The Seminar 1 task was to:

  1. Upload the APST.
  2. Upload/ Link The SACE course outlines for my relevant specialisation areas.
  3. Read Black & William (2010)1, Masters (2014)2 and Chapter 2 of Churchill et al. (2013)3.
  4. Respond to the following question.

From your experience of Seminar 1, and reading Chpt. 2, what historical features do you see as influencing the current SACE curriculum?

I’ve uploaded the APST here, and linked them on the Standards page as well.

I’ve uploaded the SACE course outlines for chemistry here:

and for mathematics here:

I did the readings (and actually quite enjoyed them). To summarise, the Masters (2014)2 paper was very single-minded, Masters was intent on getting accross the point that although assessment can be viewed from many different perspectives and in many different contexts, its purpose is always the same:

The fundamental purpose of assessment in education is to establish and understand where learners are in an aspect of their learning at the time of assessment.

— Masters (2014)2

According to Masters there has been a great deal of division and argument in the education literature about various perspectives on assessment, which is appropriate in a given context, which is not and so on, and in his paper he is calling for the community to band together and find some unity in the recognition that despite our differences and disagreements at the end of the day we are all trying to achieve the same goals.

The Black & William (2010)1 paper talked about how although overarching teaching theory and policy can be useful and important, it often overlooks the crucial step of implementation in the classroom. Also quite single-minded (not a bad thing), Black & William focus very much on the benefits of using formative assessment. More generally though, they emphasise the importance of considering what happens “Inside the Black Box” of the classroom, as this forms a crucial step to implementing innovations from theory and research into classroom practice. They use formative assessment as their primary example of such an innovation in need of implementation, and explore the reasons for its limited uptake in detail. To summarise and paraphrase their point in satire, they suggest efforts need to be focused on making implementation in the classroom easier on teachers, rather than having researchers and bureaucrats state from on high that it should be done and leaving the details of implementation to the already overworked and exhausted teachers. The discussion in Black & William (2010)1 aligns strongly with the perspective of Churchill et al. (2013)3 in that they both take very pragmatic stances. Personally, I found this degree of pragmatism appealing and even refreshing after having spent the past few years in relatively theoretical research, and I hope to see more of it in the teaching profession. They both focus on achievable steps that could concretely improve on existing eduction in appreciable ways. Black & William (2010)1 mostly focus on the translation of insights from education theory (such as the importance of formative assessment, primarily) into classroom practice.

Chapter 2 of Churchill et al. (2013)3 gives a historical overview of teaching in Australia. This overview gives perspective to the ways in which different stakeholders have influenced eduction in the past. To answer the question “what historical features do you see as influencing the current SACE curriculum?”, I’ll focus primarily on curriculum, although it is hard to entirely avoid a discussion of directly related areas such as approaches to teaching. The section on curriculum (pages 53-55) of Churchill et al. (2013)3 is particularly relevant. As Churchill et al. (2013) note, the similarities between the current SACE curriculum and the curriculum in the late 1800’s is remarkable in broad terms – both have a focus literacy, numeracy, and some social knowledge. The specific social knowledge component has changed dramatically (from the `mighty British Empire’ to what is now SOSE, the Science as a Human Endevor (SHE) component of the sciences, and such), but the perceived purpose to educate about social behaviors and expectations is still there. The chemistry curriculum includes components on global warming, pollution, and such for example. The early twentieth century changes in the curriculum, focusing more on the economic stakeholders — preparing people for jobs — is still visible in the current curriculum as well, with not only behavioral training (punctuality, subordination) occurring in schools as part of the teaching style (told you I couldn’t entirely avoid it) but also subjects such as business and accounting being explicitly offered at a school level. Many other subjects also focus on application or job-based examples and contexts for problems, General and Essential Mathematics include plenty of examples. It should be noted however that these applications focused topics are of course not exclusively due to the mentality of preparing people for jobs but also founded in the sound educational theory surrounding the concept of “authentic problems”. Perhaps most interesting are the recent changes in curriculum in the 1970s, where the focus became very much more on equity as a reflection of changing social values. Equity had up until that point been sorely mistreated, with certain linguistic, cultural, religious, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds or disabilities being severely disadvantaged (also reflected in APST 1.3 and 1.6). Although other aspects of the changed curriculum have reverted (the current SACE curriculum has moved back towards long lists of required knowledge, for example), it is encouraging to see that the changes in social values surrounding equity are reflected in the current curriculum, with significant emphasis placed on the importance of equal opportunities and explicit acknowledgment of the historically disadvantaged position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students (also acknowledged in APST 1.4). The inclusion the section entitled “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge, cultures, and perspectives” in the SACE curriculum documents represents an important acknowledgement that the historic inequality has not yet been sufficiently corrected and that we as a society value equity and are committed to prioritizing continued steps towards correcting such inequalities from our past.

Writing this post also served to help me learn how to implement a number of things in jekyll/ markdown including uploading/ linking files, citations (which was actually a massive pain), etc. so in that sense it also contributed to my learning experience. Lifelong learning, as the saying goes.

References:

  1. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2010). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 92(1), 81–90. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003172171009200119 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Masters, G. N. (2014). Assessment: getting to the essence. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Churchill, R., Ferguson, P., Godinho, S., Johnson, N. F., Keddie, A., Letts, W., Mackay, J., McGill, M., Moss, J., Nagel, M. & Nicholson, P. (2013). Teaching: Making a difference. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4