Peta Salter

The Problem in Policy: Representations of Asia Literacy in Australian Education for the Asian Century

Abstract This paper examines the strategic arguments articulated in calls for the teaching and learning of Asia in schools. “Asia literacy” is currently framed as a necessary “solution” for Australian education, but acceptance of this “solution” into the mainstream educational policy agenda has been problematised as a neoliberal and neocolonial construct. Subsequent policy debate indicates the dominance of an economic rationale that is seemingly impossible to resist. This paper suggests that critical policy approaches can be used to identify alternatives to these dominant frameworks, which imagine Asia literacy in alternate ways. Re-imagining the “solution” offers three alternatives: working within an economic agenda; restructuring Asia literacy away from a distinct policy agenda; and treating policy gaps as spaces in which teachers can generate locally relevant possibilities.

The inherent vulnerability of the Australian Curriculum’s cross-curriculum priorities

National curriculum development is a complex and contested process. By its very function, a national curriculum serves to organise diverse interests into a common framework, a task fraught with cultural and political tensions and compromises. In the emergent Australian Curriculum these tensions are manifest in and around the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs): sustainability, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. These priorities have been under fire since their introduction to the curriculum and the announcement of a review of the emerging curriculum prompted fears of a renewed attack. Studies from diverse fields of education research suggest that a lack of high-level institutional support for initiatives such as the CCPs places them in jeopardy. This paper focuses on two priorities: Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It employs interest convergence theory as a framework to understand connections between the intentions behind the inclusion of the CCPs and the outcomes of the Review of the Australian Curriculum. Furthermore, this paper draws on interview-based research that explores how the priorities are constructed by those who are expected to work with them, from pre-service through to experienced teachers. This theoretical framework provides an explanation for the perennially precarious nature of these kinds of curriculum initiatives.

Knowing Asia: Creative Policy Translation in an Australian School Setting.

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to ‘know Asia’ creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for ‘like-minded’ futures.

A reconceptualisation of ‘knowing Asia’ in Australian education

Since 1969, over 60 Australian government and non-government policies, documents, committees, working parties and organisations have explored the need to ‘know Asia’. In schools, this engagement is conceptualised as ‘Asia literacy’ and disseminated in the emerging Australian Curriculum through the cross-curriculum priority ‘Asia and Australias engagement with Asia’. However, ‘Asia literacy’ often struggles for purchase in Australian education. I argue that finding traction requires disruption of the dominant discourse of ‘Asia’ as a unitary construct and questioning what constitutes ‘Asia’. This article explores how discourse can be reconceptualised to open up space for schools to engage with ‘knowing Asia’.

Teachers' Cultural Maps: Asia as a “Tricky Sort of Subject Matter” in Curriculum Inquiry

Abstract The refocussing of Australia–Asia relations is manifest in a combination of national policy moves in Australia. Parallel shifts have been made in Europe, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. In Australia, the curricular response to this shift has become known as “Asia literacy.” This study is drawn from a wider project that explores representations of Asia literacy in both espoused and enacted policy. Teachers in this study are welcoming of Asia literacy, however lack confidence in their ability to engage with it as “tricky sort of subject matter” that requires significant theoretical work to “know Asia,” and “Asian culture” in an “authentic” way. A seemingly insurmountable barrier is created by assumptions that knowledge of Asia can be discretely inserted into curriculum. Critical reflection on residual imperial notions that are evident in such assumptions can in turn open new possibilities to theorise curricular responses to Asia literacy.

Navigating the ‘inter’ in intercultural education

ABSTRACT The structure of the Australian national curriculum encompasses engagement with ‘intercultural education’. Significantly, the context from which the curriculum was developed was heavily influenced by a multiculturalist ideology in which notions of cohesion and harmony were dominant. Therefore, those working with the curriculum need to understand the limited ways in which ideas of ‘diverse’ culture might be constructed. As a cultural text this curriculum is a place of encounter between teachers and the various influences on the curriculum document itself. We assert that the perpetuation of ideographs in the context and text of the curriculum, underpin how ‘intercultural understanding’ is positioned in the Australian Curriculum, and limit the narrative possibility of this encounter. It is essential to identify and interrogate such ideographs if we are to be cognisant of the complex politics of national curriculums and opportunities to ‘re-open’ the place for encounter.

