Politics and curriculum: a foucauldian analysis of art education reform in New South Wales 1976 - 1999

摘要

This research investigates the emergence of specific types of knowledge that comprised the subject Visual Arts in the New South Wales’ curriculum in the 1980s and 1990s. The thesis argues that the formation of the Visual Arts during these two decades was produced out of a complex network of discourses and power relations replete with controversy and struggle. The revelation of changes to the discipline imposed from or interdependent with shifts in systems of authority and the assemblage of discourses that were subsequently made possible is examined. The analysis focuses on archival records and policy documents of curriculum instrumentalities, in particular, the 1987 and 1999 senior visual arts matriculation syllabuses. These two syllabus documents were selected as each claims to innovate a new curriculum object, capitalising on the climate of reform. These objects are: the Focus Areas and the Frames. This thesis contends that orthodox critiques of curriculum history have been premised upon a teleology grounded in transparent argument. A poststructural method is utilised as an alternative to these prevailing modernist assumptions. Michel Foucault’s methods of genealogy, archaeology and theories of governmentality are foundational to the research design of this study. The application of these modes of inquiry provides a compatible way of accessing and discerning data about the power of the differentiated curriculum structures. It also enables the identification of the discursive conditions that made it possible for the Focus Areas and the Frames to be mobilised and legitimated as truth within the official curriculum texts. This Foucauldian re-reading of the archive in this investigation highlights the means through which discursive authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions. It simultaneously examines the way in which the field of art education contributed to a more active notion of subjectivity in the chosen period through practices of power/knowledge. In doing so, this thesis provides a new way of conceiving power relations in education and identifies the implications of this for curriculum reform.