The greatest and most enduring of the prophets of the Victorian era, Thomas Carlyle was prescient about the importance of heroism in defining a nation's ambition and character. First published in 1841, his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History established a foundation for historical studies that has lost none of its importance in an age of sports, photo-ops, and cable news. From its first pages the book recognizes the intimate connections between heroism and myth. Beginning with the legends of Odin, lord of the Nordic gods, Carlyle describes major forms that heroism can take: in god, poet, warrior, priest, prophet, and king. His emphasis on the great works of great men was circumscribed by Victorian presumptions. Women are seldom mentioned and little attention is given to the achievements of cooperation. But Carlyle cracked through these limits in the best way he knew: to assert that people have choices and to clarify the role that heroism plays in guiding and inspiring them.

On heroes, hero-workship, and the heroic in history

In Australia, Asia-related history has been part of secondary school history curriculum since the 1960s and Asia engagement has been an education policy imperative for decades. At the national leve...

Tracing the Unsteady Relationship between Asia Education Policy Discourse and History Curriculum in Australia

Across the world, history curriculum is often criticized for being ethnocentric or for privileging a nation’s preferred historical narratives through which it imagines itself and the world It is a

Recognizing, reproducing and resisting West as method discourse: An analysis of senior secondary Asia-related history curriculum enactment

History curriculum in Australia has moved beyond its traditional British imperial roots and currently takes a world history approach. Postmodern and postcolonial approaches have challenged the domi...

Deimperialising Asia-related history: An Australian case study

This paper contributes to critical policy research by theorising one aspect of policy enactment, the meaning making work of a cohort of mid-level policy actors. Specifically, we propose that Basil Bernstein’s work on the structuring of pedagogic discourse, in particular, the concept of recontextualisation, may add to understandings of the policy work of interpretation and translation. Recontextualisation refers to the relational processes of selecting and moving knowledge from one context to another, as well as to the distinctive re-organisation of knowledge as an instructional and regulative or moral discourse. Processes of recontextualisation necessitate an analysis of power and control relations, and therefore add to the Foucauldian theorisations of power that currently dominate the critical policy literature. A process of code elaboration (decoding and recoding) takes place in various recontextualising agencies, responsible for the production of professional development materials, teaching guidelines and curriculum resources. We propose that mid-level policy actors are crucial to the work of policy interpretation and translation because they are engaged in elaborating the condensed codes of policy texts to an imagined logic of teachers’ practical work. To illustrate our theoretical points we draw on data; collected for an Australian research project on the accounts of mid-level policy actors responsible for the interpretation of child protection and safety policies for staff in Queensland schools.

Recontextualising policy discourses : a Bernsteinian perspective on policy interpretation, translation, enactment

The representation of Asia is shaped by the complexities of the curriculum policy process, including the context in which curriculum is developed and the practices of the teachers who enact it. Developing more dynamic and interculturally rich representations of Asia in history curriculum requires an understanding of these complexities.

http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30107919/cairns-therepresentation-2018.pdf

Rebecca Cairns

Papers

The representation of Asia in Victorian senior secondary history curriculum