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Curriculum and Assessment

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_ The professional responsibilities of assessment cultural bias in standardised testing Teachers assessing themselves? Why assess students' work at all? Assessing students' work STELLA's statements about assessment The language of outcomes Developing a critical perspective on curriculum and policy The' typical learning' progression Page 10 Page 11 _
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curriculum and assessment

developing a critical perspective on curriculum and policy

One of the challenges that beginning English teachers face is to develop a perspective on the curriculum and policy landscape they are encountering on joining the profession.  It is easy to accept this landscape as a given, as though nothing different has ever existed. Yet ‘outcomes’ based curriculum remains a product of a certain period in history, arguably a result of globalising pressures to introduce certain types of performance management and accountability.

By familiarising themselves with debates at the time that ‘outcomes’ based curriculum was introduced, beginning English teachers (and all English teachers for that matter) can develop a critical perspective on their existing professional landscape.

bulletConsider the organising categories of the national profile and statement and the Victorian Curriculum and Standards Framework. What is the value of dividing each of the language modes up into ‘Texts’, ‘Contextual Understanding’, ‘Linguistic Structures and Features’, and ‘Strategies’? What theoretical justification can you give for conceptualising subject English in this way?  What are the alternatives? Teachers who are working in contexts different from the Victorian or Australian context would give a very valuable perspective by showing how curriculum statements about language or literacy learning oin their countries differs.

It is interesting to note, for instance, that the New Zealand version of ‘outcomes’ based curriculum published at the same time is actually organised around completely different categories. For an unusual comparative study, see Terry Locke, ‘ “I’m levelling with ya, mate…” Curricular Echoes From Across the Tasman, Idiom, Volume xxxi, Number 2, October, 1996, pp.20-29.

 

 

 


 

voices
"If standards could be used to promote genuine professional development, improve knowledge of teaching practice and raise the professional standing of teachers, I welcome them. If all teachers could be involved in the kind of collaborative, productive development of literacy teaching standards we were involved in with STELLA – fantastic."

Robyn Perkins 2000

  

 

 
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