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The three-dimensional design of the Australian Curriculum includes the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs), learning areas and general capabilities (GCs). Geography teachers are uniquely positioned to address the CCPs through the subject's disciplinary focus on interrelationships between physical features of the earth with individual, social and political relationships. However, for some the challenge to the stability of Geography as a distinct discipline is the greater priority. The manner in which the CCPs have been conceptualised and constructed and the current context in which curriculum decisions are made provide the need to reflect on practice and ask to what degree are the CCPs vulnerable -- in the classroom, in the school, in the profession -- and what does this mean for the students?

Within teacher education, professional standards across Australian jurisdictions consistently note the importance of developing the ability to "engage professionally" with a community (QCT, 2009; AITSL, 2012). Paralleling this however, are calls for more "classroom" time (Australian Government, 2012). This paper explores opportunities to provide students with experiences outside the classroom; both the space made available in professional standards and how this space is taken up in teacher education programs. It will be argued that wider professional experiences are crucial in developing future teachers who are cognisant of and engaged with the complexities of the communities in which they teach. (Contains 1 figure.)

There is debate internationally about the production of curriculum texts and the epistemologies underpinning the knowledge legitimated in national curricula. National History curricula in particular are a source of contention bounded by calls for coherent and unifying national narratives that are inclusive and reflect the complexity of the discipline and historical consciousness of the nation to which they are bound. This paper uses critical spatial theory to highlight the 'spaces' and 'places' of the Australian Curriculum History (years 7-10) which organise and disorganise representations of identities in and out of the centre of the national narrative. Interrogating the impact of these representations within purported inclusive and cohesive national narratives draws attention to the notions of belonging presented to Australian citizens. We argue that resistance to normative national narratives and colonial legacies presented with place-based identities can reinhabit the curriculum. This reinhabiting and decentring seeks to engage History students with alternative perspectives and articulations to the national narrative, and foster meaningful connections to place and citizenship. Finally, critical place-based education approaches invite an embodied local/global citizen through local and marginalised knowledges.

Recent initial teacher education policy and regulatory frameworks privilege "classroom ready" discourses. Taking up "readiness" as technical skill requiring more "practice" leads to narrowing of teachers' roles and efficacy with increasing pressure and regulation that marginalises ideals to equip pre-service teachers to be "community ready". We argue that enabling preservice teacher agency to engage with community beyond notions of mastering bounded classroom practice is critical to teachers' roles. Supporting teachers to teach in context as engaged global citizens requires a readiness of relational understanding and skills about the lived experiences of learners, and their wider community contexts. Data from a critical service learning case study highlight how preservice teacher agency to engage with community is conceptualised and experienced in simultaneously beneficial and challenging ways. These findings indicate the complex, yet necessarily significant contributions of service learning experiences to the development of preservice teacher "readiness".

This paper focuses on the 'problem' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education represented in the Australian Curriculum's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Looking beyond particular curriculum content, we uncover the policy discourses that construct (and reconstruct) the cross-curriculum priority. In the years after the Australian Curriculum's creation, curriculum authors have moulded the priority from an initiative without a clear purpose into a purported solution to the 'Indigenous problem' of educational underachievement, student resistance and disengagement. As the cross-curriculum priority was created and subsequently reframed, the 'problem' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education has thereby been manifested in policy, strategised as curriculum content and precipitated in the cross-curriculum priority. These policy problematisations perpetuate contemporary racialisation and actively construct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, histories and knowledges as deficient.

The structure of the Australian national curriculum encompasses engagement with "intercultural education". Significantly, the context from which the curriculum was developed was heavily influenced by a multiculturalist ideology in which notions of cohesion and harmony were dominant. Therefore, those working with the curriculum need to understand the limited ways in which ideas of "diverse" culture might be constructed. As a cultural text this curriculum is a place of encounter between teachers and the various influences on the curriculum document itself. We assert that the perpetuation of ideographs in the context and text of the curriculum, underpin how "intercultural understanding" is positioned in the Australian Curriculum, and limit the narrative possibility of this encounter. It is essential to identify and interrogate such ideographs if we are to be cognisant of the complex politics of national curriculums and opportunities to "re-open" the place for encounter.

Cultural exchange is privileged in many higher education programs across the globe. The Australian government's New Colombo Plan refers to a "Third Wave" of globalisation which foregrounds global interrelatedness through developing student capabilities to live, work and contribute to global communities and aims to make the global an "everyday" experience for students. Mobility programs are promoted as the main strategy for fostering global perspectives, contradicting the idea of the global as an everyday experience. This paper unpacks constructs of global citizenship that underpin Australia's recent international and global engagement policies, and implications for the "global" wave in "local" parochial contexts.

While Australian higher education agendas and literature prioritise Indigenous knowledges and perspectives across policy, curriculum and pedagogy, enacting this in practice remains problematic and contentious. Often the result is the inclusion of simplified Indigenous knowledges, rather than sustained engagement with and embedding of multiple and "messy" ontological and epistemological positions. This paper explores ways of engaging with this "messiness." Taking messiness as a focal point within our own context of teacher education at a regional university, this agenda and tension inform an ongoing dialogue about ways of assuring a conscious approach to cultural sustainability to embed, value and foreground Indigenous knowledges and ways of being and doing in curriculum. This endeavour can be conceptualised as a heuristic project, an ongoing conversation in response to multiple stimuli rather than a fixed endpoint or framework. In response to this exploration, this paper presents the stimuli for our conversation: situated, plural and reflexive knowledges that work together in inherently relational ways to nourish the cultural sustainability of Indigenous knowledges.

