Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/44684

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Title
Teaching history as hermeneutics: critically and pedagogically engaging narrative diversity in the curriculum
Author/Creator
Parkes, Robert J.
Institution
The University of Newcastle. Faculty of Education & Arts, School of Education
Description
In recent years, a federal government dedicated to using curriculum as a vehicle of social cohesion and cultural reproduction, has questioned the apparently ‘postmodern’ and ‘relativist’ History curriculum reform efforts of the 1990s that occurred in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Arguing for a “root and branch renewal” of Australian history, the federal government has asserted that the nation’s past was rewritten, during the decades prior to the Howard government, “in the service of a partisan political cause” (Bishop, 2006). In polemic fashion, contemporary conservative politicians and social commentators regularly collapse important distinctions between multiculturalism, pluralism, political correctness, and postmodernism, preferring to read all forms of contemporary social theory and practice as confusing and ideologically-loaded, while their own grand narratives are proposed as ‘common-sense’. In this paper, drawing upon important recent work in historiography, I rethink the ‘problem’ of narrative diversity in the curriculum. Arguing that relativism is not the inevitable conclusion of teaching rival historical narratives, I propose a hermeneutic approach to the teaching of history that by providing a curricular space for ‘critical pluralism’ pedagogically engages narrative diversity.
Relation
2007 National Biennial ACSA Conference: Curriculum Centre Stage: Inclusivity, Creativity and Diversity. Proceedings of the 2007 National Biennial Conference of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association (Melbourne 7-10 July, 2007)
Relation
http://www.acsa.edu.au/pages/page68.asp
Date
2007
Publisher
Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA)
Keyword(s)
curriculum;  history;  narrative diversity;  critical pluralism
Resource Type
conference paper
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/44684
Identifier
ISBN:9781875864645
Reviewed
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"Teaching history as hermeneutics: critically and pedagogically engaging narrative diversity in the curriculum"
 
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