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curriculum and assessment
the language of outcomes
Beginning teachers are stepping into a curriculum and policy environment that has been made by others. Most schools have detailed curriculum guidelines, and teachers have chosen a range of texts and other resources for each year level. When beginning teachers begin working with their students, they are best advised to find out all they can about the English curriculum at each year level, and to develop a sense of the beliefs and values shared by English teachers at their particular school. It is for each and every teacher to decide how best to negotiate his/her way in relation to the values and expectations of colleagues.
Peter Pidduck has written an account of his first year of teaching, in which he describes his struggle to teach the texts chosen for study at his school. His narrative has prompted a range of responses from teachers, some of whom are very critical of his stance. Click here for the full exchange as printed in STELLA, combined issue of English in Australia 129-130 and Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 9.1, 2001, pp. 95-97 (with responses from Meredith Maher, Scott Evans and Margaret Brennan, pp. 98-102).  Peter’s narrative is also available on the STELLA website.
Curriculum and policy at a school level are also shaped by mandated curriculum and assessment, such as outcomes based curriculum at a state and federal level in Australia. When ‘outcomes’ based curriculum was first introduced in Australia in the early 1990s, there was considerable debate as to whether it was really meaningful to set out learning outcomes for English in the form of a literacy continuum. Does anyone ever progress as a reader, writer, speaker and listener of English through neat sequential stages? How would you describe your development as an English student? What metaphors best capture your own experience of learning English?
For an idea of the debates surrounding ‘outcomes’ based curriculum, you should read English in Australia, 117, and  Idiom, No. 1, 1994, as well as subsequent issues of these journals. In ‘Portraits or Mugshots’, Terry Hayes gives an especially insightful account of the contradictions he experienced when judging the language and learning of the students in his class according to the ‘outcomes’ described in English – a curriculum profile for schools, Carlton: Curriculum Corporation, 1994.
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