Curriculum Studies in Australia: Stephen Kemmis and the Deakin Legacy

Abstract

When the history of curriculum studies in Australia is written, it is likely that the work done at Deakin University from the latter part of the 1970s to the early 1990s will figure significantly in it, as indeed it should. Under Stephen Kemmis’ leadership and example, a group of researchers and educators produced at least two major bodies of scholarship: one addressed to action research and practitioner inquiry, and the other to rethinking curriculum ‘beyond reproduction theory’. While the work on Participatory Action Research is perhaps more well known, and internationally so, this chapter focuses on Deakin’s contribution to curriculum studies, as a distinctive field of inquiry and praxis. Although it appears now to be little acknowledged in Australia, the Deakin project surely represents an important and distinctive contribution to curriculum studies, as well as constituting an object of interest for curriculum history more generally. The chapter documents, and is therefore an acknowledgement of, Stephen Kemmis’ role and significance in curriculum history, in Australia and beyond.