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Journal of Educational Administration

Emerald Article: Pragmatics, politics and moral purpose: the quest for an authentic national curriculum Michael Bezzina, Robert J. Starratt, Charles Burford

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To cite this document: Michael Bezzina, Robert J. Starratt, Charles Burford, (2009),"Pragmatics, politics and moral purpose: the quest for an authentic national curriculum", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 47 Iss: 5 pp. 545 - 556 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09578230910981053 Downloaded on: 26-04-2012 References: This document contains references to 39 other documents To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com This document has been downloaded 1535 times.

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Pragmatics, politics and moral purpose: the quest for an authentic national curriculum
Michael Bezzina
School of Educational Leadership, Australian Catholic University, Stratheld, Australia

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Received December 2008 Revised April 2009 Accepted April 2009

Robert J. Starratt
Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA, and

Charles Burford
School of Educational Leadership, Australian Catholic University, Stratheld, Australia
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the development of a national curriculum for Australia. The paper challenges stakeholders to interrogate the question of national curriculum, its purpose, values and potential for delivering the type of education Australia wants for its citizens in the twenty-rst century. Design/methodology/approach The paper provides a general review of the literature, research and opinion associated with the politics, purpose, leadership and potential for change associated with national curriculum innovation. Findings The national curriculum looms as the largest educational change in Australias history and requires a thorough examination by stakeholders of the purposes and values underpinning it and how such a centralised curriculum can build the learning capacity of the nation. Authentic engagement of teachers, buy in, bottom-up and top-down strategies, extensive time for negotiations and the engagement of educational and political leaders are seen as important for community ownership of the product. Practical implications The paper challenges political and educational leaders to conduct the national curriculum building dialogue at the local, state and national level and to open up previous givens to interrogation. It calls for a long-term process to protect the authenticity and moral purpose of the process and maximise its ownership and potential for change. Originality/value The paper addresses the greatest challenge yet to face Australian education, to deliver a national curriculum that delivers authentic learning for the future needs of Australians and Australia. It presents a case for stakeholders to engage the challenge through a professionally informed and morally defensible approach. Keywords National curriculum, Education, Politics, Australia Paper type General review
Journal of Educational Administration Vol. 47 No. 5, 2009 pp. 545-556 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0957-8234 DOI 10.1108/09578230910981053

Introduction On 15 April 2008, Deputy Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard announced the membership of the newly formed National Curriculum Board, describing its task as:

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The Board will oversee the development of a rigorous, world-class national curriculum for all Australian students from kindergarten to Year 12, starting with the key learning areas of English, mathematics, the sciences and history. The Board will draw together the best programs from each State and Territory into a single curriculum to ensure every child has access to the highest quality learning programs to lift achievement and drive up school retention rates.

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Her words tell a great deal about the way in which national curriculum is being viewed in Australia. It is viewed by many key stakeholders as essentially a mapping of existing practice with a view to drawing together what is best in the various Australian state and territory offerings. The term best is linked to achievement (presumably as measured by testing) and to retention rates. The assumptions are that amongst the present offerings already exists what is best for young people, and that a process of mix and match construction will deliver a curriculum that will equip the young people of Australia for the complex and uncertain future facing this nation by simply putting together the right set of pre-existing pieces. This may be an example of what Elmore describes as the default culture of public schools one which privileges existing structures and is strongly resistant to change and which he identies as dysfunctional and obsolete (Fullan et al., 2006). The challenge before Australian educational leaders is one which is shared by any of their counterparts around the world who nd themselves engaging with large-scale, centralised curriculum reform. This paper draws on the Australian experience as a way of exploring the rationale for national curriculum, the lessons of history, the experience of similar initiatives and the questions that remain unresolved in the pursuit of an authentic curriculum. Authentic curriculum reects the best of what is known about how young people learn, about what will sustain their desire and ability to continue learning, about the personal and social applications of what they learn as well as the best estimates of those understandings and attitudes their adult work and civic lives will require. Educational leaders have a responsibility to make sure that the debate is informed as least as much by what good educators know, as by the limits of inter-state politics and easily measured outcomes. The debate must concern itself not with conceptions of curriculum that are captured in the narrow connes of syllabus or content, or even outcomes, but rather a more encompassing view. Reid (2005) captured this breadth well in his adoption of Kellys denition: the totality of the experiences which the pupil has as a result of the provision made. This denition manages to balance the dimension of planning critical to a national curriculum exercise with a recognition of the importance of the student experience of learning. This paper starts from the premise that a national curriculum could be a good thing but not just any national curriculum, and certainly not one which is the product of a series of compromises over which elements of each states or territorys existing curricula make it into the nal document. It argues that the coming together of key players in Australian curriculum with the backing of all commonwealth, state and territory governments is an opportunity which may not present itself again for decades. It is an opportunity for leadership through fresh and fundamental thinking. Decisions about the type of national curriculum which would serve Australia best need to be informed by a clear understanding of:

