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The principles of learning and teaching (PoLT)

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Symposium 26 DEP06474 Systems models to support
inclusive education practices.
PAPER 3:
MOS06477
The Principles of Learning and Teaching (PoLT)
*Julianne Moss, University of Melbourne

Abstract

In Victoria, Australia, under the Blueprint agenda, The Principles of Learning and Teaching (Department of
Education and Training, 2005) are being used to operationalise pedagogical change and curriculum
renewal. The University of Melbourne is one of the three contracted providers and in 2005 and 2006 has
supported 450 teachers from state, independent and special schools in Victoria and 70 teachers in
Singapore. The paper outlines the workings of the model and illustrates how through a deeper and renewed
focus on pedagogy schools are being asked to examine and change their practice for all students. One
benefit of the initiative is that special schools are an integral part of the cluster network and are
reconsidering their role in school renewal and systems transformation more broadly. However the regime
of pedagogical renewal must be understood as part of the past and the present, multiple transgressions and
intense struggles in reform practices more broadly. None the least being the persistent stratification of
schooling into special and regular in the Victorian context and professional learning being constructed as
weak professional socialization. Working visually and reading intertextually undoing some of the
problematics of the implementation process the challenges of system wide professional learning and
curriculum reform are exposed.

* Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, email: [email protected]

Introduction
This paper takes the form of a curriculum inquiry text. My purposes inside the field of
curriculum inquiry are to examine the ‘evaded’ (Bach 1997) practices of curriculum
theorising, to rework curriculum practices to enable, rather than deskill teachers and
curriculum coordinators, the members of the teaching profession who are positioned as
the everyday curriculum workers in the reform process. Methodologically I take the
recent history of pedagogical renewal in the Australian context as the background and
foreground; a site for critical analysis, that, takes reading as seeing, illustrating how
visual and intertextual reading can work in curriculum inquiry. I consider ‘selection,
omission, frame; signification and evaluation; arrangement; differentiation and
connection; focus and context’ (Schirato & Webb 2004, p. 21) as a way to put visual
method to work when curriculum practices are told as reform narratives. Having
struggled with the framing of an analytic method to undo the practices of policy and
curriculum for some years now through reading the visual, (Moss 1999; Moss 2002,
Moss 2003; Moss, Deppeler et al. 2007) I continue this work to build defensible method
and methods that will withstand criticisms directed at practitioner research. As Freebody
(2003) comments:
often reports of the findings from Ethnographies, Case Studies and Action
Research projects...consist of little more than collages of fragments of
observations, interviews and documents, with commentaries that link each
fragment into the ongoing narrative worked up by the researchers. A principal
point to be made here, then, is that methodological frameworks such as these
cannot act as substitutes for accessible analytic methods. That is, the deployment
of an Ethnography, Case Study or Action Research does not obviate the need for
analytic methods that can stand as the means for producing public knowledge of a
kind that can be acted upon by educational practitioners and policy makers. The
transparency and theoretical adequacy of the means by which the argument
moves from findings to conclusions – the analytic methods – remains the key to
the informativeness of the project, and to its conceptual and professional
consequences beyond the timing and place if its conduct’ (pp 88-89).

A note on visual methodology

As described above my purposes, methodologically are to work for a deeper
understanding of how visuality can work within the field of curriculum inquiry and also
to develop accessible analytic methods. Initially this work involved method that I have
previously described as visual narrative (Moss 2002, 2003, Moss, Deppeler et al. 2007)
through the take up of the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckman 1966) and
ethnography more broadly. In my previous work, I acknowledge the place and
subsequently thread together the everyday artefacts of policy and practice as important
data sources in educational research. Working critically and culturally the researchers
concern is focused on how to understand human and institutional relations and practice,
breaking apart the everyday notions of how the world works, and, also untangling and
becoming entangled amongst the threads of how society is built on arbitrary divisions
that serve particular interests, particularly as it relates to groups of students and teachers’
practices.

2
The rapidly developing field of visual culture is an important source of understanding in
the development of curriculum inquiry method. Acknowledging the ephemeral objects
that interact inside classrooms, along side teaching practice, artefacts such as maps,
diagrams, performances, projections, memories, poems are ‘all creations of human
culture, patterned and crafted to fulfil a function…or to communicate something’…
(Schirato & Webb p.3), ‘visual culture is as a field of study and a set of ways of
understanding these physical and social phenomena’ (p.4). As Schirato & Webb (2004)
continue:
Our position is that visual culture is most profitably understood as all those visual
artefacts, natural forms and ways of thinking that make up perception in our
everyday life, as well as interdisciplinary technologies of analysis that can be
applied to make sense of them (Schirato & Webb p.6).

