Niranjan Robert Casinader

Geography and the Australian Curriculum: Unfulfilled Knowledges in Secondary School Education

The introduction of geography as a separate discipline within the Australian Curriculum offers hope for revitalisation of the subject in Australian school education after decades of decline. Since the 1990s, the subject has been largely submerged within an integrated curriculum framework that has had significant consequences for the presence and character of secondary school geography. Its inclusion in the learning area of SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) within schools has diluted the degree, breadth and depth of geographical education. However, in spite of the hope provided by its re-institution, the process of national curriculum construction has had disconcerting consequences for the type of geography being offered to Australian students at the secondary level. Building on critical overviews of the history of secondary geography as an Australian school subject since the 1980s, recent philosophical discourse on approaches to geographical knowledge in a school context, and the authors personal experience as a geographical educator and researcher, this paper argues that the nature of knowledge embodied by the new geography study design in Years 7–10 is flawed in both its scope and its direction. While reflecting many of the characteristics of a social realist approach to geographical knowledge, the Australian Curriculum minimises the elements of critical analysis that provide geography with its unique educational identity and value.

A lost conduit for intercultural education: school geography and the potential for transformation in the Australian Curriculum

Globalisation has increased the importance of schools as a space for developing cultural understandings within students. However, how this is translated into curriculum pathways within schools remains a matter for debate. Using the context of the new Australian national curriculum, this paper argues that notions of multicultural and intercultural education need to be updated to incorporate transculturalism. It further posits that the use of geography as a school-based forum for cultural education within national curriculum frameworks has been diminished, and that its reinvigoration ultimately depends upon a reaffirmation of ‘place’ that highlights a positive sense of difference.

Transnationalism in the Australian Curriculum: new horizons or destinations of the past?

Educationally, it is arguable that transnationalism has been primarily framed around course delivery by educational institutions within international contexts. However, it is a more complex notion, incorporating ideas such as global citizenship and intercultural understanding. Consequently, if the Australian Curriculum is the national substantiation of Australias educational priorities, designed to prepare young Australians for a globalised future, it should reflect such transnationalist elements. This paper contends that, despite contrary impressions, the Australian Curriculum is more of a protective reinforcement of older conceptions of a ‘Western’ community than one centred on forward-looking global principles. Its codifications dominate at the cost of acknowledging other points of reference that represent a collective transnational sensibility, and thus it embodies a lost national opportunity. Recent criticisms that the Australian Curriculum fails to adequately reflect ‘Western’ civilisation are ill-founded, as they ignore the strong presence of ‘Western’ intellectual constructs throughout the Australian Curriculums design and content.

Transnational learning experiences and teacher transcultural capacity: the impact on professional practice – a comparative study of three Australian schools

Abstract In school education, one of the few visible responses to increasing globalisation of educational practice has been the implementation of short-term experiential overseas student learning programmes. This paper analyses the results of a comparative research project on three Australian schools that offer such learning experiences. It argues that teachers who possess or who are capable of developing a transcultural – as opposed to an intercultural – capacity are more likely to be effective educators on these special programmes, as well as being more receptive to the personal and professional development that derives from participation in them.

Secondary Geography and the Australian Curriculum – directions in school implementation: a comparative study

ABSTRACT At first glance, the introduction of a national curriculum for Australian schools suggested a new era of revival for school geography. Since the late 1980s, the development and introduction of more integrated conceptions of curriculum design and implementation has seen the decline of Geography as a distinct subject in Australian schools, with statewide guidelines or frameworks that promoted the integration of Geography along with History into Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). The approval of the Australian Curriculum: Geography design in late 2013, therefore, offered some degree of optimism that Geography would be revived as a distinctive area of learning in the secondary environment. Utilising a qualitative comparative case study of three Victorian secondary schools, this paper argues that the hopes of renewal engendered by the institution of an agreed national Geography curriculum have been confronted by the reality of school curriculum and governance processes, in which existing local staff structures and priorities are more of an imperative in school-based Geography curriculum decision-making than policy-driven curriculum change.

