Australia, multicultural education, languages, Indigenous education, ..... The focus of the present analysis concerns the changing fortunes and .... Report of 1981, set the conceptual understanding of multiculturalism for many years, and initiated ...
Multicultural Education in Australia: Evolution, Compromise and Contest
DRAFT FOR IALEI SINGAPORE SEPTEMBER 2010
Joseph Lo Bianco Professor of Language and Literacy Education The University of Melbourne
Keywords Australia, multicultural education, languages, Indigenous education, immigration, Asian studies
1
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ..........................................................................................................................3 APPROACH ...............................................................................................................................................4 SYNOPSIS AND BACKGROUND ................................................................................................................5 IMMIGRATION CONTEXT ..............................................................................................................................5 INDIGENOUS CONTEXT ...............................................................................................................................6 SOCIAL REFORMIST ORIGINS...................................................................................................................6 CONSERVATIVE INNOVATION...................................................................................................................7 SCOPE OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION ........................................................................................................8 REGIONAL DIFFERENCES.........................................................................................................................9 LANGUAGES POLICY ................................................................................................................................9 MULTICULTURALISM AGENDA ...............................................................................................................10 ASIAN STUDIES AS A SEPARATE FIELD .................................................................................................10 ENGLISH AS LITERACY...........................................................................................................................11 THE 1990S: PROGRESSIVE RETREAT .....................................................................................................12 DISCOURSES OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL PLANNING.....................................................................13 BRITISHISM ............................................................................................................................................13 AUSTRALIANISM......................................................................................................................................14 MULTICULTURALISM ................................................................................................................................14 ASIANISM ..............................................................................................................................................15 ECONOMISM ..........................................................................................................................................16 WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED?.................................................................................................................17 NEW TIMES AND NEW CITIZENSHIP........................................................................................................19 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS...............................................................................................................20 RECOMMENDATIONS................................................................................................................................22 REFERENCES..........................................................................................................................................22 APPENDIX I: CURRENT GENERAL POPULATION DATA..........................................................................25 APPENDIX II: INDIGENOUS STATUS BY AGE AND SEX ...........................................................................26 APPENDIX III: ANCESTRY BY COUNTRY OF BIRTH OF PARENTS ...........................................................27 APPENDIX IV: LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH SPOKEN AT HOME BY SEX...................................28 APPENDIX V: PROFICIENCY IN SPOKEN ENGLISH BY YEAR OF ARRIVAL IN AUSTRALIA BY SEX.........29 APPENDIX VI: RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION ..................................................................................................30
2
PRELIMINARY REMARKS Multiculturalism and multicultural education are ultimately state projects of response to population diversity. The demographic pluralism that is the prior assumption of policy responses implied in the terms multiculturalism and multicultural education may arise in many diverse ways, specifically in the case of Australia it has arisen from two sources: immigration and original Indigenous diversity. Pluralism of course can refer to multiple kinds of difference; however the present paper refers only to differences of linguistic, cultural and racial identity, affiliation and practice. Insofar as Australia is concerned the most recent national depiction of the range and distribution of such differences, i.e. of national pluralism as discussed in the present document, are described in the Appendices, all drawn from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the national census data collecting organisation, and specifically from the last national census, taken in 2006, occasionally supplemented by survey data where indicated. Some minor presentational changes have been made to the tables by the author. Appendix I provides the latest (2009) current general population data distributed by state and territory (see map). Appendix II supplies the ABS indigenous status by age and by sex data from the 2006 census. Appendix III shows 2006 ancestry by country of birth of parents where both parents are born overseas, and in cases where only father or mother are born overseas, or where both parents are born in Australia. Appendix IV shows language spoken at home by sex as at the 2006 census. Appendix V shows self assessment of proficiency in English by year of arrival in Australia by sex. Appendix VI which reports religious affiliation as reported from the 2006 census is included for reader reference, but no direct reference is made to this data in the present paper. Map of Australian States and Territories.