. . . . .

events that have led up to the decision to pursue this agenda at this time; the global and national contexts to which such a curriculum must respond; the rationale and purposes of national curriculum; the best hopes for students; and the processes which will contribute to the successful implementation of such an ambitious project.

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An Australian national curriculum: the story so far In 1968, the then Liberal Minister for Education, Malcolm Fraser commented that:
[. . .] the Commonwealth has a special interest in reducing the unnecessary differences in what is taught in the various States (Reid, 2005).

Twenty years later, a Labour Education Minister (Dawkins, 1998) argued that Australia could no longer afford fragmentation of effort and approaches and that strategies for improvement had to be developed across the nation. This sentiment came to be expressed in a set of voluntary arrangements among the commonwealth and states, underpinned by the Hobart declaration on schooling (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs MCEETYA, 1989). This saw the development of national statements and proles in the period up to 1993 which were then referred back to the states. On the ground little happened, as states continued to give emphasis to their local priorities ahead of the voluntary national agreements. The commonwealth sought to inuence curriculum by funding specic initiatives such as values curriculum. The year 1999 saw the promulgation of The Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century (MCEETYA, 1999). This document embodies, at the same time, a broad view of schooling which enshrines notions of ethics, efcacy, self-condence, decision-making and engaged citizenship and a fairly instrumental view of the curriculum, with an emphasis on pre-determined discipline areas, basic skills and vocational and enterprise skills. Once again, in following through on this, the commonwealth sought to exercise inuence through targeted funding, increasingly making this conditional on recipient jurisdiction implementation of requirements which ranged from placement of agpoles and values statements to the implementation of the so-called Plain English Reporting regime (MCEETYA, 2005). Little of this impacted on state curricula, and even less on the experience of students. Initiatives to create a national curriculum have, therefore, not had a history of success. The conventional arguments for national curriculum have ranged from the procedural (it makes interstate transfer of students easier), to the nancial (economies of scale), to the common sense (small population) and to the principled (it creates better base for citizenship). None of these arguments seems to have been able to carry the day in the face of state-commonwealth political differences and ideological point-scoring between the major parties. However, with both major political parties (liberal/national and labour) committed to a national curriculum, and with labour governments in a majority of states as well as at commonwealth level, some of these political barriers seem to have disappeared. As well as the political realities, Reid (2005) identied a series of other obstacles to previous attempts to initiate a national curriculum. These included the lack of an adequate rationale for change, the failure to enunciate a view of

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curriculum, a poorly worked out conceptual framework, failure to take into account best available understandings of curriculum change, inadequate consultative processes, a subsequent lack of a constituency of support and a rushed development process. The National Curriculum Development Paper (National Curriculum Development Board, 2008) is the most complete expression to date of the current Australian governments intentions with respect to national curriculum. It discusses the role the curriculum should play in building Australias future, the principles for its development, content, standards of achievement, the process of its development and cross-curricular considerations. It is a document which has clearly beneted from many of the lessons of the past outlined above, in terms of working towards widespread ownership. With ownership as a high priority, practical considerations such as feasibility, exibility and clarity have come to the fore. While the issue of content is addressed, this is done in terms of asking how it might be described and how future and past orientations might be balanced. There is an implicit assumption that existing ways of organising content will continue. For example, point 1.2 states:
The remit of the National Curriculum Board, in the rst instance, is to develop a national, K-12 curriculum in English, mathematics, the sciences and history. In a second phase, the remit will be extended to involve geography and languages other than English. The Boards work must be shaped by the national goals and must connect with the other areas for which curriculum will continue to be developed within the States and territories. It must also connect with the national assessment program to ensure that the curriculum drives the assessment and not the other way around (National Curriculum Development Board, 2008).

