The Constraints Of Relevance On Curricular Knowledge

Under the Council of Australian Government’s ‘Compact with Young Australians’ in 2009, all Australian states raised the minimum age for leaving school with the expectation that young people will be ‘earning or learning’ until age 17. Where upper secondary schooling has historically focused on selecting students into further academic opportunities through disciplinary studies, it must now cater for students who do not identify with the traditional academic pathway. The presence of this new group of ‘retained’ students has institutionalised a second layer of school curriculum premised on, and legitimated by, its claim of relevance to the students’ lifeworld.  This paper will draw on an ethnographic study of five classrooms catering for such students in high schools and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges in towns experiencing high youth unemployment. It will typify the curriculum and modes of assessment offered to students in these non-academic pathways, highlighting both the similarities and differences across institutional settings. While the curriculum offered to these students aspired to be prospective, orienting to future work and life scenarios, the students often, in volatile classroom discussions, demanded that the curriculum be grounded in their present, that is, as knowledge for immediate consumption, given their limited prospects to imagine skilled futures. In addition, teachers in their efforts to foster and recontextualise such relevance, stripped the curriculum of any vertical discourse. This in effect  reduced any mileage the students might make from the knowledge acquired. Using an analytical language from Bernstein’s distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses and knowledge structures, the conclusion reflects on what is gained and what is lost when relevance serves as the only principle for curricular selection.