Curriculum Matters 6 : 2010

Visual arts education has long enjoyed a place in the New Zealand curriculum. Institutional endorsement of the value of visual arts learning for all children has maintained its status as a core subject in schools, a secondary schools examination subject and as specialist courses in colleges of education and schools of arts. The visual arts retain their presence today, and few question their centrality to a healthy curriculum. In drawing together a comprehensive statement of subject knowledge for the visual arts, with pedagogic principles that support the subjective as well as institutional dimensions of arts experience, the current curriculum document itself provides a rich foundation for learning in the visual arts. Today, however, the subject struggles to retain its place in face of the demands of increasingly complex and competing interests within the curriculum and educational community interests schools serve. Its current marginalisation in preservice teacher education programmes, the loss in many regions of traditional support services and the increasingly complex demands on teachers and schools threaten to compromise both our impressive achievement to date, and the real potentials of the curriculum we enjoy today.

In this review of the English area of the New Zealand curriculum, the spotlight is focused on the grammar teachers in primary schools are expected to know and understand in order to effectively teach and assess literacy. It is suggested that, despite some professional development in the 1990s during the Exploring Language project, teachers currently fronting New Zealand primary school classrooms lack sufficient declarative knowledge of grammar to teach and assess the grammatical components of literacy in the English curriculum. This may be cause for concern, particularly in light of the introduction this year of Reading and Writing Standards for Years 1 to 8, which places teachers’ judgements about learners’ literacy proficiency under increased scrutiny. Overseas studies of teachers’ knowledge about grammar are reviewed and implications drawn for the local context.

Heteronormativity is pervasive and ongoing in most societies. New Zealand, despite its comparatively liberal laws in relation to sexual orientation, is no exception. The effects of such attitudes, values and prejudices extend into education and, by default, into curriculum. Findings from a study including student and staff online surveys, a series of focus group and individual interviews and an overview of programme content suggest that there was a hidden curriculum of heteronormativity in teacher education at a New Zealand faculty of education in 2009. Course content and delivery, staff and student attitudes and beliefs and the lack of visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual (LGBTT) people appeared to produce a curriculum that was unsupportive and not inclusive of queer students and staff members. This article discusses notions of curriculum and the research findings with reference to relevant theoretical perspectives.