This document, which was intended as a stimulus for the participants in a National Curriculum Board Forum, devotes little attention to the question of the fundamental purposes which might underpin a national curriculum. The vision which is to shape decisions about precisely the knowledge, understandings and skills that will help (students) in their future (National Curriculum Development Board, 2008) is dealt within a single paragraph, and might be summarised as follows:
Schooling should build a strong foundation for future national prosperity and international competitiveness by allowing students to develop:
. . . .

a sense of themselves and Australian society; a capacity and predisposition to contribute effectively to society; knowledge, understanding and skills with which to work productively and creatively; and a commitment to contributing to a cohesive society with knowledge of the rich diversity of histories and cultures that have shaped it.

This list does not address such issues as beliefs about what kind of person is being served, what kind of society is desired, and what capabilities are needed to best prepare young people to engage constructively in Australian society and an increasingly complex global community. If the present attempt to move to a national curriculum is to be any different from its predecessors, it will call for a profound and compelling sense of the need for such a national curriculum and the fundamental purpose of that curriculum. This in turn will require a combination of political intelligence to overcome the obstacles of politics, expert change management skills to ensure that the reform becomes owned and

embedded in the localised practices of state education bodies and schools, and consideration of the key roles of teachers and educational leaders if it is to overcome the inertia of well established existing practice. Why a national curriculum? Australia already has signicant examples of centralised curriculum development because each state has developed its own uniform structure on precisely this model. It could be argued that a national curriculum based on the kind of discipline-based approach foreshadowed in the National Curriculum Development Paper (National Curriculum Development Board, 2008) would be simply replacing one level of centralisation with another, with the added complexity of satisfying state-based constituencies. If this were to happen a great deal of effort would have been expended on a campaign of conformity for little educational gain. This argument seems to gain further support from the Australian Council for Educational Research study which found that 95 per cent of senior secondary chemistry content, 90 per cent of advanced mathematics content, and 85 per cent of physics content is common to all states and territories (Masters, 2007). This might lead to the belief that arriving at a national curriculum could be a comparatively straightforward, almost bureaucratic exercise. If it were this simple, earlier attempts in Australia would have had a better record of success. Moreover, following this line of thinking reduces the argument for a national curriculum to what Reid (2005) describes as a pursuit of the line of least resistance through the utilisation of the status quo, a dubious foundation for creating a future focussed foundation for education in Australia. When the focus turns from what is currently in place to what is needed by the nation, the argument becomes both more complex and more compelling. A national curriculum which will do more than maintain the status quo will need to respond to the emerging national agenda, and the future in which todays students will live. Australia simultaneously addresses its domestic agenda while it participates in the international effort to confront the many emerging global challenges. Some commentators (Beare, 2008) suggest that the human race has a very limited time left to address these challenges before they develop into irreversible catastrophes. The challenges include diminishing sources of energy, water, arable soil, food supply and available medicines to control new diseases, as well as the growing gap between the rich and poor nations of the world. The current international nancial crisis clearly reveals how connected the worlds economies and industries are to global realities. Moreover, in an increasingly complex and globalised world, it is the policies of nations acting singly and in concert which have a capacity to respond to factors like the environment, technologies, humanitarian issues, population diversity, regional alignment, security, the knowledge economy and globalisation itself (Cole, 2007; Wilson, 2007). Nations need citizens who are capable of contributing critically and constructively to nation and society building. A national curriculum may be the only tool capable of inuencing a coherent national response. Having accepted that there is a place for a national curriculum, and that Australia is perhaps uniquely placed historically to respond to that need at the present time, there is still a need to address the fundamental question of purpose.