Constructing the [parochial] global citizen

ABSTRACT Cultural exchange is privileged in many higher education programs across the globe. The Australian government’s New Colombo Plan refers to a ‘Third Wave’ of globalisation which foregrounds global interrelatedness through developing student capabilities to live, work and contribute to global communities and aims to make the global an ‘everyday’ experience for students. Mobility programs are promoted as the main strategy for fostering global perspectives, contradicting the idea of the global as an everyday experience. This paper unpacks constructs of global citizenship that underpin Australia’s recent international and global engagement policies, and implications for the ‘global’ wave in ‘local’ parochial contexts.

Conversations on cultural sustainability: stimuli for embedding Indigenous knowledges and ways of being into curriculum

ABSTRACT While Australian higher education agendas and literature prioritise Indigenous knowledges and perspectives across policy, curriculum and pedagogy, enacting this in practice remains problematic and contentious. Often the result is the inclusion of simplified Indigenous knowledges, rather than sustained engagement with and embedding of multiple and ‘messy’ ontological and epistemological positions. This paper explores ways of engaging with this ‘messiness’. Taking messiness as a focal point within our own context of teacher education at a regional university, this agenda and tension inform an ongoing dialogue about ways of assuring a conscious approach to cultural sustainability to embed, value and foreground Indigenous knowledges and ways of being and doing in curriculum. This endeavour can be conceptualised as a heuristic project, an ongoing conversation in response to multiple stimuli rather than a fixed endpoint or framework. In response to this exploration, this paper presents the stimuli for our conversation: situated, plural and reflexive knowledges that work together in inherently relational ways to nourish the cultural sustainability of Indigenous knowledges.

Spaces for variations in the Asia Literacy 'Policy Gap'

This chapter interrogates theoretical complexities of the construal of Asia and Asia literacy in education policy in the Australian context. It explores the values and objectives at play in the representation of the ‘problem’ that requires an Asia learning ‘solution’. To a certain extent, the positioning of Asia learning in policy is ‘creative’ (Bacchi, Analysing policy: what’s the problem represented to be? Pearson Australia, Frenchs Forest, 2009, p 211) of neoliberal and neocolonial constructs of the problem in the first place. Asia learning is simultaneously positioned as both ‘problem’, in a perceived lack of Asian knowledge needed to ensure economic futures for Australia in the Asian century, and ‘solution’ as an imperative to increase this knowledge. Central to this ‘solution’ is the cross-curriculum priority in the Australian Curriculum. This chapter interrogates the trajectory of such policy from ‘text’ to ‘in context’ in the classroom and the way in which school actors both respond to and create space to reimagine narrative possibilities of the ‘solution’. These reimagined narratives can represent encouraging departures from governing neoliberal approaches; however, residual imperial notions of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian culture’ enduringly haunt them. The latter highlights the importance of teacher’s intellectual engagement in theoretical work regarding how they will ‘know’ Asia, as a necessary precursor to ‘doing’, though ‘doing’ is often what dominates discussion of classroom enactment. This chapter concludes by exploring the possibilities for teachers to navigate the multiple and dialectical spaces for variation in the Asia literacy ‘policy gap’.

The Critical Global Citizen

Policy imperatives around mobility encourage students to take up international experiences to increase their marketability. These imperatives are framed in narrow ways by neoliberal metanarratives of globalization. As a result, peripheral mobility experiences are often positioned as key to internationalization and developing global citizenship. This individualized notion of the global citizen is counter to qualities of critical global citizenship, such as resilience, empathy, understanding one’s place in the world, and an ethical understanding of inequalities. Higher education institutions have an important role in shaping the social and disciplinary norms that construct these notions and in recognizing the diversity of local and international experiences that perpetuate them. This chapter puts forward a challenge to institutions to create supportive environments for the facilitation of critical global citizenship.