A study of the impact of the Australian Curriculum: History on pedagogical practices of rural New South Wales primary teachers

The History K-10 Syllabus (NSW Education Standards Authority [NESA], 2021) was mandated in New South Wales schools in 2016, as a result of the introduction of a new F-10 Australian Curriculum: History (Australian Curriculum Assessment and reporting Authority [ACARA], 2010). This was a significant shift from the state-based education system that had dominated Australia’s educational and historical landscape for the past 200 years. In primary schools, the pedagogical changes were even greater as teachers grappled with teaching a discipline-based curriculum in contrast to the familiar integrated social studies approach of the recent past. Added to the complexity of implementing new curricula in schools were the differing demographic and geographic considerations that need to be recognised. In Australia, there is an identified educational gap between performance of students in non-metropolitan schools and metropolitan schools (Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, 2020b). Rural schools have particular needs to be addressed to ensure an equitable curriculum for all Australian students.
This thesis examines the impact of the introduction of the broader F-10 Australian Curriculum: History on the pedagogical practices of six New South Wales rural primary teachers in three schools as they adapted to a new discipline-based History syllabus. A practice theory lens has been adopted for interpreting the implementation of the F-10 Australian Curriculum: History, drawing on Theodore Schatzki's (2002) “site ontological” approach to the study of social organisations. Specifically, the research uses the theory of practice architectures to explore how the conditions for pedagogical practice, that is, the practice architectures, comprised the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements within sites of practice, enabled and constrained rural primary teachers’ pedagogical practices.
This study adopts a multicase study method (Stake, 2006), through the selection of a small number of rural primary schools, to investigate the practice of teaching History across those sites and how the adoption of the new curriculum enables and constrains those practices. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and interaction analysis (Keyton, 2018) provide analytical techniques for systematically interpreting the data. The research advances the knowledge base of educational theory and social theory by making new contributions to practice theory grounded in empirical work in rural primary schools. These contributions arise from the distinctive ontological perspective adopted in the study, which provides original insights into how rural primary schools’ educational practices are shaped by (and shape) identifiable practice architectures that exist and can be explored in their local sites.
The practical implications of the study will be the increased understanding of exactly what those practice architectures looked like in rural primary classrooms and how they shaped and were shaped by the teaching of the new F-10 Australian Curriculum: History and the conditions at each site at the time. It is both the means and ends of acting in this complex situation that will inform researchers as well as practitioners in their own classrooms about how to negotiate the curriculum to create positive pedagogical practices. The study will thus produce lessons for local, system, state and potentially national policies and programs, especially for initial teacher education and continuing teacher professional learning.