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The fundamental purpose of a national curriculum A fundamental challenge of curriculum making is to acknowledge both the moral and the intellectual character of academic learning (Kelly, 2009) or as Starratt (2007) would express it, to connect the learning agenda of the school to the central moral agenda of learners during their 13 or more years in school. An authentic national curriculum should be able to articulate how it will help learners in this quest in the twenty-rst century as they search for the truth of their humanity within Australian society, and within their participation in a global human community (Starratt, 2007). Curriculum work can often seem to be disengaged from the real world teeming with challenges and possibilities. Educators and leaders can miss this connection because they are accustomed to view the learning agenda of the school as an end in itself, rather than as a means for the moral and intellectual lling out of learners as human beings (Kronman, 2007). In the context of a debate about national curriculum, the challenge is to seek to create this missing connection to move past the easy assumptions of the traditional curriculum of the academic disciplines and its traditional pedagogy as the vehicle for personal transformation and social progress. There is a need to abandon the seductive expediency of the path of least resistance and the quick political response. Rather the challenge is to put the time and energy into engaging as a society with the deep, signicant questions that might ground a national curriculum. Who are Australians? What in the national character is to be cherished and sustain? What national habits continue to restrain progress? What does membership of Australian society ask of its members? How do individual talents ourish while contributing to the cultural and economic good of society? How can a national curriculum contribute to a meaningful, productive and sustainable future? Questions like these have been at best under-emphasised in the discourse to date, including in the most recent consultative document (National Curriculum Board, 2008) on the shape of national curriculum. Such considerations are hardly original. For example, Dewey (2004, p. 97) had this to say:
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures exible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

To assure the best for Australias students there is a need to consider their experience of the curriculum in the classroom, the kind of aspirational outcomes to be achieved and the extent to which a national curriculum might address the likely emerging futures the world may present. Curriculum becomes real for students in the classroom when they are actively engaged in making sense out of the world the curriculum presents, making personal connections, asking what and how questions of the material, seeking practical application of the material to real life (Anfara et al., 2002). This will not take place where curriculum makers limit their horizons to content and skills only, nor where the curriculum is so prescriptive as to prevent tailoring of learning experiences to local and individual needs (Curriculum Standing Committee of National Education Professional Associations, 2007), nor where the learning experience becomes credential driven. The overemphasis on credentials is not a risk for national curriculum alone. In any

politicised educational reform, the catchcry of rigour is closely followed by recourse to more testing and more benchmarking with a concomitant disempowering of schools and teachers, a narrowing of curriculum and the false sense of security that easily quantiable data can bring (McMurrer, 2007). The recent ratication of the No Child Left Behind (Congress of the USA, 2001) legislation by the new Obama administration points to the pervasiveness of this type of thinking. The integrity of knowledge and the learning process itself is thus compromised in a pedagogical and assessment process that benet neither the learners personal and intellectual growth, nor a moral commitment to understanding the world for which they will be responsible (Starratt, 2007). Rather, curriculum designers should build into the content of the curriculum questions that touch upon the responsibilities such knowledge implies, whether that content deal with historical wars, genetic manipulation, the writing of poetry or national policy, gender stereotyping, political struggles for human or civil rights, environmental politics. In other words, curriculum should promote not only disciplinary understanding but also seek to build an ability to understand, to appreciate and to act in ways that are not only effective in the familiar world, but will also enable the learner to rise to the challenge of the new (Australian Curriculum Studies Association, 2006; Australian Education Union, 2006; Treadwell, 2008). These notions carry with them a fuller and richer sense of the human person as an agent in society, as a person who is not just an employee, or a cog in the economic machine. Lessons from recent curriculum innovations It has been argued in the previous sections that the future for Australian students lies in rapidly changing, globally exposed, knowledge societies in a world of dwindling resources. Any curriculum building exercise will be challenged by Australias rapid move from a relatively mono-cultural country to a decidedly multicultural one. It will be challenged by the need to contribute to the development of fully participating citizens in the civil, social and cultural lives of their communities be they local, national or global. This curriculum building task is at its core a deeply ethical pursuit. Fullan and Barber (2005) recognise this in their discussion of tri level leadership. Along with the moral dimension, they signal some lessons for large-scale (system-wide) change which are relevant to this discussion. Among other things, in a consideration of real world change in which politics and educational wisdom interact, they call for: . a clear and consistently espoused moral purpose which forms the link between systems thinking and sustainability; . constant communication of the big picture while being open to feedback from stakeholders; . rewarding collaboration and network building; . promotion and support for good leadership wherever it can be found; and . design of policy with capacity building in mind. The experiences of Tasmania and New Zealand in attempting to build large-scale curriculum have much to teach us in terms of the ways in which educational and

