More continuity than change: Draft 7-10 history syllabus a 'balanced offering'

Naturally, there has been some anxiety among history teachers about the update, since history is one of the most contested aspects of the school curriculum.

On initial reading, my guess is that many teachers will respond with general favour to this draft, but healthy discussion and debate will be welcome.

On the whole, the draft update appears to be a balanced offering reflecting more continuity with our current syllabus than change from it.

It would best be characterised as a renovation rather than a rebuild, and this will relieve those teachers who might have been worried about the enormous workload involved in developing programs for anything too new and different.

Most importantly, in my view, disciplinary history (through the concepts and skills) has remained the foundation requiring students to develop deep substantive knowledge (that is, knowledge about the events, peoples and ideas of the past), as has deep disciplinary knowledge (that is, knowledge about how history ‘works’, how historians develop accounts and arguments, the different kinds of source material available to historians working on different eras and so on).

This provides an opportunity for teachers to work with interesting content and also ensures that history remains a rigorous academic subject drawing on a long, proud and successful tradition of history education in this state.

Looking across the content that students can and must study, there appears to be reasonable balance between national, regional and global history – this can never be perfect.

The writers have also proposed some relaxation in the demands of the content. Crucially, this has not necessarily narrowed the content covered from 7-10, but might alleviate pressure at a few key points.

For example, in Stage 4 (Year 7-8) students are only required to study one ancient civilisation instead of the current two. So, ancient world history is retained but the demands are not so heavy.

The draft also provides opportunities for teacher choice in terms of the specific options that are covered within some topics.

As in our current 7-10 history syllabus, there is an excellent variety of themes within Stage 5, for example. These include the Holocaust, Australian women, the environment movement, pop culture and more.

Teachers also have the option of creating a ‘school-developed’ topic which is popular.

I would argue that all of this means that, fortunately for NSW, this draft is an improved adaptation from the history content published in Version 9 of the National Curriculum last year.

Unfortunately, that curriculum material was, in part, the product of unhelpful political meddling by former federal education ministers who wasted their chance to genuinely improve the content by choosing to use it as ammunition in an embarrassingly unsuccessful mini culture war.

The 7-10 history content in the current National Curriculum is generally less balanced, and some of the topics are more cumbersome than what has been proposed in this NSW update.

There are a range of changes to the way some topics are structured and explained, but probably the most obvious difference between this draft and our current 7-10 history syllabus is that 19th century Australian history has been made a mandatory topic in Stage 4.

This topic essentially explores the nature of colonisation and contact in Australia between Indigenous people and Australia’s colonisers.

It explores various interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, government policies, violence and war, the legacies of colonisation and more.

I suspect many will think this is a new idea – to make this particular topic mandatory – and it is easy to see how this might become the subject of politicised public debate.

In fact, it would simply be a return to how Stage 4 history was taught in NSW from 1998-2012. In this period, under two different syllabuses, students had to study this content (in slightly varied form).

From 2012 to the present, this topic has been an option – though we have no data on how many schools select it.

If this requirement to study Australian colonial and contact history in Stage 4 is implemented in the final version, it is likely to be well-resourced.

Historians have been producing new and powerful insights into this era in recent years. The award-winning military histories by Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars (2018) and Gudyarra (2021), are clear examples. So too is Grace Karsken’s award-winning book, People of the River (2020).

In addition, we now have an excellent and award-winning documentary series The Australian Wars (2022), directed and presented by Rachel Perkins.

Fresh and lively scholarship is bound to help make this topic interesting and rigorous.

From my initial reading of the draft, there will remain some challenges. For example, covering the enormous ‘Australia at War’ topic in the suggested 15-20 hours will be difficult.

There are also some new aspects that teachers might take time to warm to, such as the new ‘context studies’ (larger than the previous ‘overviews’) and the ‘case studies’ that do not feature in the current 7-10 history syllabus.

But these are not likely to be insurmountable issues. Any minor obstacles will ultimately be worked out collectively through professional organisations such as the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales, which has been helping to solve curriculum problems now for nearly 70 years.

There will no doubt be debates and disagreements about this draft as there always is when the history curriculum hits the news.

There are aspects of this that I would adjust, and my thinking on it may change before I submit my feedback – I have literally had less than two days to read the document and begin to develop my thoughts.

Many teachers will have different views on where any strengths and weaknesses lie in the draft, but that is natural and healthy.

My main hope is that debates around this draft do not see a repeat of some of the appallingly ill-informed commentary that we had to endure from some openly partisan education ministers when the history content of the National Curriculum was under discussion in 2021-2022.

It is important that anyone interested in school history submits feedback to the review so that we, as a community, have the best chance of getting a final 7-10 history syllabus that is rigorous, contemporary, teachable and reflective of our national diversity.