Indigenous basket-weaving a ‘bizarre’ way to teach maths
Embedding Indigenous culture into each subject is making it harder for kids to learn the basics.
Basket weaving seems like a woke way to teach maths, yet the national school curriculum incorporates Indigenous dance, storytelling and basket weaving into mathematics lessons. In a contorted attempt to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture into every subject area – along with the themes of sustainability and Australia’s connection with Asia – the curriculum has dumbed down a generation of children with a failed experiment in social engineering.
Far too many students are failing to master the fundamental skills and knowledge needed for a well-educated workforce, a successful society and a resilient economy.
One in three children failed to meet the minimum standards for reading, writing and mathematics across years 3, 5, 7 and 9 last year.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were twice as likely to fail: teenagers in year 9 had the reading ability, on average, of a non-Indigenous 10-year-old.
Australia’s education ministers must erase the latest version 9 of the national curriculum and replace it with the sensible NSW syllabus, which is clearly written and sequenced, and focuses more on facts than feelings. Sections of the national curriculum are nonsensical.
When year 8 maths students solve problems involving the circumference and area of a circle, using the pi formula passed down from ancient Greece, the curriculum suggests they explore “traditional weaving designs by First Nations Australians and investigate the significance and use of circles”. Four-year-olds learning to count can use “body-tallying that involves body parts and one-to-one correspondence from the counting systems of First Nations peoples of Australia to count to 20”.
In year 7 algebra, the curriculum suggests a lesson “recognising and applying the concept of variable as something that can change in value, investigating the relationships between variables, and the application to processes on Country/Place, including how cultural expressions of First Nations Australians, such as storytelling, communicate mathematical relationships that can be represented as mathematical expressions.” Say what?
The curriculum is under renewed scrutiny since federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson used data analytics software this week to reveal a document so convoluted that primary school principals decreed it is “impossible to teach”. Henderson, who could well be minister in a matter of weeks, criticised it as “ideological and unwieldy”.
Australian Government Primary Principals Association president Pat Murphy wants to see a stand-alone primary school curriculum with a focus on the basics of literacy and numeracy all the way to year 6. “The fundamentals of English and maths are the foundation of so many other subjects and for lifelong learning,” he says. “But we’ve tried to jam too much into each subject area. The curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep.”
Murphy warns that the curriculum encourages a “choose your own adventure” approach to teaching, leaving too much content open for interpretation.
His views are shared by former Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel, who has established his own science syllabus company, Stile Education. Finkel says while the US has strict regulations and quality assurance for syllabus material and lesson plans, Australia lets teachers use whatever material they see fit, under the umbrella of the national curriculum or state syllabus. “There is no way for them to know if it’s high quality because there’s no quality assurance process in Australia,” he says.
Finkel says primary schools should focus on what he terms the “muscle memory subjects” of English, mathematics, sport and music. “If you don’t do these from a young age, good luck trying to pick them up later in life,” he says. “If you don’t learn mathematics in primary school you will struggle with it all through high school.”
Finkel describes the science curriculum as “comprehensive” but questions some cross-curriculum lesson suggestions – or “elaborations” – that affect at least half the science subjects taught in the first three years of schooling. As an example, year 2 students are “acknowledging and learning about First Nations Australians’ way of sharing astronomical knowledge across generations through oral traditions that include cultural accounts, story and dance”.
“If you just followed the elaborations you wouldn’t teach much of the core knowledge that has underpinned modern science since Enlightenment,” Finkel says. “I’m still old-fashioned enough to believe you should teach kids the times tables. You can’t think clearly if you don’t have the core knowledge embedded in your (brain). You can’t do mental arithmetic if you don’t know your times tables.”
This warning is echoed by University of NSW emeritus professor John Sweller, who formulated the theory of cognitive load – that people don’t learn when they’re overloaded with information. “The first priority ought to be to learn conventional mathematics,” he says. “If that priority isn’t attained, everything else will be irrelevant.”
Sweller has no doubt the curriculum was written with “good intentions” but he is critical of the “bizarre” Indigenous elaborations for maths. “Adding unnecessary information to any curriculum imposes an extraneous cognitive load that interferes with learning,” he says.
“Teaching Aboriginal culture is fine but teaching it as part of a mathematics course is bizarre. Students end up learning nothing of traditional mathematics and probably very little about Aboriginal culture as well. If the core curriculum material isn’t learnt, the rest has no meaning.”
Sweller says explicit teaching, with step-by-step instruction and repetition – is important for children to master new content.
The national curriculum was introduced by Julia Gillard’s Labor government in 2008 with the stated aim of creating a “more ecologically and socially just world”. The document is created by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which answers to federal, state and territory education ministers, who in turn “adopt and adapt” it to suit their schools.
The former Coalition government endorsed the latest version – supposedly after “taking a chainsaw to the curriculum”.
Three “cross-curriculum priorities” infuse every subject area with the themes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture, sustainability and Australia’s engagement with Asia.
The opposition has identified 2451 lesson elaborations relating to these priority areas across English, mathematics, science, humanities and social sciences, health and physical education, the arts, technologies and foreign languages.
When 10-year-olds are taught the concepts of binary coding in computing – the use of the symbols 0 and 1 for programming – one elaboration is: “Making collaboratively a long thread with beads representing binary for the letters that spell the Country/Place name in the local First Nations language and English, and could be displayed as a ‘binary banner’ as an Acknowledgment of Country that we are on the Traditional Lands of the (insert name) peoples.”
It is important that all students learn about Indigenous culture, history and perspectives, and that Indigenous children can embrace their heritage and learn in ways they find interesting and relevant. But Indigenous kids live in a Westernised world so they have the right to be taught without condescending attempts to incorporate their culture into every lesson.
The national curriculum is not due to be reviewed until 2027, yet it could be replaced immediately with the new syllabus in NSW, which has taken seven years to develop.
NSW Education Standards Authority chief executive Paul Martin says some knowledge taught in disciplines such as maths is more than 2000 years old. “Content knowledge is the first and primary thing that students learn,” he says. “You don’t mix all the content up, because students need to know which bit of this unit of work is maths and which bit is history – it can’t just be an integrated unit on everything.” The NSW syllabus spells out precisely what teachers need to teach at every age and stage of schooling.
“Our syllabuses are leaner … they provide a clear set of priorities that should make teachers’ lives easier and also fit within what is achievable within a school year,” Martin says.
“It’s not fair for teachers to have to work their way through all those syllabuses and work out which bits they teach and which they don’t.”
As for cross-curriculum priorities such as Indigenous history and culture, he says: “We’ve included it appropriately in subjects where it fits but not simply for the sake of it.”
Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andy Mison helped write the arts national curriculum. He says curriculum writers struggle to find consensus across eight states and territories, and government, Catholic and private schools. “We are trying to satisfy so many agendas,” he says.
“The regular reviews, often politically driven, do not help, and then the curriculum needs to be interpreted and implemented in individual schools.”
He concedes the national curriculum is “overly complex”. “There is always room to simplify and clarify the language,” he says. “But I would not want to see the national curriculum fall over. If it’s not right, we need to keep working on it to improve it and make it fit for purpose.”
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