Locating the place of ‘design’ across the Australian Curriculum: a detailed analysis of three learning areas

Abstract

Recent understandings of ‘design’ and, in particular design education have become entrenched within schools and higher education as approaches to provide students with opportunities to develop creativity and imagination, and the skills needed for a globalized future. Drawing from Australian curriculum documents, this paper presents a content analysis that locates representations of design and establishes whether current representations support the building of twenty-first century capabilities. The development of curriculum is positioned within the paper as an ideological act that establishes normative discourses of design and compares them with ‘the other’. Our findings demonstrate that design is represented in multiple ways across the Australian Curriculum and that teachers are presented with a specific discourse of design in curriculum documents from different key learning areas. We argue that a dominant re-constructed representation of design within curriculum has the potential to standardize currently discipline specific understandings of design with implications for the enacted curriculum in the classroom and the key discipline design capabilities acquired by students.