Reading the visual

As has been well established in the field of cultural studies, texts are not simply objects
which retain a singular status as ‘text’ only; rather texts are produced and created.
Educational research has embraced these inter textual processes gradually, but in recent
years there has been a heightened interest in curriculum inquiry in this form of analytic
work. These influences in brief can be attributed to:
• the contribution of narrative and narrative theory, also known as the ‘narrative
paradigm’ (Zeller and Farmer, 1999, p.15);
• the reconceptualisation of visual sociology, now known as visual culture;
• the influences of globalisation, ‘technoliteracy’ (Lankshear, Green, & Snyder
2001) and ‘the material–semiotic systems of technoscience’ (Haraway 1994,
p.326.)

I persist with the development of these forms of curriculum inquiry as I find places of
practice to be where I best see what it is that is going on in Australian schools,
particularly during periods of curriculum reform. I assert that Australian schools and their
communities, reliant on politically shaped short-term programs and projects, have largely
been unable to question or change the dominant patterns of Australian schooling
structures or systems. Locating itself firmly within the western discourses of schooling,
Australian education mirrors traditions that are ‘sharply and deliberately
stratified;…segregated by race, by gender, and by class; tracked into academic and
technical schools; divided among public and private, Protestant and Catholic’ (Connell
1994 p.129). The public private dichotomy is now accepted as how things happen in
Australian schools and to my mind no longer debated. In the state of Victoria, during the
2006 election campaign, promises included the establishment of more selective state
schools. The wide spread allegiance to the competitive academic curriculum, formalised
high stakes testing and tightly held tertiary entrance exams signal that the ‘technical
production’ (Posner 1988 p.80) model remains the dominant form of curriculum logic in
Australian education.

Positioning myself as someone who works for ‘the never ending struggle for social
justice’ (Lather & Smithies 1997) and bringing this to the fore through how it is that
‘curriculum works’ (Gough 1998) I take up in this paper aspects of The Principles of

3
Learning and Teaching (Department of Education and Training, Victoria, 2005)
documentation in respect to teachers’ professionalism, issues of special and ordinary
school and the role of visuality and intertextual work as a way to analyse the participation
of teachers and curriculum designers as key actors in curriculum reform. As an example
of a ‘text’ of the early twentieth first century the PoLT documents and the associated
curriculum reforms props are not simply realist artefacts or lifeless documents, these are
documents that can be subject to critical analysis and deconstruction. The documents
provide an opportunity to, in the words of the feminist author Dorothy Smith ‘displace[s]
the analysis from the text as originating in writer or thinker, to the discourse1 itself as an
ongoing intertextual process…bringing into view the social relations in which texts are
embedded and which they organise’ (1990 p. 161-2).

Pedagogical renewal in other states: the Australian context

Australian research on pedagogy has increasingly moved beyond inquiries into the
specific forms of pedagogical and content knowledge that teachers bring when teaching
particular academic content to principles that can be generalized across grade levels and
academic disciplines. Whether it be the Victorian ‘Principles of Learning and Teaching’
(PoLT), The Queensland ‘New Basics’ or the New South Wales ‘Quality Teaching’, the
trend in recent years has been the articulation of broad principles of classroom
organization and practice that appear on a surface reading to transcend subject matter.
This position is representative of Lee Shulman’s ‘General Pedagogical Knowledge’
(GPK). That is, how pedagogy is accorded, viewed or interpreted is not subject or content
specific but generally left up to the ‘expertise’ and ‘discretion’ of individual teachers.

Implicit in Australian approaches are that pedagogy is a practice or a craft representing

the teachers’ accumulated wisdom with respect to their teaching practice acquired over
many years. Encompassing the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs with respect to various
aspects such as pedagogy, students, subject mater and the curriculum, this ‘craft’
knowledge guides the teachers’ actions in practice. Thus, valued is practitioner’s wisdom
and the ability for Australian teachers to engage in reflective practice and hence learn
from their own practice. As indicated in the various Australian documents discussed
below, teachers are encouraged to plan, design and explore new approaches in their
classroom. In allowing teachers to ‘personalize’ and ‘individualize’ their teaching
practices, pedagogy flows from the understandings and knowledge in the minds of
teachers towards the construction of knowledge and understanding in the minds of
learners and is not derived from by purposeful study in a more-or-less contrived or
controlled situation of that of an educational researcher. A discussion on how GPK is
accorded in some Australian states Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria follows.