3
APPROACH The paper is based on a textual analysis of selected public policy literature and scholarly critique. This has been highly selective, due to the large amount of material available, For example, a recent research study (Lo Bianco and Gvozdenko, 2006) has uncovered at least sixty seven significant policy and policy informing texts which have influenced the area of language education programming at the Federal level alone since 1970. Reading and analysis of current and past education programming, party political policies and public debate also inform the discussion. A simple chronological approach is used, partly to show the contested and often shifting history of multicultural education and its occasionally politicised nature. Most of the events and policy documents are analysed by reference to three phenomena, geography, demography and economy which I argue are the recurring staples in the Australian treatment of multiculturalism. Geography refers essentially to how Australian education has responded to its Asian context, alternating between moments of anxiety or rejection and moments of embrace and integration. Demography refers to the two main population-pluralising movements: immigration, which led directly to the politics of multiculturalism; and the parallel politics of indigenous reconciliation. Both connect to issues of political enfranchisement of minorities via citizenship policy and compulsory voting. Economic forces have influenced both demography and geography. First, the demand for labour after the Second World War produced the mass recruited immigration program that was critical to the emergence of multicultural education. Second, the need to identify replacement markets and consumers following Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community during the 1970s required Australian economic planners to look to Asia. Third, globalisation today makes all policy planners think of the language and cultural issues of an economically integrating world. In general terms all the major political parties in Australia either share a commitment to globalisation or accept its effects, and most deploy the discourse of free trade and unfettered
4
markets. The impact of less regulated finance and trade flows is accompanied by liberalisation of labour markets, declines in fertility and ageing and these forces stimulate more demand for labour, filled, in turn, by recruited immigration, and sometimes by undocumented immigration. As a result reference is made throughout the paper to economic questions as a context for multicultural policy. SYNOPSIS AND BACKGROUND The focus of the present analysis concerns the changing fortunes and meanings of the concept of multicultural education in Australia. The paper discusses the concept and activity of multicultural education through analysis of major public policy announcements, programs and reports. It is of course the case that education institutions adapt to social changes other than those deriving from ethnic or racial differences, such as technological change, economic developments, historical events, national identity and the inculcation of citizenship, and such adaptation is also “cultural”. However, the changes that concern the present discussion are confined to those deriving from the demographic diversity of populations. Immigration context The formal origins of multicultural education in Australia can be traced to the movement for electoral enfranchisement of recently arrived immigrants in the early 1970s via appeals to equal educational opportunity for their children, growing subsequently into a new vision for a culturally transformed nation itself absorbing and embracing change due to immigration. These moves are most strongly associated with the Government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labour Party between 1972-1975. However, the multicultural policy was continued and extended by the Liberal Party Government of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser from 19751983. To a significant degree a relatively bi-partisan approach emerged in relation to multicultural policy, and so in its Australian manifestation multiculturalism has been spared some of the bitter controversy which has characterised it in other settings. Nevertheless, ideological differences relating to the purposes and extent of multiculturalism have also always been present as well and at times in the more recent past have represented sharp political divides on the issue. The initial policy measures have clear functional antecedents which can be traced to the 1947 Post-war Migration Program, and specifically its adoption of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP). The aim of the AME aim was to teach English to all adult immigrants recruited to Australia, including large numbers of displaced persons from Eastern and Southern Europe. As such multicultural policy was invested from its earliest manifestation with an immigration-servicing character and multicultural education was a direct outgrowth of these provisions for immigrant adults. The overarching policy can therefore be seen as a form of settlement policy since immigration in Australia was always planned with the dual objectives of increasing population and producing a larger domestic economy. Other measures to accompany settlement lent the program an overall ethos of facilitating settlement, citizenship and social participation. In the late 1960s research showing persisting difficulties and educational inequality among immigrant children meant that the adult focus of the AMEP was extended to children in programs teaching specialist English as a second language. From such programs focused on specialist provision of English, initially for adults and subsequently for children, emerged a more wide-ranging set of policies and programs which can properly be called multicultural education. The essential aims of this expanded understanding of the consequences of
5
immigration produced changes to the entire society, and not just measures to enable immigrants to adapt to the new social, educational and economic environment of the host society. This move to expand policy and include educational measures to bring about widespread recognition of the benefits of cultural diversity have proved more controversial. Indigenous context Separate and parallel developments related to the recognition of Indigenous cultural and linguistic rights which has its unique history and particular circumstances. A critical move was the 1967 referendum which transferred responsibility for Aboriginal policy from state governments to the Federal (Commonwealth). Educational experimentation in cultural and linguistically diverse programs accelerated under the Whitlam administration of the early 1970s and the Fraser administration which succeeded it. A critical series of important legal cases, culminating in the landmark ruling of the High Court of Australia (HCA, 1992), commonly known as Mabo also played a role. The Mabo decision recognised native or Aboriginal land title for the first time. This recognition was a consequence of the High Court’s rejection of the doctrine of terra nullius one of the ways (others being conquest or cession of territory) in which international law recognises as “…effective ways of acquiring sovereignty” (HCA, 1992, clause 33) for the British settlement of the continent. By accepting that a concept of native title preexisted British occupation of Australia and that the source of this title was “traditional connection” to the land, established by traditional laws and customs, which, when not extinguished in various ways, made issues of Indigenous language, culture and law critical to public policy in a wide range of areas. The most important changes were in fostering legal recognition of traditional land ownership but there were educational consequences as well reinforcing the already existing moves to include Indigenous languages in schools and to insert Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum for all students. In clear ways Indigenous education and immigrant education measures are radically different but both represent claims to modify the mainstream curriculum of public education on behalf of the presence of minority populations. SOCIAL REFORMIST ORIGINS The chronological account begins with the election on 2 December 1972 of the (short-lived) Whitlam government, the first non-Conservative Federal administration in almost three decades. Inheriting several pragmatic experiences in settlement policy, especially the AMEP and its extension in the late 1960s to children through the Child Migrant Education Program (CMEP) the Whitlam government proclaimed that it would change the national character in deep ways, legitimising diversity and experimenting with how to represent national pluralism in the public imagining of the nation. Its new way to talk about the nation has had an enduring effect. The AMEP was a pragmatic measure to ease the integration of newly arrived immigrant adults into the national economy of their new host society. This assistance to newcomers to acquire the national language was to reassure the host society that a multicultural society would not emerge as well as to respond to the views of labour market researchers that English proficiency is a strong predictor of social and occupational opportunity. We can consider this therefore a ‘pragmatic’ multiculturalism in which specially designed English language education was based on the national interest, and extended to children by Federal initiative between 1969 and 1970. Under the Whitlam administration a new and radical aspect of pluralism emerged. This involved the first recognition that immigrants were also changing the host society, that this change was potentially positive, and that it ought to be encouraged.
