Curriculum Construction: A Critical Analysis of Rich Tasks in the Recontextualisation Field

Abstract

Within Education Queensland's recent ‘new basics' curriculum initiative, Education Queensland developed 20 transdisciplinary learning and assessment tasks for Years 1 to 9, called ‘rich tasks’. This paper critiques two of the rich tasks that were most closely aligned to knowledge and skills within the health and physical education learning area. To do so we draw on Bernstein's (1996) theory of the social construction of knowledge. Through this framework we analyse how two rich tasks recontextualise the discourses from the primary field in the production of the highly-valued healthy citizen. We argue that these particular rich tasks do not fully realise the tenets of the new basics agenda and, more broadly, of contemporary physical activity and health discourses. We conclude that, for curriculum artefacts to be meaningful, curriculum makers must be informed by closer attention to the primary field of knowledge.