"Living with trash". "Protest". "Save one island, save them all".
The headings sound like they might have come from some progressive "social studies" program. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
On the contrary, these are the names of unit outlines from English for the Australian Curriculum (E4AC), a federally funded website that provides unit outlines for English teachers, to complement Australia's national curriculum.
The national curriculum for English has enough problems of its own. Any decent content in there is heavily diluted by heavy content on "social studies", the coverage of grammar is rather patchy, and the Western literary classics are scarcely mentioned.
But if you thought the curriculum itself was flawed, spare the time to take a look at E4AC.
Released in early 2013, the website was funded by the then department of education, employment and workplace relations, and developed by such prestigious educational bodies as Education Services Australia, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, the Australian Literacy Educators Association, and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia — bodies which are supposed to represent more than 10,000 English teachers from across the country.
The result of their combined efforts is a sequence of 12 "thematic based inquiry units", exploring topics such as "changes to democratic and citizenship rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples" ("Talk about rights", Year 6), "the sustainability issue of living with trash" ("Living with Trash", Year 8), and "ways that protest literature represents the world as it could be" ("Protest", Year 10).
The units outline a number of activities to be done in English classes. Many of them have very little to do with English.
For example, at the end of the Year 8 "Living with Trash" unit, students are supposed to "create their own art from trash piece that will aim to provoke thoughts in viewers" then display it as an art exhibit.
Elsewhere, the unit suggests students watch videos on how to make an "earth bench" out of "bottle bricks", complete "opinionnaires" on attitudes towards trash and recycling, and "use butcher's paper and highlighter pens to create a picture map" to represent "key ideas about sustainability". Only occasionally does the unit outline actually include some content that relates to reading and writing — for example, when it suggests students should consider "how trash has been used as a setting in fiction" and how to write feature articles (about trash, of course).
In the Year 10 unit "Protest", students consider issues such as "representations of gender" and "protest, respect and identity".
They are asked to "discuss the view of men and women" represented in the "I bought a Jeep" commercial, study Paul Keating's Redfern address, and analyse the design of Amnesty International Australia's website.
It could hardly be more blatant that the "English units" outlined on this website are more about ideology than they are about teaching kids how to read and to write coherently in English.
Although E4AC occasionally slips in a little content about structuring pieces of writing and rhetoric, the bulk of the material appears to be concerned with social issues rather than the rudiments of English.
For the most part, it doesn't even recommend good reading material. Aside from a summary reference to George Orwell's Animal Farm in Year 10 and the prologue of Romeo and Juliet in one of the Year 7 units, there isn't much in the course in the way of literature.
What's more, even when it does reference reading material, half the time it doesn't imply students should actually be required to read it.
In one of the Year 8 sequences, for example, it says students should examine the cover of and a 370-word extract from Andy Mulligan's 2010 novel Trash. Students are not actually required to read the novel as part of the unit, although it does concede elsewhere: "Students can be encouraged to read the novel for their own interest."
And so, there we have it. In the lead-up to 2013, the federal government funded various teachers' organisations to produce these blatantly politically charged English units that focus heavily on social issues, are filled with material that has little to do English itself, and which rarely require the students to actually read anything.
It is shameful any federal government ever funded something like this. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago it did, and as a result we have all paid for it.
The only consolation is that E4AC is not actually the national curriculum, and so there is no pressure on schools to actually use these unit outlines.
Let's hope not, anyway. The fewer kids there are studying "trash" in their English classes, the better.
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