6
Whitlam’s first Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby talked about the “family of the nation” and stressed both its cohesion and its diversity. This way to mark difference as normal and central to the newly emergent nation extended to many policy fields. The years 1972-1975 saw the beginnings of the community languages movement as a key part of multicultural education and the most tangible of all policy interventions in multiculturalism. Other Whitlam innovations were the creation of the Telephone Interpreting Service, at first for emergencies, later for more general assistance, supplying professional language mediation in health and medical situations, in courts of law and in policing, and the beginnings of professionalism via the creation of the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters. Whitlam’s education Minister Kim Beazley snr instituted the Schools Commission as an independent education policymaking authority, and massively boosted funding to public education. The principal rationale was the equalisation of educational opportunities. Education for ethnic minority and Indigenous children was incorporated within this logic, thereby supplying the first orientation in multicultural education, that of equalisation of social and educational opportunities. This essentially assumed a class analysis of society, and the place of minorities within it, based on the sense that public authorities have the responsibility to remove obstacles to equal participation in education and the social and economic opportunities it affords. Speaking of language defined urban immigrant populations and using language definitions of Indigenous people associated with separate cultural traditions, enveloped in the language of social and economic opportunity, invoked political activism around notions of “language rights”. While this was a successful project for the social reformist side of politics the emergent political consciousness among immigrants and Aborigines, bolstered by citizenship access and compulsory voting, sparked concern among conservative political forces. CONSERVATIVE INNOVATION The conservative parties undertook analysis of why and how a strong association had emerged between the aspirations of immigrants, especially due to their greater numbers and urban locations, and the programs of the Labour party. The result was an analysis of the place of immigrants in society, and of indigenous people, based on cultural differences, rather than class, a conservative counter. Labour’s stress on educational interventions for ameliorating social disadvantage came to be replaced by this conservative emphasis on cultural dissonance between home and school, and between communities and other public institutions and authorities. The disadvantages faced by minority populations were to be sought in individual and cultural factors not in socio-economic positioning. This, then, was the second, and also lasting, stream of ideologising about minority populations. For much of the next two decades multicultural debate oscillated between these two schools of thought, a class analysis of minorities, and their place and aspirations, and a culturalist analysis of minorities and their social position. One stressed economic progress as the basis of social integration; the other stressed individual and cultural differences. The former stressed discrimination and disadvantage and advocated major social change; the reaction celebrated cultural diversity, stressed an expectation of overriding commitment to a unified polity and located disadvantage as a transitional, and marginal, experience of individuals. During the middle of the 1970s, after the Fraser Liberal-National government came to power replacing Whitlam, two critical developments were to shape multicultural policy. First, Britain’s application to enter the European Common Market was accepted and, second, Australia
7
admitted large numbers of Vietnamese refugees. In their different ways these two events shaped cultural policy and multiculturalism for two decades into the future. The loss of the guaranteed markets for Australian raw materials and primary produce required the nation to more energetically seek market access in East Asia. The addition of historically unprecedented numbers of new Australians from Asian countries meant that the nation was turning towards Asia and away from Europe. The Fraser government was highly motivated to replace what it perceived to be the dangerously close association of ethnicity politics with Labour. More widely it sought to dissociate ethnic Australian aspirations from the antagonistic language of class. So, although the Whitlam government can be credited with having laid the foundations of multicultural education in Australia, it was Fraser who enacted many of the lasting and most celebrated policy measures. The key instrument was the investigation into the place of immigrants conducted by Frank Galbally. The influential report that followed, the Galbally Report of 1981, set the conceptual understanding of multiculturalism for many years, and initiated programs, some of which are still in force today. Galbally stressed the self-help nature of minority communities, in areas such as welfare, language maintenance, and religious identification. Public institutions were expected only to support, not carry or implement, many of these initiatives. Among the Galbally innovations were extensions to multilingual public radio and the origins of multicultural and multilingual public television. Schools were asked to ensure that multicultural perspectives were integrated in their curricula, across all subject areas, and English teaching was enhanced. Scope of Multicultural Education The Whitlam and Fraser years essentially defined the scope of multicultural education in the Australian setting. Over this formative period and from the disparate sources and ideologies Australian multicultural education has become a wide-ranging term which has included six essential areas of focus, with different emphases over time: i) ii) iii) iv) v) vi)
Provision of specialist teaching programs of English as a second language for immigrants and Indigenous children and adults;; first language maintenance for immigrant and Indigenous learners; Teaching of community languages, i.e. immigrant and Indigenous languages, as second languages; Infusing culturally diverse perspectives across all subject areas of the curriculum, such as history, geography, citizenship studies; Parent participation; and active combating of negative and racist depictions of minority populations.
