Implementing the Australian Curriculum: A critical capabilities approach

IN RECENT TIMES the use of the term capability has proliferated across a range of government and non-government contexts. It can be found, for example, in texts exhorting best practice in the world of business, evaluations of military capacity, descriptions of leadership qualities in systems of appraisal; and interventions for human development in conditions characterised by poverty, violence and political and social fragmentation. Given the number of contexts in which the term is currently used, it may not be surprising to find it applied with diverse understandings and purposes. With the emergence of the capabilities in the Australian Curriculum, questions of their meanings and purposes are central to their productive use in classrooms across Australia. And yet, questions to do with the origins of the capabilities and how they have arisen in educational policy and strategy have hardly registered in the development of the Australian Curriculum. As the Australian Curriculum enters into the implementation phase there is an urgent need for a conceptualisation of the capabilities that informs professional learning and ongoing curriculum design at the national and local level.