Call to remove ‘white consciousness’ in Victoria’s English curriculum
Victoria’s English curriculum is too white and biased against women and people of different sexualities, according to a pair of researchers who want an overhaul of the senior course.
Education
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The VCE English curriculum should be overhauled to remove “white consciousness”, gender bias against females and a “heteronormative” bias against people of different sexualities, researchers suggest.
Education experts Alex Bacalja and Lauren Bliss from the University of Melbourne spent three years analysing the books and texts Victorian high school students learn and found there is not enough racial, sexual or gender diversity.
They found only 4 per cent of texts by Indigenous creators, which they said reflected “the ‘white consciousness’ of the Australian classroom and curriculum”.
“Our study found that creators of the 360 texts on the lists were primarily male (64 per cent male to 36 per cent female),” they said in an Australian Association for Research in Education publication.
“The public discourse about slavery in Australia recently put a spotlight on what is being taught and read in our schools, and the need for English classrooms to be inclusive, sensitive and uninhibited toward the dark and complex events of Australian history.
“If the study of literature is to remain relevant, we believe it is time for educators to escape the comfort of their own literary histories.”
This means more women, Indigenous, sexually diverse and Asia-Pacific authors.
The researchers looked at texts from 2010 to 2019 and found only one novel by an Indigenous author, Larissa Behrendt’s Home, and an “almost total exclusion of ‘black literature’, poetry, plays and cinema”.
“Instead, we found many stories that engaged with themes of colonisation, Aboriginal Australian identity and Australian history. However, most were created by non-Indigenous authors, filmmakers, playwrights and poets,” they said.
Dr Bacalja and Dr Bliss also looked at sexual and gender diversity and found “a persistence of heteronormative texts in Australian curricula”.
“Our study of character sexuality also found an overwhelming percentage were heterosexual. Of the 402 protagonists identified, 78 per cent were heterosexual, 18 per cent had no identifiable sexuality and just 4 per cent were identifiably homosexual.”
Opposition education minister Cindy McLeish said: “The last thing we need is culture wars within our schools. We need to focus on getting back to basics and lifting the results of those young adults leaving our schools.”
Education Minister James Merlino was also contacted for comment.
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