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political imperatives can either support or work against one another, depending on how they are handled. The recent introduction and subsequent demise of the Essential learnings curriculum in Tasmania has lessons for those who seriously would take an ethical curriculum stance. The Tasmanian framework identied thinking, communicating, social responsibility, personal futures and world futures as being among the core educational needs of Australians. These were seen as requiring a curriculum that would make provision for six essential learnings, encompassing relationship, health, purpose, ethics, and signicantly learning to know and to think (Department of Education Tasmania, 2009, pp. 7-10). There is no hint here of the dominance of the utilitarian notion of preparation of a workforce or the enriching of an economy. Despite the emphasis is on authentic learning the initiative failed. This focus on authentic learning was exciting, challenging and seen as relevant to the needs of future generations of Tasmanians. It reected the thinking of writers like Beare (2002), Starratt (2004), Bezzina et al. (2007) and Duignan (2006). Yet the Tasmanian innovation was clearly unsettling to its government, some educators and the community at large particularly as represented by elected politicians. Wilson (2007) notes that politicians are resistant to curriculum that does not resemble traditional forms. This dynamic has likely been a contributing factor in the demise of the bold Tasmanian initiative because, as the Department of Education Tasmania (2008) argued: Feedback suggested a focus on more familiar curriculum areas. The problem seemed to be that while these innovations acknowledged the fairly universal opinion that the values and purposes contained within the curriculum were morally responsible, and at face value met the future needs of society, they failed because they challenged the traditional paradigm of what a curriculum should look like and how to measure its outcomes. Moreover, it is likely that closer attention to constant communication of the big picture with key stakeholders (Fullan and Barber, 2005) may have lessened the apprehension of parents. A bold educational venture foundered on the rocks of political reality and the complexities of change management. New Zealand has been engaged in a similarly visionary process of curriculum building for some time now. It shows promise that with better management of process, it may be possible to avoid a public or political backlash. The new national curriculum of New Zealand enshrines this evocative vision of young people:
. .

who will be creative, energetic, and enterprising; who will seize the opportunities offered by new knowledge and technologies to secure a sustainable social, cultural, economic, and environmental future for our country; ori and Pa keha recognise who will work to create an Aotearoa New Zealand in which Ma each other as full Treaty partners, and in which all cultures are valued for the contributions they bring; who, in their school years, will continue to develop the values, knowledge, and competencies that will enable them to live full and satisfying lives; and who will be condent, connected, actively involved, and lifelong learners (Ministry of Education New Zealand, 2007).

With this as a starting point, the curriculum being developed in New Zealand is one organised not around formal academic disciplines, but rather ve key competencies or