1
I have not elaborated in this short framing paper, the depth of theoretical consistency that is necessary to
write these arguments. Bloomaert, J. (2005) is a useful recent reference and clarifies the use of key terms
and data history of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis.

4
Education Queensland and ‘New Basics’
Queensland’s School Reform Longitudinal Study, QSRLS, (Lingard & Ladwig, 2001),
and its associated New Basics Project (Education Queensland, 2001) and Productive
Pedagogies (Hayes, Lingard & Mills, 2000; QSRLS, 2001) aimed to focus on the
underlying dimensions of pedagogy that have meaning in real, authentic classrooms and
can be sustained organizationally by schools. Unequivocally the New Basics Project
asserted ‘improved pedagogy is at the heart of this agenda’ (New Basics Technical Paper,
2000). Teachers were invited and urged to mentor one another as pedagogues; to open up
their classrooms to their colleagues, to swap strategies and to talk about pedagogy (Luke,
1999).

The view of pedagogy as the independent work of teachers is strongly communicated in

Education Queensland’s ‘Five Principles of Effective Learning and Teaching’2. The five
‘broad ranging’ principles formulated for the development and implementation of quality
learning programs in Queensland State schools and state:
1. Effective learning and teaching is founded on an understanding of the learner.
2. Effective learning and teaching required active construction of meaning.
3. Effective learning and teaching enhances and is enhanced by a supportive and
challenging environment.
4. Effective learning and teaching is enhanced through worthwhile learning
partnerships.
5. Effective learning and teaching shapes and responds to social and cultural
contexts

These principles are expected to underpin learning and teaching practices across all
sectors State schools in Queensland. They are based on the premise that every student is a
learner, that student learning involves making meaning from experience and from their
own social and cultural values. These principles stand against a single view of pedagogy
and isolate the independent effects of any one specific teaching technique or learning
skill. Left up to the expertise of every teacher, these principles assign teachers as
knowing a repertoire of ‘pedagogical strategies’ to implement in their classroom.

Rich Tasks3 are a component of the New Basics Framework and present substantive real
problems to solve and engage learners in forms of pragmatic social actions that have real
value in the world. Rich Tasks are designed so that students can display understandings,
knowledges and skills through performance on transdisciplinary activities that have an
obvious connection to the wide world. The emphasis on the ‘real’ or ‘wide’ world draw
from the literature in ‘authentic pedagogy’ and a closer examination of some published
examples of Rich Tasks identify the connections with the thinking of John Dewey, Lev
Vygotsky, Paulo Freire and Ted Sizer, all of whom who have published widely in relation

2
The full document is found at
http://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/learning/teaching/technology/principl/principl.pdf
3
Full details on the following website, accessed on 26th June, 2006
http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/html/richtasks/richtasks.html

5
to ‘authentic’ learning. Rich tasks are supported by the ‘Productive Pedagogies’
framework. Productive Pedagogies are deemed to be recognized by:
• Intellectual Quality – higher order thinking, deep knowledge, deep understanding,
substantive conversation, knowledge as problematic, metalanguage.
• Connectedness – knowledge integration, background knowledge, connectedness
to the world, problem based curriculum.
• Supportive Classroom Environment – student direction, social support, academic
engagement, explicit performance criteria, self regulation.
• Recognition of Difference – cultural knowledges, inclusivity, narrative, group
identity, active citizenship4.

To develop competence in an area of inquiry for the Rich tasks, it is argued that students
must:
(a) have deep foundations of factual knowledge,
(b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and
(c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

To develop in students ‘deep’ knowledge implies that teachers themselves must possess
‘deep’ knowledge as well as provide their students with ‘strategies’ that will enable them
to access and engage with the content. As teaches engage in some form of knowledge
transfer and an individual repertoire for pedagogy, issues of what constitutes GPK and
PCK, are raised discussed. There is an assumption that effective teachers have discipline-
specific knowledge about how to best design and guide learning experiences, under
particular conditions and constraints.

