Critical and creative thinking (CCT) was introduced as a General Capability in the Australian Curriculum in 2010, heralded as a call for more explicit teaching of CCT. This study was an online survey of 259 Australian teachers, exploring how they have adopted CCT as curriculum, including how confident they feel about this area of their teaching…

Interpreting and enacting curriculum in any school is a complex undertaking, even more so in special school contexts where teachers must develop and enact appropriate curriculum modifications and accommodations for small groups of students and individual students. In special education contexts, educational modifications are changes teachers make…

The paper begins by drawing upon research to understand the genealogical position of dance within the school curriculum as a new 'entitlement' for all young Australians. Whilst dance is included within the Australian curriculum it has been historically marginalised as a 'soft' subject within curriculum hierarchy. This low position in the…

Policy makers in the US and several other countries are recommending that more schools offer an International Baccalaureate (IB) programme. However, little is known about the challenges that IB programmes present for teaching and learning particularly those meeting national curriculum. In this study, we examined the challenges of the IB's Middle…

The purpose of this article is to present a problematising and exploration of how teachers educated within settler-colonial systems are positioned to analyse critically and resist whitewashed curriculum when planning for school-based learning. Since the 2013 implementation of the Australian Curriculum: History, Aboriginal and Torres Strait…

Educational change is dependent on the practices and perceptions of educators. Yet efforts to sustain teacher's adoption and implementation of reform packages often deteriorate over time. Monitoring educators' engagement across the reform process, and making adaptions to reflect key findings, is central to successful implementation. This…

Integrated approaches to curriculum planning and delivery are not a recent phenomenon. In the 1930s John Dewey advocated for a more cohesive conceptualisation of students' learning. Yet, despite state and national endorsement of curriculum integration in Australia, it is generally considered an alternative curriculum design that has failed to gain…

The introduction of the Australian Curriculum in 2011 and 2012 brought with it a variety of responses, from consternation from some states less willing to give up their autonomous curriculum positioning through to significant optimism from educators and academics about the opportunities and benefits afforded by such a national curriculum…

Background: Contemporary scholarship calls for the Health and Physical Education (HPE) profession to pay attention to the practical translation of the critical agenda. Whilst invitations to criticality have featured in HPE scholarship for decades, there have been limited attempts to explore how the critical agenda translates into practice in HPE.…

Commentary on the introduction of the Australian Curriculum (AC) has reflected a tension for educators of students with disabilities (SWD) between in-principle support for a curriculum that is inclusive of all students and the challenge of translating a general framework into relevant, individualised learning experiences appropriate for all SWD.…

The implementation of student-centred learning programs can improve student outcomes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) domains. The required approaches to teaching and learning in such programs, however, are only slowly being adopted in the Asia-Pacific region. This article focuses on a STEM module, 'Water in the 21st…

The new Australian Curriculum (AC) aims to prepare learners for the twenty-first century and in doing so, emphasize the development of critical (and creative thinking) as one of the "general capabilities" of learners. Critical thinking is seen as key in preparing "students to live and work in the 21st century" and…

Curriculum initiatives with intercultural educative aims are not uncommon in many schools around the world. This paper argues that these initiatives and their classroom implementation by teachers is strongly impacted and influenced by the prevailing neoliberal context of schooling. The findings of a project working with teachers on implementing…

Three decades ago, Stephen Kemmis (1990) argued that curricula provide insights into how nations and states interpret themselves and how they want to be interpreted. He also noted that 'debates about curriculum reveal fundamental concerns, uncertainties and tensions which preoccupy nations and states as they struggle to adapt to changing…

Recent critiques of citizenship education have identified the need for curricula that cover not only civil, political, social and cultural aspects of political belonging and responsibility, but that orient students to the realities of global engagement and responsibility. Rather than focussing on national values, histories and political…