capabilities (the label seems to be used interchangeably). These are: thinking; using language, symbols and texts; managing self; and relating to others. The curriculum includes a future focus as one of its key principles, encouraging student engagement with the future in terms of issues such as sustainability, citizenship, enterprise and globalisation (Ministry of Education New Zealand, 2007). The Tasmanian experience has shown that shifts away from traditional discipline structures can be risky, however the New Zealand process seems to have successfully avoided these risks, at least in part by adopting a much longer implementation time frame, and by bringing key constituencies along with its thinking. Australian national curriculum development seems to be characterised by a drive to deliver within the election cycle. This kind of time pressure places constraints on deep and/or original reection, and makes difcult consideration of the kind of creative options called for by a vision of authentic learning for a complex and uncertain future. By contrast, the New Zealand Curriculum Development Project (intrinsically simpler than the Australian as the New Zealand curriculum covers only a single jurisdiction) took six years including review and development, and received some 10,000 submissions. This stands in stark contrast to the remit of a 2010 delivery date which has been given to Australias curriculum writers. Shaping implementation Development and implementation of a national curriculum will be an educational change exercise on a scale never seen before in this country. It needs to be conceptualised both from a bottom-up and a top-down perspective from the point of view of the teacher as practitioner and that of those charged with leading change at the systemic level. The teacher perspective will be addressed rst. After students, teachers need to be the rst concern, because they are on the front line of curriculum change. They are not only implementers but also local leaders of change. Failure to keep in mind how change might look in the staffroom and the classroom can limit the success of even the best of initiatives. Looking after teachers in a time of change requires consideration of securing teacher buy in, sensible workload, appropriate resourcing, targeted professional development and practical lead times. Time is a critical factor in all of these considerations. The issue of gaining buy-in is fundamental to such curriculum change. Fullan (2001) writes of this in terms of the implications for educational leaders who will bring to the enterprise a sense of moral purpose, and play a key role in coherence making. Advocates of shared or distributed approaches to leadership would also argue for the nurturing of ownership through engagement (Crowther et al., 2002; Duignan and Bezzina, 2006; Harris, 2002). This will not be achieved by handing down a detailed syllabus for rigid local implementation. Teachers and school leaders need to be committed to, and engaged with, the pursuit of the types of authentic learning espoused in the curriculum. They need to be supported and developed in this pursuit, particularly in times of change and reform. Recent reports by the OECD (Barber and Mourshed, 2007) and the Business Council of Australia (Dinham et al., 2008) make a case for this kind of support, arguing that the single most important factor in improved student outcomes is the quality of teachers. They advocate appropriate professional development, adequate resourcing and ongoing support.

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The building of capacity is critical to the success of large-scale curriculum endeavours such as national curriculum (Fullan and Barber, 2005). There is a need to nd ways of delivering national curriculum which are not only effective in the short-term, but also increase the likelihood of long-term sustainability by building capability in teachers and leaders at school, system, state and national levels. This is best done by being intentional in process design so that opportunities are identied wherein the skills of curriculum building, curriculum implementation and curriculum leadership can be learned and applied not only by the National Curriculum Board, but also by states, regions and schools in developing appropriate localised expressions of the compelling national themes. Engagement of teachers in shaping curriculum has attendant risk. There can be a tendency to make decisions around what is most convenient for teachers, or causes them least discomfort. Horsell (2007) the Senior Years Curriculum Superintendent in South Australia described the 2006 South Australian curriculum framework as being designed by teachers for teachers. He argued that the process of design should be based on community input and aspiration for teachers to teach to our children, rather than being shaped around teacher convenience. Attention now turns to the top down perspective. The current draft of the National Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008) states:
This new declaration holds that values as well as skills must form part of a schools legacy to young people. Without pretending to a monolithic Australian national identity, this 21st century declaration maintains that students should hold values of resilience, ingenuity and tolerance, and that behaviours and learning must model these values consistently and persistently.

If there is no monolithic national culture, it is most unlikely that a monolithic national curriculum will work. If the National Curriculum Board, to whom a most challenging yet crucial task has been given, is to rise above the interstate politics and the vested interests of the academy, it needs to nd the path which gives expression to an essential Australianness, while allowing space for states, regions and local communities to implement in ways which reect local realities. If values are indeed to be a part of a legacy to young people, they need to be considered explicitly along with the other outcomes of curriculum. Conclusion As a nation, Australia has embarked on perhaps the most signicant educational journey of all the journey towards making explicit the kind of education it wants for its citizens. The journey has arrived at a crossroads, a decision point at which it needs to choose between a national curriculum which satises the imperatives of long-standing discipline-based structures and political convenience, or one which seeks to respond in an authentic and comprehensive way to the sense of what it is to be Australian in the twenty-rst century. This second option makes far greater demands on curriculum developers, teachers, learners and educational leaders, but promises far greater rewards. The demands of this second option relate particularly to engaging disparate stakeholders in a meaningful way, and building the commitment necessary for a successful implementation right across the nation. This cannot be rushed. If a nascent national curriculum is to be successful, there is a need to be prepared to face up to the foundational issues of personal and social identity and to the

implications of its being expressed in different ways, and to consider whether existing structures both political and educational are best suited to emerging futures. This is a debate in which educational leaders should be playing a key role.
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