The New South Wales Quality Teaching

The New South Wales (NSW) of Department of Education and Training commitment to
developing fully the talents and capacities of all students in their public school system,
prompted the Quality Teaching (QT) model of pedagogy. Developed by James Ladwig
and Jenny Gore in 2003, in consultation with and on behalf of the NSW Department of
Education and Training, this model acknowledges that it is the ‘quality of pedagogy that
most directly and most powerfully affects the quality of learning’ (Department of
Education and Training, 2003, p.4). Although the model encourages conversations on
pedagogy from all the relevant stakeholder groups including the local school community,
the model also advocates for individualized and personalized pedagogical approaches
from the teacher. Similar to the QLD New Basics, the ‘generic qualities of pedagogy’
identified in the document is in pursuit of the individual differences teachers take into
account of their teaching, and across all the different styles of and approaches to teaching.

The Quality Teaching model proposes the following three features of classroom practice
as having a positive effect on students’ learning and improving student outcomes. These
features can be characterized as representing three dimensions of pedagogy:

4
The productive pedagogies framework has since further been adapted by the NSW Department of
Education and Training and is referred to as The Quality Teaching Model. Its three dimensions are: quality
learning environment; intellectual quality and significance. The QT model is later discussed in this paper.

6
 • pedagogy that is fundamentally based on promoting high levels of intellectual
quality;
• pedagogy that is soundly based on promoting a quality learning environment
and
• pedagogy that develops and makes explicit to students the significance of their
work.

These three dimensions forming the basis of the model for pedagogy in NSW public
schools, concentrates more on how teaching is done rather than what is taught, although
the two are noted to be inter-connected. In carefully characterizing teaching rather than
teachers, the model implies that any teacher is capable of producing quality teaching:
The strengths of the QT model is that it synthesizes general characteristics
of pedagogy, thus making it applicable across subjects, key learning areas
and years of schooling. In so doing, it offers a coherent vision of quality
teaching necessary for developing a shared vision of pedagogy on a school-
wide basis (Gore et al., 2004).

Not unlike the Education Queensland New Basics, Quality Teaching places emphasis and
value on pedagogy which focuses on producing ‘deep’ understanding, knowledge
concepts, skills and ideas in students. While this intellectual quality requires students to
engage in higher-order thinking and to communicate substantively about what they are
learning it also constructs pedagogy as dependent upon the capacity of teachers to have
‘deep and flexible’ knowledge. Teachers are still expected to prioritise key ideas, skills
and concepts in content knowledge and determine the best implementation of these ideas,
thus strongly advocating that teachers have an understanding of the structural
organisation of their content knowledge.

QT aims to focus on both the physical and discursive conditions that impact on
pedagogical reform. Its concern with deepening the students’ learning and making their
learning more meaningful is linked to making pedagogy ‘significant’. Significance refers
to pedagogy that draws clear connections with students’ prior knowledge and identities,
with contexts outside of the classroom, and with multiple ways of knowing. Improving
the quality of the learning environment is also imperative in the model. Quality learning
environment refers to pedagogy that creates classrooms where students and teachers
work productively in an environment clearly focused on learning. Such pedagogy sets
high and explicit expectations and develops positive relationships between teachers and
students and among students.

QT builds on what teachers already know, understand, value and many already do in
terms of ‘quality’ teaching practice. It begins from a premise that acknowledges the
capacity of all teachers to teach well, just as it works from the premise that all students
can learn. This ‘self-styling’ approach to pedagogy by every teacher is aimed to allow
teachers to regain control of their teaching by defining their teaching goals and
monitoring their progress in achieving them. A key component in the ‘self-styling’ is
‘reflective thinking’ about ways for teachers to modify and refine their learning thinking
about their pedagogy. This is designed so that every teacher can think more carefully

7
about what their students will learn and what they will produce. To engage in ‘self-
styling’, QT encourages teachers to pose the following four questions which relate to the
teacher’s expectations, knowledge of subject matter, and kind of planning:
• What do you want your students to learn?
• Why does that learning matter?
• What do you want your students to produce?
• How well do you expect them to do it?
• What do you want your students to produce?
• How well do you expect them to do it?

The Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) and the Principles of

Learning and Teaching (PoLT)
The Victorian Essential Learning Standards5 (VELS) describe what is essential for
students to achieve from the years Preparatory to 10 in Victorian schools. The VELS
provide a whole school curriculum planning framework that sets out learning standards
for schools to use to plan their teaching and learning programs, including assessment and
reporting of student achievement and progress.

The Principles of Learning and Teaching P-126 initiative is a component of the Blueprint
for Government Schools, Flagship Strategy 1: Student Learning and provides a structure
to help teachers focus their professional learning. The principles build on the work that
has already been developed through the Science in Schools (SIS) and Middle Years
Pedagogy Research and Development (MYPRAD) initiatives, which show that different
teaching approaches often result in substantial differences in both the ways students
approach their learning and in the quality of that learning. In an attempt to ‘capture the
essence of effective learning and teaching’, the principles are broad ranging, essentially
providing a basis for teachers to ‘review their practices to improve their teaching’. The
PoLT do not advocate a single ‘right’ or ‘best’ way to teach nor do they attempt to
mandate a single ‘one size fits all’ approach. Rather there is an increasing recognition of
the importance of collaborative reflection between teachers of their pedagogy and of
creating classrooms that can be characterized as ‘learning communities’.

The principles reflect a view of pedagogy which centre on the following tenets:
• Interacting with students; that is how they question and respond to questions, use
students’ ideas and respond to students’ diverse backgrounds and interests.
• Creating a social and intellectual climate.
• Framing the content around a series of tasks to be completed or as key ideas and
skills that are revisited and built on.
• Creating and operating as Professional Learning Teams, which will enable for
rich and productive conversations.

5
Accessed at http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/about/index.html
6
The PoLT background paper is found at http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/pedagogy/pdfs/bgpaper1.pdf

8
According to the 2006 PoLT manual the principles of learning and teaching are intended
to:
• develop a shared language of pedagogy based around the six Principles;
• develop insights into the classroom strategies and activities appropriate to each
Principle;
• discuss instances of the particular Principle in their current practice; and
• develop a process or plan to extend the Principle in their school, as a potential
initiative or set of initiatives (Department of Education and Training, 2005).

The PoLT manual and program has it genesis in previous research and professional
development activity developed by Deakin University, Victoria and the Department of
Education and Training, Victoria over the past five years. These professional
development activities commenced with the Science in School Components and
Innovation Strategy (2000) and grew into a number of separate professional development
strategies that included:
• MYPRAD, Middle Years Pedagogy, Research and Development (Department of
Education and Training, 2003)
• Later Years project (LYP): Interviews and focus group meetings with teachers
and education officers working in the later years
• Development of Mathematics and Technology Components (based on teacher
interviews) and the SIT (Science and Information Technology 2005).
• PoLT (Department of Education and Training) trial 2004

What are the Principles of Learning and Teaching?

The Principles of Learning and Teaching in brief are:

1. The learning environment is supportive and productive
2. The learning environment promotes independence, interdependence and self
motivation
3. Students’ needs, backgrounds, perspectives and interests are reflected in the learning
program
4. Students are challenged and supported to develop deep levels of thinking and
application
5. Assessment practices are an integral part of teaching and learning
6. Learning connects strongly with communities and practice beyond the classroom
(Department of Education and Training, 2005)
Each principle is elaborated in the form of expanded indicators of practice. For example:

Principle 4: Students are challenged and supported to develop deep levels

of thinking and application
In learning environments that reflect this principle the teacher:
4.1 plans sequences to promote sustained learning that builds over time and
emphasises connections between ideas
4.2 promotes substantive discussion of ideas
4.3 emphasizes the quality of learning with high expectations of achievement
4.4 uses strategies that challenge and support students to question and reflect

9
4.5 uses strategies to develop investigating and problem-solving skills
4.6 uses strategies to foster imagination and creativity.

The audit instruments are the method used to generate data about teachers’ and schools’
understanding of learning and teaching. These guide strings are used to determine a
focus for school curriculum improvement, in the context of the Blueprint curriculum
reform initiative, the Victorian Essential Learnings (VELS 2005) and Flagship 1, student
learning.

