Search

Purpose - The purpose of the paper is to analyse non-indigenous student resistance to indigenous history and to improve non-indigenous students' engagement with indigenous history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is a value-laden discipline. Unlike 'old' history with its focus on facts and 'knowledge for its own sake', current history teaching in Australia is critically engaged with the ideals of citizenship and values as attached to actions and events. The changing purpose of history teaching is influenced by recent social and political pressures to instil values in a population deemed to be in moral decline. This paper draws on an analysis of the values discourse within the history curriculum. Deconstruction of the 'nation' and the 'citizen' in the Queensland Senior Modern History syllabus combined with preliminary observation and interview data with history teachers and students forms a basis for discussion. This paper also addresses the current debate surrounding the framework of nine key values prioritised, and funded, by the Australian government. In a context of social change and educational accountability, the relevance of history teaching may increasingly be values exploration and the fostering of a new global and ethical citizenship. Values and citizenship education within the history classroom offers exciting possibilities coupled with the risk of narrow interpretation and pressure to "instil" rather than critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to conduct a literature review of academic debates relating to the Australian Curriculum: History (ACH), in particular subjective constructions of teachers, and the teaching of Australian History and Aboriginal peoples' and Torres Strait Islanders' histories. The literature reviewed from a socio-political lens, examines functions of power/knowledge operating in discourses of education to illuminate how teachers, Aboriginal peoples, and Torres Strait Islanders, take up and/or resist subjectivities constructing them. Drawing from the toolbox of post-structuralism, this literature review troubles the notion of the non-Indigenous perspective as dominant, and the teacher as an active, non-critical participant in the process. Highlights • Comprehensive literature review about teachers, and the teaching of Australian History. • Dominant ideologies of education position teachers as passive conduits for learning. • Cross-cultural learning of Australian history complex, but inattention inexcusable. • Racist teachings of Australian History stem from dominant ideologies of Europeanism. • Initial education programs provide avenues for critical analysis of curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One initiative related to citizenship education in Australia has been a policy of values education. This latest form of citizenship education has been largely based on whole school policy and a list 'Australian Values'. In recent research I examine the way 'values' are already understood by History students and teachers. I use Foucault's theories of subjectivity and technologies of self to examine how the practices of historical inquiry shape students' and teachers' own values formation and knowledge of self. This paper will focus on the ways in which studying History fosters school students as ethical global citizens. History teaching is a space and place in schools for the exploration of a myriad of values including those espoused in the relationship between and within the school as an institution, the syllabus, historical sources, students and the classroom teacher. Opportunities for values formation are provided through critical inquiry and discussion, historical positioning and reflective practices which develop students and teachers 'knowledge of self'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching national history in school generates significant public anxiety and political debate—as the various 'history wars' around the world reveal. For many school students, however, studying their nation's past is dull and repetitive. Such lack of interest has been confirmed by surveys and research reports that reveal alarmingly low levels of national historical knowledge among young people, and there is growing popular concern that their ignorance of the past endangers the nation's future. Yet preoccupation with students' apparent national illiteracy tends to overlook how they connect with history in the first place. This paper draws on findings from a comparative Australian and Canadian research project that interviewed students and teachers about the ways they learned and taught history. It argues that any return to 'the facts' at the expense of critical historical engagement in class could turn students away from the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the case for a greater focus on the teaching of local histories in the Australian Curriculum: History. It takes as its starting point an Indigenous epistemology that understands knowledge to be embedded in the land. This connection between knowledge and country is used to examine recent literature on whether the teaching of history in schools can succeed in the context of the new Australian history curriculum. Various proposals from academics to develop a framework that can be used to select appropriate content and approaches to teaching history in Australia are explored. It questions whether a geographically dispersed and diverse body of students can ever be engaged with knowledge that is often taught far from the place of its making. This article eschews the traditional concepts used by historians to teach and interpret history, in order to observe how the country can teach the student. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]