created by, the AC policyreform process. By incorporating policy-makers’ perspectives alongsidepolicy texts, we have examined the dynamic processes of policy develop-ment and enactment, which lie behind and beyond glossy policy texts.Moving across from text to talk in our analysis, we have traced the waysin which the federal education field, and the AC reform more specifically,is creating the field upon which teachers’ work is once again up for nego-tiation. Analysing curriculum policy documentation alongside interviewswith high-level policy-makers, we have identified three inter-connectedthemes: a general commitment and embrace of the standardization of cur-riculum as a means to intervene into current educational practices; theinstantiation of systems-level authority over teachers’ work with curricu-lum; and contested—and at times ambiguous—conceptualizations ofteachers’ work in relation to curriculum and pedagogy.

Our analysis of policy documentation reveals that the AC reformactively asserts the AC as having textual authority—and agency—withinAustralian schools to provide students with a quality, ‘world-class’, andequitable education. In constructing the textual authority of the AC, thepolicy documentation depicts the AC, rather than teachers, as having thepower to enact these provisions: teachers’ professional authority and dis-cretion, on the other hand, lies predominantly in their creative andresponsive implementation of the AC. These sorts of assertions are unde-niably linked to the need for the federal government to make strident itscase for this recalibration of systems-level curriculum arrangements. Theyalso must be understood in light of the pragmatic demands of policy set-tlements, in which governments must respond to potential contestationand criticism for attempting too much centralized control at once.Arguably, the policy separation of teachers’ work from the curriculum(AITSL versus ACARA), including separate policy announcements anddocumentation suites, assisted the Labor government to reach policysettlements with the States and Territories. Nonetheless, such policysettlements have reverberated effects on fields of practice, particularly in afield that is still establishing its own parameters of practice.

Our analysis of interviews with high-level policy-makers shows thatwhat constitutes teachers’ authority and discretion is not settled. Policy-makers are offering multiple and sometimes contradictory articulations ofteachers’ work as they try to animate the AC in their own jurisdictions andsectors: this study can only give a taste of the complexity and nuance ofthese responses. Nevertheless, although settlement is still yet to be reached,the policy field is creating the parameters within which policy-makersunderstand the AC reform. To be sure, the policy construction of the ACas providing student entitlement to a common and/or equitable schoolingexperience provides a common conceptual framework for many of the pol-


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icy-makers we interviewed. In addition, the uncoupling of curriculum andpedagogy in the Education Revolution reform suite is also taken up by thepolicy-makers we spoke with. Whilst diverse in their positions and views,policy-makers viewed the standardization of AC as linked to systems-levelauthority over teachers’ work. This involved, for instance, asserting theright of education systems to control curriculum, over teachers’ authority.For many, the AC was understood as a valuable opportunity through whichto intervene into teachers’ practices. Importantly, policy-makers’ discus-sions about the AC invariably rested upon the intersections of teachers’curricular and pedagogical work. The logic of the field produced by the fed-eral field of education that distinguishes between curriculum and pedagogy,and which strongly frames teachers’ curricular work as lying in creative andresponsive curriculum ‘implementation’, is certainly reiterated within pol-icy-makers’ understandings of teachers’ work. Teachers are expected,therefore, to execute their professional decision-making through their effec-tive curriculum ‘implementation’.

In analysing policy documentation alongside interviews, we haveidentified the ways in which the AC is both written, and ‘taken up’ byhigh-level policy-makers, as an assertion of systems-level control overcurriculum. At the same time, high-level policy-makers reiterate theassertions made in the AC policy reform, that the standardization of cur-riculum provides an opportunity to intervene into teachers’ current curric-ulum enactments, and to potentially address issues surrounding thepresent inequity within, and the market competitiveness of, Australia’seducation system. Importantly, whilst the policy-makers we spoke withare concerned largely with system-level aspects of the AC reform, theirdiscussion of the purpose and effective implementation of the AC drawupon perceptions of teachers’ work. With regards, however, to the waysin which teachers’ might come to enact their professional authority inrelation to curriculum we found significant ambiguity. Our analysis sug-gests that the AC policy documentation and reform agenda is attemptingto cement a logic surrounding teachers’ authority, which separates curric-ulum authority from pedagogic authority. As demonstrated in our analysisof interviews with high-level policy-makers, what this means in relationthose working in the policy field understand teacher professional authorityis less clear: policy-makers necessarily draw on a range of personal andprofessional understandings of teachers’ work in order to make judgmentsabout what teachers should, can, and will do with AC documentation.Nonetheless, it is clear that the AC is prompting a series of significantfield-level shifts as its documentation and reform agenda proliferatesacross the education field.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues on the Australian ResearchCouncil Linkage Project ‘Peopling Education Policy: Realising the NewAustralian English and Mathematics Curricula’—Jim Albright, DavidClarke, Doug Clarke, Peter Freebody and Peter Sullivan.


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Note

1. The Peopling Education Policy project is funded by the Australian Research Council(LP110100062) with additional funding provided by the NSW Department ofEducation and Training, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, CatholicEducation Office Melbourne and the Australian Curriculum Assessment and ReportingAuthority. The project is a collaboration between Monash University, AustralianCatholic University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, Universityof Newcastle and the University of Melbourne. The content is the responsibility ofthe authors and the views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of theuniversities or the partners.

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Documents

Remaking the professional teacher: authority and curriculum reform