English and Arts National Curriculum Discussions

June 2010

A submission on the national English curriculum has expressed concern that the requirement to teach phonics has not received enough prominence, and that it is ‘submerged in a sea of competing strategies’.

The submission comes from a range of university academics, including the developers of the phonics-based MULTILIT remedial reading course. It criticised the draft national English curriculum because, while it ‘makes reference’ to the teaching of phonics, it fails to specify that phonics is the best way to teach reading.

It also criticised the draft curriculum for making reference to the ‘seriously flawed’ three cues system of teaching reading. The submission concludes that ‘the Australian curriculum is unclear about which skills are crucial in learning to read. This leads to confusion between the processes involved in learning to read (decoding text) and the processes involved in understanding what has been read.’

Visual Arts teachers across the country have also questioned the proposed draft national Arts curriculum, which proposes to combine the five arts disciplines for all Australian schools.

The initial advice paper, which was released last month, states that it will be mandatory for all students from Kindergarten to Year 8 to study a combined arts course for two hours a week, including visual arts, music, dance, drama and media studies.

Leading arts education experts have argued that visual arts should be treated as a ‘separate field of study’, and that ‘combining the five arts disciplines into one general subject leaves about 20 minutes for each area’. They argue that this is a ‘vast reduction in time and focus’ that schools currently spend on the visual arts curriculum.

The coordinator of Visual Arts Education at the University of Melbourne, Dr Wesley Imms, stated that ‘each art form is as different as each of the sciences are within science but you don't hear of chemistry or physics being asked to come under the one umbrella. Visual arts and music are the dominant art forms and are being asked to lose time, curriculum structure and position in the school to bolster arts that are not as popular’.

 

 

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