The first three parts of these six components can be grouped under language policy: provision of specialist English education, the maintenance of the first languages (both transitionally as a form of access to English and the wider curriculum but also as language maintenance, and therefore as language rights), and then the issue of making such “community languages”, as they came to be called, available to the wider population as second languages. In her review of similar developments in the United States Nieto (2000) identifies seven “basic characteristics” of education for a culturally diverse society. These are, paraphrased, that it should be anti-racist, basic, important for all students, pervasive, directed at social justice and that it should be a ‘process’ and use critical pedagogy’ (passim, p. 305). This reflects many aspects of what came to be multicultural education as it evolved in Australia, at least in rhetoric and advocacy, during the early to mid-1970s, which is also in sympathy with Nieto’s
8
understanding of the field as ‘. . . a philosophy, a way of looking at the world, not simply a programme or a class or a teacher’ (2000, p. 313). Items 3-6 however take multicultural education well beyond issues of language, but in the Australian context language education became the central issue and often represented a proxy indicator of how multicultural education in general was treated. As a result in the following sections of the paper special attention is devoted to language issues. REGIONAL DIFFERENCES Both institutionally and historically regional differences are notable in multicultural education. Some regions, states and urban areas, due largely to the economic and therefore employment basis of their economy have received a disproportionate share of the post-war migration numbers. Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and their respective states, have in turn developed the strongest and most persistent immigrant settlement programs. By contrast regional areas and the territories and states most isolated from industry based urban conglomerations count the largest proportion of traditional Aboriginal people and the smallest proportions of immigrants. As a result issues and concerns relevant to education for Indigenous children, and therefore cultural and linguistic issues arising from this are regionally specific. External geography has also had a major impact. An example is the case of the Northern Territory which is geographically close to Indonesia and SE Asia more broadly and has therefore experienced patterns of immigrant settlement and adopts policies which gives more emphasis to Indonesian as a language of choice. As a result a nuanced account of the practice and experience of multicultural education needs to acknowledge considerable variation across Australia arising from factors of both internal and external geography and the economic basis of different regions. LANGUAGES POLICY After the major changes in the wake of the 1981 Galbally Report lobbying for a more systematic approach to language provision and for ethnic language rights accelerated. From 1981 the national association of ethnic organisations (FECCA), in collaboration with other language interests, (Ozolins 1993) commenced a program of agitation for a national language policy. FECCA organised national congresses which mobilised thousands of people across the country in a veritable mass demand for a national language policy. In 1982, in response to this well-organised pressure, the Federal government, still led by Fraser, initiated a Senate committee investigation into the claim for a national language policy. In the March 1983 elections the Hawke Labour government replaced the Fraser government. More cautious and consensus seeking than the previous Labour government under Whitlam, Hawke inherited the organised movement national language planning. It retained the Senate enquiry, allowed it to complete its work, receiving its report in 1984, but baulked at the depth of change implied in adopting a national language policy for the first time in Australia. However, the community lobbying persisted and in June 1987 adopted Australia’s first National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco 1987) and the English speaking world’s first multilingual national plan. The Policy won bipartisan support. These events represent the culmination of a long process of addressing language issues as
9
matters of public policy, including the provision of immigrant English from 1947, the many initiatives of Whitlam and Fraser, and extended to explicit planning for community languages, and multi-cultural perspectives across all schooling, Asian languages and Studies of Asia, interpreting and translating, and English language literacy for all. However, the Hawke government also began separate policy development processes each of which responded to demography, economy and Asian regionalism in distinctive ways that ultimately impacted on language policy and multicultural education. MULTICULTURALISM AGENDA In 1989 both sides of politics collaborated again on the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. This was another watershed document in response to diversity and produced a new vocabulary for talking about cultural pluralism, dislodging the Galbally approach. The three principles of the National Agenda: cultural diversity, social cohesion and economic efficiency, encapsulated the evolving compromise that at that time made Australia uniquely positive among countries responding to cultural diversity. This three-part pattern combined an economic rights dimension, replacing the rhetoric of class based disadvantage with the neutral tone of “productive diversity”; it retained the celebration of cultural differences approach emphasised in the Galbally report but also introduced a discourse of common citizenship of diversity within a unified set of national institutions and allegiance, i.e. pluralism with social cohesion. Although originating together language policy and multiculturalism now had their own separate and comprehensive policies, with separate locations in policy debate and programming. Language policy was becoming more connected to economic efficiency arguments, through literacy, trade languages, and international English, and this was entrusted to education and training ministries. Multiculturalism on the other hand was entrusted to the Department of the Prime Minister, and to the Department of Immigration. These changes reflect the emergence of separate interests for these fields, and, ultimately, a fragmentation of the previously cohesive advocacy. From the early 1990s with the extension of Anti-Racism legislation, and the creation of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, and from 1994, and the High Court ruling on land title, the Mabo Decision, and the creation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, further specialisation occurred. What had been a collaborating, if not completely united alliance of constituencies around minority interests, was starting to fragment. ASIAN STUDIES AS A SEPARATE FIELD A reform initiative aiming to bring about a more Asia focused education system was entrusted to a specially formed advisory think tank, the Asian Studies Council in 1986. These developments towards Asian Studies were not integrated with multicultural education being seen principally as externally connected and related to history, social studies and foreign language teaching. An early point of tension arose around the sense that multicultural education tends to advance the teaching of languages and the infusing of cultural perspectives across curricula of schools on the basis of domestic pluralism. The Asian Studies Council devised the term Asia literacy, and demanded that Australian education respond to the geographic proximity of Asian countries, addressing national rather than local issues, advancing not languages spoken by
