ABSTRACT

Curriculum inquiry in Australia is relatively recent as a distinctive (sub)disciplinary formation. In the early 1980s, an official national organization was created to address Australian initiatives in both curriculum inquiry and curriculum work-the Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA). Anow well-established journal (Curriculum Perspectives) was also formed. Through its biennial conference and publication program, including its journal, ACSA seeks to provide a certain measure of leadership with regard to formal curriculum inquiry, although this is not its primary area of interest or responsibility. More recently, the Curriculum Corporation has provided organizing oversight for the field, albeit from what tends to be an official, systemic, administrative orientation. However, it is certainly not interested in nor charged with the pursuit of formal curriculum inquiry as such. Instead it focuses its endeavors on the practical provision of curriculum leadership and the development of curriculum materials, moreover within more or less received and traditional terms of reference.1 Hence, the intellectual elaboration of curriculum thought and scholarship has emerged as a more or less unsystematic, sporadic matter, to some extent located in universities or related sites and with varying, arguably limited impact on policy. Perhaps more to the point, curriculum thinking overall has become instrumentalized and largely technical in its orientation: subordinate(d) to policy.