The Kandyan Convention 1815: Consolidating the British Empire in Colonial Ceylon

Abstract The Kandyan Convention (1815) was definitive in consolidating British sovereignty over colonial Ceylon. The Convention and later legal instruments reflect a shift in British colonial policy regarding the acquisition of territories of Empire. Previously, British Government policy had favoured indirect rule through mercantile interests. Seizing opportunities provided by Kandyan power struggles, Governor Brownrigg, at the far reaches of Empire, implemented direct British rule. The Convention, however, straddled an emerging sense of ‘rights’ by making a specific commitment to ‘protect’ Buddhist faith and authority. The centrality of Buddhism to Sinhalese society made these provisions a powerful inducement for the Kandyan ruling elite. Nevertheless, as subsequent events revealed, the protection of these rights proved to be less important than the establishment of full British colonial control through forceful administrative measures. The Convention was, therefore, an early precursor to the modes of governance pursued by the British Government as its formal Empire expanded over the latter part of the nineteenth century.

From sovereignty to modernity: revisiting the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms – transforming the Buddhist and colonial imaginary in nineteenth-century Ceylon

The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms (1831) have been characterised by David Scott (1995) as marking the transformation of colonial Sri Lanka from one kind of political rationality – that of mercantile sovereignty – to another – that of colonial governmentality. Whilst consonant with the view that the Commission marked a moment when the colonial administration moved away from a strategic reliance on Asokan or Buddhist forms of authority in the earliest phase of British rule, we argue that there is a more nuanced genealogy to this transition. The Reforms, while directed to the administration, judicial and political institutions of the colony, also contemplated extensive commercial restructuring that inculcated a self- improvement mode into ‘everyday life’. Drawing on colonial archives, we show how elements of a logic of governmentality, such as educational, land, and fiscal reform, were utilised at different times by the colonial administration to commence the modernisation of the colony well before 1832. It is also evident that the transformation was partial, and at points strongly resisted by local Buddhist communities. Instead of marking a clear point of transformation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms gave legibility and a national imprimatur to a process already in train, while providing further impetus to a socio-political rationality that had begun to shift decades prior. The secular logic of the colonial State, however, was later to unleash a movement of Sinhalese Buddhist reform and cultural re-valuation that generated, ‘a more modernised Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism to create expanding areas of social, cultural and religious life for the nationalist cause.’

Geography Education, Transculturalism and Global Understanding

Future-oriented global understanding necessitates the development of a new form of cultural mindset; that is, transculturalism, as opposed to multiculturalism or interculturalism (Casinader 2014, 2016). This chapter will argue how geography, as a result of its unique form of inquiry education (Kidman and Casinader 2017), provides the ideal conduit through which teachers can develop such a perspective in primary and secondary students. The geographical emphasis on place, prediction and transformation as part of the inquiry process enables a more cohesive and holistic student understanding of global understandings.

The building of the transcultural capacities of preservice teachers to support their employability in a globalised world: a pilot study

ABSTRACT This paper explores the findings of a pilot project that investigated the impact of the International Professional Experience (IPE) programme within a Faculty of Education at a research intensive Australian University in developing the capacity of preservice teachers (PSTs) to work and teach amidst culturally diverse environments. The pilot was a precursor to a project investigating the impact of IPE on PSTs’ cultural capacity across a range of IPE locations. The importance of teachers acquiring transcultural capacity has become more acute in recent years. Educational globalisation has influenced Australian educators and schools to see working and learning in countries outside Australia as opportunities that support readiness for a professional career. Australian graduate teachers are now required to possess and demonstrate the skills and capacities to relate to, engage with and teach students from diverse cultures. Migration has altered Australian demographics to the point that cultural understandings are now mandated in the national curriculum. The pilot study findings suggest that the IPE experience has a significant impact on the development of transcultural capacity amongst PSTs especially those who have not had opportunities for, engagement with cultural modes outside their place of origin.

‘Intelligence in the Wild’—Inquiry in the Field

The reality that different disciplines perceive the world through different lenses makes it self-evident that the concept of fieldwork would vary from one discipline to another. Science, Geography and History all have an interest in ‘place’ as the focus of fieldwork inquiry. They differ in the position of place in relation to the individual and the form of that inquiry. Geography and the Sciences share a focus on understanding the real world as it exists, whereas History emphasises the collective importance and significance of primary sources, the records of the past, whether in written form, as artefacts of various sizes, or in situ. The knowledge of local people who are, and have been, embedded within particular living contexts is valued and included in an historical inquiry, and to a lesser extent, Geography; it is not rejected, as it is within scientific inquiry.