10
domestic minorities (community languages, whether Asian or not), but the powerful official languages of prominent Asian economies. Asian languages came to be closely linked therefore with trade, sometimes being termed ‘trade’ languages. As such Asia literacy was predominantly a discourse of foreign affairs, security, and trade and diplomacy interests, about international relations rather than multiculturalism or diversity. This does not make it incompatible with an approach to curriculum diversification based on local diversity but the necessary work of integration and fusion was inadequately pursued and initially the effect was to specialise and ultimately to fragment a previously cohesive language and multicultural framework. Asia literacy became especially closely associated with Hawke’s successor Paul Keating. As Prime Minister Keating made strenuous efforts to engage Australia in regional affairs and to effect supporting changes in domestic policy, especially in trade, diplomacy and education. Asian languages and studies were given their most prominent place with the adoption in 1994 of the National Asian Languages and Studies of Asia Strategy (NALSAS), funded by all states and territories (COAG, 1994), already the cause of concern to minority communities sensing that Asian languages construed only as foreign trade languages implied problems for their presence in the community and the number to be supported (Singh, 2001). NALSAS became the most well funded and extensively pursued program of curriculum change in relation to languages, though its long term effects are today under considerable doubt (Lo Bianco, 2009). ENGLISH AS LITERACY The first signs of a backlash against multilingualism were, in hindsight, flickering as early as 1990, under the rubric of International Literacy Year. ILY was a declared international marking of the importance of literacy, under the auspices of UNESCO and other agencies of the United Nations. Its purpose was to consolidate action towards what was declared as the ‘eradication’ of illiteracy, focused principally on developing countries. One key effect of ILY was to bring to the attention of national policymakers in education and training in the context of development assistance in the region. However, in the early 1990s the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) commenced a series of examinations using human capital economic theory on the impact of poor rates of literacy of national economic performance, especially on the labour market. This had the effect of focusing policy makers on communication issues, and specifically literacy, in the context of schooling. ILY had mainly addressed adult education and was used by some lobbyists to make comparisons about the provision of English teaching to immigrants under the AMEP with the educational provisions for “native” Australian adults with literacy difficulties whose needs it was perceived were neglected. The work of integration that had failed to be pursued between Asian studies and multicultural education was repeated in this instance. What was required was an integration of the separate domains of adult education, English for newly arrived immigrant adults, with literacy support for locally born English speaking adults from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, to pedagogically and socially demarcate their domains and operations. Much integrative work was done by teachers, curriculum writers and researchers but in public policy the direct labour market effects of literacy policy came to prevail over alternative conceptualisations of policy. The process however underscored what is discussed below as ‘economism’, an emerging Federal political preference to debate new policy initiatives using the terminology of macroeconomics and conceptualising all education outlays in terms of investments, choices being made on the basis of those promising greater returns. This too underscored what has since become a well established international pattern of association of education investments closely with anticipated labour market effects of efficiency and labour mobility.
11
A practical impact was also to focus more attention on English, and to construe levels of funding for English literacy as a mainstream investment, and, at first by implication, later more directly, other kinds of language education spending as pandering to “ethnic ”rather than to “national” interests. Although the government’s own NPL addressed both “English literacy” and “Asia literacy”, and had initiated the research whose findings would shape the next decade of policy making in these fields (Wickert 2001) both came to be used as battering rams against the multi-culturally inspired language policy (Moore 1996; Herriman, 1996). The particular effect on Indigenous languages and on English as a second language teaching in general was to make ‘literacy’ the overarching concept organising school intervention (Nicholls, 2001). THE 1990S: PROGRESSIVE RETREAT By 1991, the Hawke government’s new education Minister, John Dawkins, set in train this process of emphasising English literacy and trade languages (Clyne 1991). The result was the controversial Australian Language and Literacy Policy that succeeded in distancing multicultural rationales for education and replacing these with a claim to represent an exclusive national interest, as distinct from minority interests (Moore, 1996; Ozolins 1993). The national interest was to be interpreted and devised by elites, trade officials, business representatives and advisers removed from local settings of either immigrant or indigenous community-based diversity. The result was to project an image of Australia as a state with an imagined uniform native English speaking community, and only marginal or residual cultural diversity. This imagery dissolved the pluralist commitment of Labour’s political predecessor in the early 1970s and of its conservative replacement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and paved the way for the marginalisation of multiculturalism as a legitimate basis for initiatives in education policy at the Federal level. The ALLP accelerated the fragmentation of policy making in these areas as Asia literacy and English literacy, took separate paths, with separate national advisory structures, funding schemes and programs. In schools this sometimes meant a proliferation of funding and increases in resources but for curriculum coherence and planning the effect was often a lack of coordination and a fragmentation of effort. However, the process of policy change that the ALLP set in train was itself destabilised rapidly, when it was replaced by NALSAS (COAG, 1994). Funding under NALSAS was based on formulations about national trade relations supplied not by any education official, research or interest, but from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, directly combining school languages study with external trade statistics. NALSAS focused on only four languages Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean and continued till 2002. A key effect of NALSAS was to accelerate the introduction of Asian languages in schools across Australia, especially Japanese, least successfully Korean. However Asian community languages, such as Vietnamese, received no support and local community contexts for language teaching were marginalised (Singh, 2001). In (English) literacy, the other stressed field of the ALLP, essentially the same process occurred: the ALLP starting a process of diminishing the impact of multiculturalism on education policy, but this process provoking a conservative reaction that resulted in even stronger emphasis for literacy, and abolition of the ALLP. From 1997 most of the policy initiative in literacy, this time under the Coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard which was shy of using the term multiculturalism in policy. Successive education ministers under the Howard administration stressed instead a curriculum ethos of national unity and
