Education systems across international contexts are currently challenged with requirements to include representation of diverse perspectives, understandings and knowledges into their school curriculum and pedagogy. These calls result from insights about the importance of ensuring that equity initiatives are not just focused on redistribution of resources, but also foreground the recognitive and representational dimensions of an equitable, socially just education system (Fraser, 2008). In Australia this is playing out within the national curriculum space, with the call to include content about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and knowledges supposedly being met by their inclusion as cross curriculum priorities within Australia’s national curriculum. Despite these inclusions, public and political debates about Indigenous content in the curriculum continue to swirl within the media, and research suggests that few teachers are engaging their students in this dimension of the curriculum. These same curriculum contestations are evident in education systems across the globe, where traditionally marginalized groups are voicing their expectations for the curriculum to represent a more diverse range of knowledge systems, languages, social, cultural and religious practices than has occurred until now.

There is currently limited empirical understanding of secondary school teachers’ approaches, attitudes, and capabilities for teaching the curriculum content that is not from the dominant culture of a society, and the disciplinary structures that underpin these. In this paper we report on a study of these relevant issues, where the focus was on the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content into the national curriculum. While the study looked closely at the Australian context, these issues have global relevance in policy landscapes of hyper diversity. Prior research has considered the barriers to teachers taking on more inclusive curriculum practices as relating to curriculum structures (Beresford & Gray, 2006); lack of confidence on the part of teachers (O’Keeffe, Paige & Osborne, 2019) and their fears of ‘offending’ community sensibilities (Burgess & Evans, 2017); and the impact of the disjuncture created for teacher practice by the socio-political, epistemic and cognitive constraints built into the curriculum (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013) and the curriculum design (Maxwell, Lowe & Salter, 2018). This systemic, socio-political work of the curriculum foregrounds the dominant, disciplinary knowledges and their structures and delegitimises other ways of knowing and being.

The study aims to answer the following research question. How, why and what issues affect the development and impact of teachers’ meaningful engagement with curriculum content from diverse perspectives?

To do this, the study brings together ideas about epistemic cognition to understand how teachers assess the validity, certainty, reliability and limits of their own knowledges, with a focus on the development of the secondary subject orientated curriculum and its adherence to the core knowledge claims of the disciplines (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). The focus on Indigenous ways of knowing requires a third conceptual element to unpack what Nakata (2007) has termed the cultural interface. Within this framing, the tensions between Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and the claims of western schooling systems play out as alternative knowledge systems that vie for attention in the curriculum and in classroom settings. Nakata’s framing of the cultural interface acknowledges the damaging impact of western disciplinary knowledges on Indigenous thinking and identity, but also provides insights into understanding the socio-cultural potentialities and limitations of the teaching and learning content that is other than western disciplinary content within the current curriculum structures. The positive potentials frame a context where two or more knowledge systems might exist in the official curriculum in ways that create new knowledge without the dominant disciplinary knowledges making all other knowledge systems subservient.  

The study to be reported identifies how, why and what teachers’ values attitudes, beliefs and disciplinary training impact on their capacity to plan and teach curriculum content from diverse knowledge systems. The three-part design of the project draws on quantitative (survey) and qualitative (policy analysis, analysis of interviews, and case studies) methods to identify the impact of the academic discipline on the curriculum, and on teacher attitudes, capacities and their epistemological beliefs about the integration of content from diverse perspectives into the official curriculum and everyday classroom teaching and learning. In the study, we have asked how teachers’ personal beliefs and values impact on ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ they prioritize, plan, teach and assess curriculum content from diverse knowledge systems. To do this, the study was designed in three (3) phases. First (phase 1), a quantitative survey was administered to secondary history and science teachers across two different schooling systems, to identify teachers’ epistemic beliefs and to test whether adherence to subject (history and science) discipline knowledges might impact on teachers’ capacity to understand and engage with diverse knowledge systems. The survey was constructed with a combination of measures that had prior evidence of validity and reliability, as well as newly created measures to assess teacher behaviour in ways that were potentially less subject to social desirability bias. The quantitative data of the survey was analysed via confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis. Simultaneously (phase 2) a policy analysis of the curriculum, and of interviews with key curriculum policy workers involved in writing, deciphering and designing resources for teachers was undertaken. To understand the curriculum, and the approach taken by curriculum policy workers in designing curriculum resources and policy, a hybrid thematic approach based in principles of decolonisation was used to analyse policy and interview text. In this paper we will present findings from these two analyses, and report on plans for the third phase of the project which will entail case studies of twenty secondary schools across diverse settings to investigate the curriculum practices at these schools.

The findings that we will present from this large-scale integrated study will provide insights into the place of curriculum in how systems work to achieve a socially just education system. Our findings come from three vantage points - teachers, curriculum designers, and the enacted curriculum - which together offer insights about the most critical barriers to address and the most viable pathways forward. By providing an empirical investigation of the inclusion of Indigenous content into the Australian Curriculum, the paper provides an alternative perspective and a new body of evidence of the impact of teachers’ inter-dependence on the epistemic authority of discipline knowledge in the official curriculum. Our findings highlight how curriculum design is a critical policy lever to achieve recognitive, redistributive and representational social justice (Fraser, 2008) through secondary education. In understanding the deep structural impediments of current curriculum design, teachers, school-leaders and policy workers can be supported to build better relationships with diverse students, their families and communities, and in particular, improve the learning outcomes of all student including those that are from culturally diverse communities.

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