Australian Educators Lack Expertise to Teach Politically Controversial Issues: Expert

Students are seen in class at Melba Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct. 12, 2020. Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

Teachers are ill-equipped to tackle controversial issues in the classroom, which has contributed to students’ poor grasp of social and political affairs, according to an associate professor.

In March, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters launched an inquiry to look into Australia’s civics education after data showed the current approach wasn’t working.

According to the National Assessment Program (NAP-CC), the majority of Australian students have an insufficient understanding of how the political system works, with only 38 percent of Year 10 students achieving a proficient standard in civic education.

The result has raised alarms as civic education has been considered a crucial aspect of the curriculum. According to education departments and experts, civic education develops students’ critical thinking abilities and expands their knowledge about political and social issues, which enables them to participate in democracy as informed citizens

On the other hand, individuals who have little societal knowledge, poor media literacy, and lack critical thinking skills are vulnerable to lies and manipulation.

Teachers Are Ill-Equipped To Address Controversial Issues

In his submission (pdf), Simon Knight, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), attributed part of the problem to teachers’ lack of expertise and development in addressing complex political and social issues.

Mr. Knight, who’s also the founding director of UTS’s Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society, outlined three main challenges that teachers face in navigating the teaching of civic and citizenship education.

The first challenge, he noted, is that civic education is “not an area of specialism for most teachers.”

The second challenge is civic education may involve teaching of controversial issues that requires a broad knowledge base.

The third challenge lies in how teachers tackle issues that involve a high degree of disagreement and uncertainty.

Implementing appropriate pedagogic strategies, in this case, is complex, and teachers “may lack confidence and support” to do so, Mr. Knight added.

“Teachers may not feel supported in navigating the space because it is not clear how to operationalise the policies, and they may feel vulnerable to criticism.”

The associate professor suggested that it’s imperative to “support professional learning for both pre-service and in-service teachers, both as a means to provide learning support to teachers, and to lend status to civics and citizenship and its teachers.”

“Participation in democracy requires engagement with issues on which people disagree, and the evidence, values, and uncertainties that underpin those disagreements,” Mr. Knight said.

Students Only Learn About The System, Not The Policies

Meanwhile, Adam Lovett, a philosophy lecturer at the Australian Catholic University whose research focuses on democratic theory, argued that a reason behind the failing civic education is that the curriculum “focuses on the wrong kind of thing” to help students learn about politics.

The Australian civic and citizenship curriculum covers the concept of democracy, liberal democratic values, legal and political systems, and civics participation.

In his submission (pdf) to the committee, Mr. Lovett noted that the current civic and citizenship curriculum “predominantly focuses on teaching facts about political institutions” but instead, it should focus on policies.

“Policy knowledge furnishes citizens with the ability to choose between parties on election day,” Mr. Lovett said.

For example, Year 10 students spend some time learning about democratic values but are not taught about important social issues such as taxation, healthcare, immigration, inequality, housing and so on.

“The key task is to teach both sides of policy debates,” he wrote.

“When it comes to taxation policy, for example, some claim higher taxation leads to less growth. Others claim that higher taxation is essential for economic equality. The curriculum’s content should focus on these differing arguments.”

“For most longstanding policy disputes, there are perfectly reasonable arguments on both sides. Teachers can similarly focus on teaching the debate. They needn’t [and obviously shouldn’t] take a side when teaching these policy disputes.”

Concerns About How Teachers Tackle Controversial Issues

While teachers are expected to be neutral and refrain from expressing personal opinions when teaching controversial issues, the task has become challenging as political discourses become increasingly polarised and divisive.

A survey by the Institute of Public Affairs revealed how the progressive agenda has infiltrated the school curriculum. It showed that in the new Victorian English Curriculum for Year 12 students, 19 of the 36 texts on the reading list are “woke or social justice ideology texts, grounded in critical race theory, or critical gender theory.”

Meanwhile, of the 17 Australian-authored texts available for teachers to choose, 13 promote a social justice ideology.

James Arvanitakis, pro-vice chancellor at Western Sydney University, pointed to the lack of nuance in classroom discussions on civic education in a journal article published in The Social Education of Australia in March 2023.

Students are often “positioned to be for or against something rather than taking a middle ground and working through the complexities of the many wicked problems confronting our world,” he noted.

Mr. Arvanitakis also said that civic education has become “political footballs captured by the ‘culture wars.’”

“No matter what is proposed, someone screams that the focus should be somewhere else,” he wrote in The Future Of Civic Education.

“No matter where you sit on these debates, the problem is that the focus is on the content being communicated to students and the political framing that follows.”

“Topic after topic is framed from two different perspectives that establishes a certain ‘orthodoxy’ that frames conversations around false binaries such as settlement v. invasion, pro-climate change v. anti-science, or changing cultural norms v. traditional family values.”

Mr. Arvanitakis added that while it’s impossible for teachers to cover every topic in detail, the core of civic education was for teachers “to encourage curiosity, wonder, engagement, interrogation, and empowerment.”