Abstract:
In this paper we examine the Federal Government’s review of the Australian Curriculum as a case study into policy mediatisation in Australia. We think that the Australian Curriculum must be considered as a key policy document for teachers, as mandated curriculum texts are the key specifications for teachers’ work. This case also exemplifies how contemporary policy developments are very much tangled up in media processes, which demands new methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Our case begins when the Federal Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne announces a review into development and implementation of the Australian Curriculum early this year. None of this was surprising given his public statements prior to the 2013 election. And from the outset there was plenty of media commentary by Christopher Pyne and others (including Kevin Donnelly), discounted the time consuming consultative process involved in writing the Australian Curriculum Shaping Papers and the subsequent curriculum documents, not to mention reaching a national agreement with the six states and two territories. Pyne’s criticism about the robustness, independence and balance of the curriculum, English and History in particular, also received abundant media attention soon after the election. Our research involves an analysis of an archive of media texts including announcements and debates, transcripts of interviews with Pyne, news reports and commentaries from print and web-based sources at the time the review was announced and again when the review findings were made public. In this case, we are not interested in theorising a conspiracy by Pyne and others to manipulate public opinion to his cause. Rather we borrow Bacchi’s concept of ‘problematisation’ to understand the ways in which Pyne’s review names ‘the problem’ of the AC, and how the review plays out as an example of rationalistic policy problem solving. Bacchi’s approach enables us to trouble the terms in which the ‘problem’ of the curriculum is named and to make visible the ways in which certain attitudes, values and categories come to be taken for granted as ‘real’ and ‘true’ through policy mediatisation. We also propose that this case is an examplar of contemporary policy making that pretends to be a public debate whilst really only offering a spectacle of advanced liberal polemics.