12
English as the national language, and directed education policy towards the introduction of a normalised national testing scheme. This literacy testing program conflated English as a second language with English literacy and in the process undermined a staple of multiculturalism, the teaching of English as a specialist activity. During the late 1990s the environment for languages and multicultural education resembled a kind of “anti-policy” climate (Lo Bianco 2001) at the Federal level and by 2002 NALSAS was itself terminated, leaving only residual programs for languages, multicultural education and Asian studies at the Federal level. An Asian languages funding scheme was restored in 2007 with the election of the Rudd Labour government, but on a much reduced scale and current efforts are directed at the introduction of a nationally coordinated and agreed curriculum to supplement and possibly replace state curricula (Lo Bianco, 2009). The Australian Curriculum does carry a strong place for languages and this reflects a fusion of European, Asian, community and Indigenous languages preferences. DISCOURSES OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL PLANNING We can see from the above account the interaction of various policy voices or interests: i) ethnic minority and Indigenous agitation for language and cultural rights and representation in education ii) professionals, such as teachers, linguists and researchers, who legitimised public action for languages and multicultural education, and iii) diplomatic and trade interests committed to integrating Australian education into Asia motivated by trade, diplomacy and security concerns (Lo Bianco, 2004). Over the three decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there was both collaboration and competition among these interests. It was their interaction with government that produced a continuing stream of pluralistic and comprehensive planning for languages and cultures in schooling (Lo Bianco and Gvozdenko, 2006) but it was also their pursuit of separate agendas which fragmented the coherence of early planning and introduced a range of separate programs and understandings of the role of education in meeting the needs of cultural diversity. These voices and interests essentially advocated responses to the shared realities of demography, geography and economy, and while their collaboration was often effective it was sometimes strained and divergent. The 1970s and early 1980s belonged to the ethnic minority advocates; the late 1980s and early 1990s belonged to the Asia literacy advocates. The late 1990s belonged to a new language policy interest, or, rather, the resurgence of a dominant earlier concern, for English literacy to have both practical and ideological primacy. In the following section the main discourses which have framed the overall phases of such policy are discussed briefly. These are the broad national ideologies and phases that have shaped language and culture policy since national Federation in 1901. I have labelled these Britishism, Australianism, Multiculturalism, Asianism and Economism (for a more extensive discussion see Lo Bianco, 2004). These should not be seen as exclusive phases, but as overlapping discourses and while there is a rough sequence from one to the other some residue of each understanding and ideology about the cultural identity of Australia persists in public discussion today. In addition these are broad summaries of what are complex periods of time and so only dominant trends and ideas or events are mentioned. The new current phase into which Australia appears to have entered however seems to require a new label, which only time will reveal. Britishism The dominant original discourse and ideology of cultural and linguistic planning in Australia was essentially a pursuit of English mono-lingualism based southern British norms and was
13
accompanied by language repression regarding Indigenous and eventually also towards immigrant languages. For most of the 19th century, prior to compulsory schooling and Federation, what passed for language and cultural policies are to be found public attitudes and these reveal immense variation across the nation according to essentially local conditions. However, as compulsory schooling was instituted from the early 1870s across the British colonies of Australia, its aims of mass literacy and cultural socialisation supplied the institutional platform for more effective and widespread language education, and institutionalised the religious sectarian divisions inherited from the British Isles. Progressively, both formal policies (laws, regulations and official texts) and social practices (attitudes and behaviour) came to sustain an underlying national desire for cultural homogenisation. At political Federation in 1901, just as today, demography and geography, multiculturalism and Asia, were the constant points of reference in what passed for policymaking on languages. Other dominant language attitudes included suspicion, and occasional hostility, towards the public use of minority languages, a conviction that indigenous languages (always pejoratively labelled ‘dialects’) were both primitive and destined to disappear, and a strong attachment to southern British norms of correctness for English. From the more tolerating tone of the mid 19th century, attitudes hardened in the early part of the 20th when overt policy against bilingual schooling provisions was adopted in several states in 1917-1918, specifically targeting the prominent German-speaking communities. As the early decades of the twentieth century progressed, a sense of national vulnerability intensified, through economic depression and war, and made any notions of linguistic diversity political anathema. Australians carried British passports; most evaluated southern British linguistic norms as superior to their own speech, and, like most people in the world, imagined the state as a homogenous and indivisible reflection of the nation. Australianism From an early period Britishism was challenged through the assertion of the value of Australian writing, writing whose themes, idioms, style and character extolled the landscape, experience and character of Australia, contesting its judgment and representation solely through British prisms, but also through the activities of amateurs and later professionals to document and describe the evolving new varieties of English that was Australian. A ‘nationalist’ phase followed, from the 1890s as the British colonies agitated for and imagined national independence, to after the Second World War following by expansion in both literary and scholarly activity and documentation, public interest in Australianisms, and ultimately a confident promotion of educated Australian English as the target norm in schooling and broadcasting. Perhaps the culmination of these changes in policy was the Macquarie Dictionary of 1982 and its wide acceptance. Formal recognition of Australian English followed in the 1987 National Policy on Languages and its reiteration in the 1991 Australian Language and Literacy Policy. Multiculturalism The vulnerabilities of Australia’s isolation and small size were dramatically felt in Japanese bombing of the northern city of Darwin and the British surrender of Singapore in 1942 during World War II, along with military calculations about the inability to defend the vast continent. The political slogan “populate or perish” bolstered public acceptance of the post-war recruited immigration program. This program, as discussed earlier, was accompanied by a major adult English language teaching scheme, the AMEP, described at its 50th anniversary celebration conference in 1999 as “50 years of Nation Building” (Martin, 1999).
