Curriculum as policy deception: a critical analysis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge inclusion in the Australian Curriculum
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it