Curriculum as policy deception: a critical analysis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge inclusion in the Australian Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Education systems founded on the legacies and structures of colonisation (for example, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) have established curricular structures that have perpetuated and entrenched processes and practices that marginalise and delegitimise Indigenous people and knowledge. We argue that the approach to curriculum inclusion used within the Australian context is an act of policy deception, hiding in plain sight the hierarchical othering of Indigenous knowledges, such that they are positioned as points of epistemic contrast that legitimate the ‘inviolable assertions’ of Western knowledge embedded in the school curriculum. We argue that the inherent structures that rationalise the goals and organisation at the ‘institutional’ curriculum level of the Australian Curriculum contribute to the impossibility of teachers legitimising Aboriginal Knowledge systems as part of disciplinary thinking in genuine ways. Such knowledges are relegated to a surface-level treatment within existing school subjects, including their representation within formal curriculum materials and their authentic enactment within classrooms. We contend that as a national reconciliation and consensus-building project, the Australian Curriculum's inherent structures have not only failed to support the development of deep engagement and understanding of Indigenous worldviews but also constrain teachers’ agency to extend their disciplinary thinking beyond the bounds of Western knowledge. We invite consideration of the reparative work necessary to imagine new ways of structuring and approaching curriculum.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.066 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".