14
Although there had been vibrant Chinese, French, German, Irish and Italian speaking segments in the population throughout the nineteenth century the immigration program that commenced after World War II permanently and radically transformed the overall population mix, and ultimately many of its public policies. However, the multicultural moment in Australian public policy is most closely associated, as discussed earlier, with the Whitlam Labour government of 1972-75, its conservative replacement, the Fraser government of 19751983, and the Hawke Labour government of 1983-1991. The governing theoretical ideal of thoughtful multicultural discourse has been for a separation of the domains of the political from the cultural nation. By this logic the political nation remains a vertical structure, a unitary, English speaking, representative parliamentary democracy, governed by law, based on notions of formal legal and economic equality, and buttressed by a single common citizenship. The cultural nation is characterised by horizontal affinities of culture, language, plural identity attachments and notions of community. Relatively liberal citizenship laws, combined with compulsory voting, produced a large urban constituency that the political classes appealed to with cultural politics in which languages featured prominently. Multiculturalism imagined and advocated the nation as a multilingual and independent entity with attenuated connections to Britain. There were many concrete achievements of the multiculturalism phase, in which language education became the locus of claims for social reconstruction, some of which are lasting: the beginnings of Indigenous rights understood as cultural self-determination, some world-first policy provisions (the alreadymentioned public interpreting and translating) and moves towards comprehensive and explicit national language planning that sought to combine demography, geography, pluralism and cultural continuity (Clyne 1991, Ozolins 1993, Lo Bianco and Wickert 2001a). However, by the mid 1980s advocacy of rights to the maintenance of minority languages was starting to lose momentum. One reason was the realisation that the successful intergenerational language retention rests in considerable part with individual communities, and a growing view that public institutions cannot practically directly intervene to support all differences of language and culture. A new manner of thinking emerged. This regarded language and cultural retention as a ‘resource’ rather than a ‘right’. A right implies that a sanction against some authority for noncompliance is possible. A resource involves thinking about the benefits (intellectual, cultural, economic and social) of assisting young people to retain and develop a mastery of the language of their families, and the cultural knowledge that they are developing in their communities (Ruiz 1984). And, as importantly, in the mid 1970s Britain applied to join and was formally accepted into the European Economic Community. Britain’s move was important for both Australian language education and national identity. One consequence was to cost Australia guaranteed markets for several export items, but its cultural importance lay in the pragmatic stimulus it provided for commercial communication with regional neighbours. Language education would undergo a further and dramatic revolution. Asianism Although by many practical indicators, of people and institutional links, and overwhelmingly in commercial and strategic considerations, Australia is deeply linked to Asian and Pacific countries, formal membership of Asian, and especially South East Asian, regional institutions is a separate matter. The debate about whether Australia is an Asian nation however, also raises the question of what is Asia. Claims on formal language education and its role in ‘signifying the nation’ reflect powerful mixtures of economic interest and national security, both in turn premised on geographic proximity. These claims became more frequent after Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community. The imperative of securing new markets for Australian primary produce and raw materials, underscored by continuing political turmoil in SE
15
Asia, especially the victory of the north Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam war, decisively directed the national policy gaze to what political discourse later dubbed ‘the region’ and ‘the neighbours’. Although always present, and steadily evolving in prominence, ‘the region’ is now a shared political program, a staple of political discourse, recalling how multiculturalism featured in political discourse in an earlier phase. The most committed to this program of re-conceptualising national identity was the Keating Labour government in the early 1990s which embraced regional integration in a very energetic way and made language education a clear and important part of this project, and, despite wide suspicion that it harbours a preference for American associations, the replacing conservative Howard government since 1996 has continued the policy of Asian integration though with less commitment to any assumption that Australian national identity should be affected by such integration. The election of the Rudd and now the Gillard Labour governments in 2007 and 2010 have enshrined this priority or commitment to pursuing economic ties in Asia, regional security links in Asia and exploring and enacting the educational consequences of these pragmatic ties. In education, Asian languages were the boom subjects of the 1990s, not always comfortably aligned with multiculturalism, sometimes distancing that legacy (Singh 2001) drawing on a stream of thinking of Asia-literacy as a national capability deficiency, a missing part of needed human capital, and as such required by mainstream English-speaking Australia, not its minority populations. However, by the mid 2000s it was clear (Lo Bianco, 2009) that the states which offered the greatest range of language education provision (Victoria and South Australia, some 47 languages supported in diverse ways) had the greatest retention rates for language study and success rates in language learning, while those administrations that pursued more narrowly trade and Asian focused programs had the lowest retention and success rates. This underscores that in a pluralistic nation the motives for language study and cultural learning are multiple and pragmatic regionalism can only ever be one legitimation. Economism The late 1990s saw the dominant language policy discourse change dramatically, returning perhaps to an older