Exclusion of curriculum justice from the 2021 review of the Australian curriculum: powerful knowledge remains unquestioned
Date
2025
Authors
Arnott, C.
Harrison, N.
Vass, G.
Woods, A.
Lowe, K.
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Journal article
Citation
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2025; 1-21
Statement of Responsibility
Christopher Arnott, Neil Harrison, Greg Vass, Annette Woods, and Kevin Lowe
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Abstract
The study reported in this paper examined the debates surrounding proposed changes to the Australian history curriculum made as a part of the 2020/2021 curriculum review. The focus is on the commentary and media statements made in the public domain by influential voices, such as the then Federal Minister of Education, academics and members of the public. The time period under investigation is between the months of April and December 2021. The analysis reveals that the debate is mired in assumptions that accept and reassert the dominant Western epistemological underpinnings of the history curriculum. It is a manoeuvre that concurrently serves to deflect attention from meaningfully engaging with knowledge-making practices from beyond this framing, such as First Nations epistemologies, which we argue could assist with enabling and enriching onto-epistemic heterogeneous approaches to the curriculum. For this paper, we start by exploring what constitutes knowledge, and its purposes in Australian schools, we then outline the methodology used to obtain the data corpus analysed, and finally present the findings of the thematic analysis of the data that was conducted. To conclude, the paper emphasizes the necessity of recognizing the complexities of knowledge production in history education, and we offer suggestions for including Indigenous knowledges in history education in Australia
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OnlinePubl.
Available online 8 August 2025
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© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.