Physical, Personal and Social

Learning

Discipline-based Learning

Interdisciplinary Learning

Figure 1: The strands of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards: organising

curriculum in Victorian schools (http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/VELSoverview.html, April
2005)

The PoLT instruments are:

• Teacher questionnaire and Component Mapping
• Student perceptions of the class
• Student learning survey
• Team strategic processes
• Curriculum audit
• Cluster communication

What follows below and over the page are images from the implementation phase of the
Victorian Essential Learnings (VELS) captured from online sources. Documents and
image downloads are now a primary source for curriculum inquiry. Boomer’s image of
the curriculum as ‘a kind of Hollywood western town teaching set’ (Boomer 1988 cited
in Green, 2003, p.129) now intersects with a resilient form of hypertextual realism that
multiples furiously, and is rarely, if ever reviewed.

10
Figure 3: Introducing the Victorian Essential Learning Standards 2005, Victorian
Curriculum Assessment Authority.

Figure 4: Living out the jumble: implementing the Victorian Essential

Learning Standards 2006, BLUEPRINT for Government Schools,
Department of Education and Training, Victoria.

11
What then can be made of the curriculum designs and the processes that have been
undertaken to operationalise ministerial authorised curriculum reform in Victoria? One
benefit of the initiative is that all schools including special schools are an integral part of
the cluster network and are reconsidering their role in school renewal and systems
transformation more broadly7. To illustrate how the change machinery is working I have
included some examples of teacher generated texts produced during 2006 PoLT
workshops. These representations are produced with the aim of trying to understand what
the reform and implementation machinery was producing.

I take up Popkewitz’s position that ‘history is not straightforward [and] involves multiple
transgressions and trajectories and entails intense struggles’ (1998, p.536). Colleagues
and I, who have been closely linked to the implementation process through the machinery
of PoLT, have been struck by the intensity of the struggle for the groups of teachers we
have been working with. These teachers are typically curriculum leaders in their school
or are a nominated cluster educator. Cluster educators are appointed by groups of schools
and range widely in years of teaching experience, leadership roles and allocated
responsibilities from the cluster management group, that is principals of the represented
schools. What we have found overall, supporting teachers to build pedagogical networks
in their schools, is that teachers are constantly written and rewritten by multiple demands
of the roll out. Rattled and unable to act beyond the programming of the curriculum
machinery that they are given little time to understand, teachers feel framed by existing
structures, and self imposed barriers. We commonly hear ‘we’ve been doing VELS, so
there is no time for PoLT’.

7
The special/ordinary binary, is further issue that I wish to keep ‘on notice’ in the context of Australian curriculum inquiry,
reminding us that any regime of pedagogical renewal must be understood as part of the past and the present, multiple
transgressions and intense struggles in school reform practices more broadly. None the least is the persistent stratification
of schooling into public and private and special and regular in Australia and particularly in Victoria. The total number of
Australian school students identified as having a disability for government program purposes almost doubled between
1995 and 2002 rising to 117 808 across all Australian schools, representing 3.5 per cent of enrolments. Victoria is home
to more than 1.2 million children and young people, representing just under 25 per cent of the national child population.
Around 67 000 or 7 per cent of Victoria’s children are believed to have some form of disability7 and 4.7 per cent of
school-aged children (5-14 years) are thought to have a severe or profound disability. Since 1984, the proportion of
students with a disability receiving additional funding and support in Victorian government schools has grown from 0.93
per cent of total enrolments (or 5 300 students) in 1984 to 3.1 percent (or 16 670 students) in 20067. This picture is
consistent with the national trend. In 1984, almost all students with disabilities in Victoria’s government schools were
located in segregated, special settings. Since then, successive state governments have pursued integration of children
with disabilities into mainstream schools, while continuing to support specialist schools. In 2006, 56 per cent of Victorian
school-aged children with disabilities who attend government schools attend mainstream schools. Specialist schools cater
for 44 per cent of children with disabilities who attend government schools. Source Auditor General Department of
Victoria, 2006.

12
 School 1

School 2

School 3

School 4

School 5

ASISTM = Australian
School Innovation in
Science, Technology
and Mathematics,
DEST
8

Figure 5 Leading Change: Cluster Metropolitan Region Victoria

8
Over the seven-year period of the BISTMT Programme, ASISTM will provide $33.7 million in funding to cluster initiatives
throughout Australia. Individual school cluster initiatives may apply for ASISTM funding in the indicative range of $20,000 to
$80,000, with most successful projects expected around the middle of that range. A typical ASISTM project will be carried out over a
single school year, in some circumstances projects may be allowed to continue for up to an extra 6 months. The first projects, 102
schools were selected n July 2005 and a second round, 99 schools selected in April 2006; source
http://www.asistm.edu.au/aboutproj.asp, accessed October 12th, 2006.

