How can Asia literacy in the curriculum contribute to dialogues around ‘Australian nation-ness’?

Abstract

Curriculum reforms are wrestling with the challenge of cultivating subjectivities and citizenships that can both align with the nation’s interest and compete on the global stage. Regionalisation has emerged as a mid-range collective identity that forges new alliances, shared identities and critical economic mass to mutual benefit. In this way, Europeanisation is high on curricular agendas across Europe. Australia has attempted a similar scalar move to insert itself in the Asian region and social imaginary by curricular means, but with wavering commitment over time. This chapter focuses on the cross-curricular priority, ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’, stipulated in the Australian Curriculum, to ask whether this infused status amounts to a token gesture or a symbolic expression of aspiration, and how this focus was re-construed in the 2014 review. It draws on review documents and parliamentary debates to suggest that current interpretations of ‘Asia literacy’ have shrunk to a thin economic opportunism which only undermines Australia’s project of belonging in Asia. It is then argued that much could be learnt from Indigenous communities’ struggle for representation in the curriculum and that dignifying the idea that Australia has a yellow history might help Australians forge a deeper moral sense of who ‘we’ are and how the nation might fit in the Asian region.