The curriculum conversation in Australia: Review Essay of The Australian Curriculum: promises, problems and possibilities, ed. Alan Reid and Deborah Price (ACSA, Canberra 2018)

This essay discusses a new book on the Australian Curriculum (AC), edited by Alan Reid and Deborah Price. The book included twenty-one different perspectives on the Australian Curriculum, including chapters on its various learning areas and its other cross-curriculum elements; chapters on its context and its political implications; and chapters assessing its adequacy in terms of various kinds of diversity and inclusiveness. The essay discusses the value and the difficulty of bringing together these different kinds of perspectives. It reflects on what they represent as an insight into the current forms of Australian curriculum inquiry. More broadly, it draws attention to questions of education purposes in a democracy; and of the complexity of interactions between national frameworks such as the AC; political purposes; and educational practices within schools. The conversation about whether a national framework is valuable is necessarily intertwined with issues concerning the kind of framework that is specified (its starting points and degree of specification), and the processes and resource support associated with it.