National curriculum development is a complex and contested process. By its very function, a national curriculum serves to organise diverse interests into a common framework, a task fraught with cultural and political tensions and compromises. In the emergent Australian Curriculum these tensions are manifest in and around the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs): sustainability, Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. These priorities have been under fire since their introduction to the curriculum and the announcement of a review of the emerging curriculum prompted fears of a renewed attack. Studies from diverse fields of education research suggest that a lack of high-level institutional support for initiatives such as the CCPs places them in jeopardy. This paper focuses on two priorities: Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It employs interest convergence theory as a framework to understand connections between the intentions behind the inclusion of the CCPs and the outcomes of the Review of the Australian Curriculum. Furthermore, this paper draws on interview-based research that explores how the priorities are constructed by those who are expected to work with them, from pre-service through to experienced teachers. This theoretical framework provides an explanation for the perennially precarious nature of these kinds of curriculum initiatives.

Since 1969, over 60 Australian government and non-government policies, documents, committees, working parties and organisations have explored the need to "know Asia". In schools, this engagement is conceptualised as "Asia literacy" and disseminated in the emerging Australian Curriculum through the cross-curriculum priority "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia". However, "Asia literacy" often struggles for purchase in Australian education. I argue that finding traction requires disruption of the dominant discourse of "Asia" as a unitary construct and questioning what constitutes "Asia". This article explores how discourse can be reconceptualised to open up space for schools to engage with "knowing Asia".

The refocussing of Australia-Asia relations is manifest in a combination of national policy moves in Australia. Parallel shifts have been made in Europe, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. In Australia, the curricular response to this shift has become known as "Asia literacy." This study is drawn from a wider project that explores representations of Asia literacy in both espoused and enacted policy. Teachers in this study are welcoming of Asia literacy, however lack confidence in their ability to engage with it as "tricky sort of subject matter" that requires significant theoretical work to "know Asia," and "Asian culture" in an "authentic" way. A seemingly insurmountable barrier is created by assumptions that knowledge of Asia can be discretely inserted into curriculum. Critical reflection on residual imperial notions that are evident in such assumptions can in turn open new possibilities to theorise curricular responses to Asia literacy.

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to "know Asia" creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for "like-minded" futures.

This article extends existing theoretical perspectives to present a continuum of global citizenship education that can be applied to explore the practice and outcomes of transformative Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) experiences encompassing service-learning. It draws data from three WIL case studies across the disciplines of Business, Social Work and Education to explore how this continuum elucidates understanding of students' engagement with and reflection on critical and transformative notions of global citizenship. Using critical servicelearning theory that positions students as agents of their own transformation, the authors found that global citizenship can be conceptualized as a multifaceted process of becoming underpinned by the development of student agency, rather than a linear destination of 'knowing'. We provide examples of this agency while also considering the complexities in and for transformative learning for global citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent initial teacher education policy and regulatory frameworks privilege "classroom ready" discourses. Taking up "readiness" as technical skill requiring more "practice" leads to narrowing of teachers' roles and efficacy with increasing pressure and regulation that marginalises ideals to equip pre-service teachers to be "community ready". We argue that enabling preservice teacher agency to engage with community beyond notions of mastering bounded classroom practice is critical to teachers' roles. Supporting teachers to teach in context as engaged global citizens requires a readiness of relational understanding and skills about the lived experiences of learners, and their wider community contexts. Data from a critical service learning case study highlight how preservice teacher agency to engage with community is conceptualised and experienced in simultaneously beneficial and challenging ways. These findings indicate the complex, yet necessarily significant contributions of service learning experiences to the development of preservice teacher "readiness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of the Australian national curriculum encompasses engagement with ‘intercultural education’. Significantly, the context from which the curriculum was developed was heavily influenced by a multiculturalist ideology in which notions of cohesion and harmony were dominant. Therefore, those working with the curriculum need to understand the limited ways in which ideas of ‘diverse’ culture might be constructed. As a cultural text this curriculum is a place of encounter between teachers and the various influences on the curriculum document itself. We assert that the perpetuation of ideographs in the context and text of the curriculum, underpin how ‘intercultural understanding’ is positioned in the Australian Curriculum, and limit the narrative possibility of this encounter. It is essential to identify and interrogate such ideographs if we are to be cognisant of the complex politics of national curriculums and opportunities to ‘re-open’ the place for encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

National curriculum development is a complex and contested process. By its very function, a national curriculum serves to organise diverse interests into a common framework, a task fraught with cultural and political tensions and compromises. In the emergent Australian Curriculum these tensions are manifest in and around the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs): sustainability, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. These priorities have been under fire since their introduction to the curriculum and the announcement of a review of the emerging curriculum prompted fears of a renewed attack. Studies from diverse fields of education research suggest that a lack of high-level institutional support for initiatives such as the CCPs places them in jeopardy. This paper focuses on two priorities: Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It employs interest convergence theory as a framework to understand connections between the intentions behind the inclusion of the CCPs and the outcomes of the Review of the Australian Curriculum. Furthermore, this paper draws on interview-based research that explores how the priorities are constructed by those who are expected to work with them, from pre-service through to experienced teachers. This theoretical framework provides an explanation for the perennially precarious nature of these kinds of curriculum initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1969, over 60 Australian government and non-government policies, documents, committees, working parties and organisations have explored the need to ‘know Asia’. In schools, this engagement is conceptualised as ‘Asia literacy’ and disseminated in the emerging Australian Curriculum through the cross-curriculum priority ‘Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia’. However, ‘Asia literacy’ often struggles for purchase in Australian education. I argue that finding traction requires disruption of the dominant discourse of ‘Asia’ as a unitary construct and questioning what constitutes ‘Asia’. This article explores how discourse can be reconceptualised to open up space for schools to engage with ‘knowing Asia’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enact-ment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to 'know Asia' creates space to imagine localised narrative possibili-ties that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobili-sation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school lead-ers to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for 'like-minded' futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]