13
Figure 6 Leading Change: Cluster Rural 2 Region Victoria

14
Figure 7 Leading Change: Clusters X 2 - Rural Regions Victoria

15
What is present, what is absent? Why are things like they are?
What does an analysis of reading these texts visually yield? What then is the ‘selection,
omission, frame; signification and evaluation; arrangement; differentiation and
connection; focus and context’ (Schirato & Webb 2004, p. 21). Digitised imagery from
the teacher workshop texts reveal how local priorities are reflected, long lists of activities
and programmatic approaches to curriculum work are documented. A working bee can be
given the same weight as major school wide practices such as VCAL, VET or discipline
renewal. Reporting to parents is included as are major school based initiatives. The white
space of the open ended task given over to teachers during the workshop, frame the
current social practices of curriculum and pedagogical change.

Reviewing these texts I read imagery that features teachers as consumers of instrumental
action and weak professionalisation. This finding is nothing new, and has been said and
researched by many including Lortie (Lortie 1975 in Lortie 2002), who reminds us
teaching is dominated cultures where ‘…the attitudes, values, and orientations people
bring with them continue to influence the conduct of their work’ (Lortie 1975 in Lortie
2002 p.55-56), rather than ‘highly developed subcultures - that is rich complex bodies of
knowledge and technique…’(Lortie 1975 in Lortie 2002 p.55-56). Further teachers are
‘inhibited in impulses toward autonomy, more resources, and control over the work
situation…teachers have been socialised to a subordinate position within school systems’
(Lortie 1975 in Lortie 2002 p. 167-8). Looking back to Figure 4 and back again to the
teacher workshops texts, I also ask is this a mirror of the jumble and teachers caught in
the producer/consumer ‘unidirectional flow’ (Aoki 2005, in Pinar and Irwin, p. 113) of
curriculum production?. I have suggested there is work to be done in understanding how
visuality forms an essential part of the deliberation in the field now known as visual
culture, and there is a need to take up this space in curriculum inquiry. Visuality as
Mirzoeff (2006, p.54) notes ‘from its very conception, was a multi-media term,
connecting art, literature and music’ (Mirzoeff, 2006 p.58). Further Mirzoeff, continues
in this significant essay On Visuality:
for contemporary critics, visuality has a complex and challenging genealogy.
Rather than lead us into the complexities and redundancies of 19th- and early
20th-century optical science, visuality implies an engagement with the politics of
representation in transnational and transcultural form… a ‘time-based medium,
[a] series of connected and dispersed lines, crossing time and space,…a network
and a politics of representation (2006 p.76).

There is much more that has been said and needs to be said about reading curriculum
textually/ intertexually, visualizing curriculum inquiry and practice and intermixing other
visual data sources alongside these teachers’ performances across other sites of practice.
At the most basic level we have incorporated the techniques of reviewing the
participant’s workshops texts as part of the program content, illustrating how the visual
can be rapidly integrated into the delivery of content in the following day. To network
curriculum inquiry and visuality requires as Mirzoeff (2006) has suggested engaging with
the politics of representation in transnational and transcultural form/s. Engaging the
teaching profession in networks of their own production requires the dominance of the
logical and rational traditions of schooling and the weak professional socialization to be

16
seen. Professional learning sits in an awkward space, too often being reliant on the next
available ‘bucket’ of funds or roll out, as has been the case in the recent commitment of
the large states, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to pedagogical renewal. As a
recent evaluation of a major federal initiative, the Australian Government Quality
Teacher Programme over 2001–2003, found, both the understanding and impact of
professional learning in Australian schools is difficult to isolate:
The ways in which professional development programs impact on teaching practices and student
learning outcomes are complex, occur over time and are difficult to identify. Professional
development is a dynamic and multi-layered process, rather than a single event. Student learning,
likewise, is a complex, extended process (Meiers & Ingvarson 2005, p. 28).

Visualizing and producing curriculum work with image and hypertextual forms is an
important contribution to working beyond the limit setting traditions in the field of
curriculum inquiry and professional learning. The possibilities for working visually
digitally and spatially reverberate the qualitative research ‘moments’ into the twenty first
century – any takers to refine these methodological orientations as central focus for
curriculum work in Australia?
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