The Australian curriculum: finding the hidden narrative?

The Australian curriculum to be introduced in all Australian schools over the next few years provides two competing narratives about curriculum. An overt narrative provides an unproblematic view of curriculum where the rhetoric and discourse that promotes a ‘world-class curriculum’ effectively obscures a second narrative. This second narrative indicates that the bases of the proposed curriculum are actually narrow and conservative and where implicit assumptions about knowledge, pedagogy and power have been camouflaged. This article will critically analyse The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 2.0, one of the key policy documents that informs the organisation and content of the second phase of the Australian curriculum. In a tradition that has its origins in the work of Freire and other critical education theorists, this article explores the assumptions and contradictions that inhere in The Shape of the Australian Curriculum. This article concludes that the introduction of an Australian curriculum should be an opportune time to engage in debate about an alternative narrative such as the one associated with Freire's critical pedagogy, in order to balance the prescriptive and top-down curriculum that is currently being prepared.