pattern, the assertion of the primacy of English; but this time English as ‘literacy’. New elements were the focus on international economic competitiveness in a global economy, rather than the assertion of national unity or British culture and the emergence of a strong sense of commercial value of English to higher education in particular but to private education efforts in general. Under prevailing ideas about language and opportunity there is also a reconfigured notion of the role of the state and public education as contributors to enhancing economic competitiveness. Conservatives and social democrats share the new rationality of governance that elevates the interests of economy above those of nation and community and constitutes a new kind of challenge for advocates of bilingualism and multilingual language planning. Throughout the 1990s a sequence of international research reports pointing to declining standards of English literacy coincided with a rationality favouring education’s connections with the labour market. These developments essentially reflect a political economic ideology of human capital theory as advanced by the OECD (1992; 1996). Almost identical pressure has been felt in many English speaking countries, with literacy, and especially revised notions of ‘basics’ in English literacy, forming a major component of curriculum reforms in Britain and the United States during the 1990s and reinforced recently in the United States with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.
16
Measuring English literacy performance utilising standardised testing procedures permits international comparison. This practice was especially powerful in the early 2000s when economic competitiveness had moved decisively to the north Asian region. The resultant discourse about public education was a powerful incentive towards stressing literacy as the overwhelming schooling priority. Related to negative international economic comparisons, there was a perceived decline in young people’s employment prospects in the post-industrial labour markets, in a context of rapidly intensifying globalisation. Compounding these literacy-related problems has been the steady recognition and naming of English as the global medium of exchange. In this context 1970s and 1980s multicultural and multilingual education achievements, and 1980s and 1990s regionalism stimulating achievements in Asian languages teaching, are vulnerable to contraction. The priority in public discourse, is on ‘basics’ in English literacy and numeracy, constituted as a transferable quantum of acquired measurable fixed skills that public education produces, and that individuals deploy in competitive personal promotion in an unfettered marketplace of competence. This is a rather inadequate depiction of what constitutes ‘literate capability’ when more persuasive accounts of the phenomenon show it to be variable, multiple, contingent and complex (Cope and Kalantzis 2000). Three possible effects of this return to stressing English literacy as the primary and overarching objective of public schooling, on languages appear to be emerging. First, language policy advocates have had to sharpen their justifications for mass language learning, advancing the interdependent effects of literacy in second languages with literacy in English. Second, policy interests that stressed ‘multiple values’ for languages, (that is cultural, regional, intellectual, community and other warrants for language learning, in the context of national identity and social cohesion) are evaluating their rhetorical positions. Third, it is already evident that many schools are re-evaluating the extent of their present commitment to languages in the context of the higher priority now devoted to increasing performance in English literacy assessments, despite literacy interdependence between two languages being well established empirically (Cummins 2000). WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED? Since the adoption of multicultural education in Australia there has been a continuing interest in language and culture policies, training and programming. In general, while multi-cultural policy has been and in some areas continues to attract public criticism, and is the source of political controversy, very few people challenge the study of languages. Perhaps related to this, there is very little concern about the status of English. The demand for English among immigrants and indigenous people is vibrant and although the AMEP (Martin 1999) has been squeezed in recent years it remains a coherent and critically important national program. Public provision of English instruction has meant the almost complete absence of politics on this issue. However, there has been considerable public controversy around standards of assessed literacy performance, for both children and adults, but, unlike the United States and to a lesser extent Britain; this is not generally perceived to be an immigration connected issue. These are significant achievements and indicate national identity impacts of language education, which is now, as will be shown below, the expected experience for all young people at all school levels. This is a dramatic reversal of the historic pattern of language policy. The range of languages shows the effects of the multiculturalism and the Asianism phases, and also the persisting strength of earlier phases of language priority.
17
There has been a wide public acceptance that planning for language competence is both appropriate and necessary. Evidence shows that in those states that supplemented Federal policy with complementary but state-specific programming have achieved impressive outcomes. This is true of several States; Victoria is mentioned only to provide an example. •
• • •
•
•
•
•
•
There has been a vast increase in the study of languages other than English across Australia with regional differences affected by local demography, or neighbouring country languages (for example the Northern Territory has a higher proportion of spoken Aboriginal languages and is closer to Indonesia and so indigenous languages and Indonesian predominate among its language offerings); There has been a significant diversification across Australia of languages studied and of the modes through which language teaching is delivered; In many cases there have been well-developed and coherent connections between English, mother tongue teaching and foreign-community language policies. 1999 figures for the government-schooling sector (almost 25% of pupils attend nongovernment, mainly Catholic parochial schools) in Victoria, show a continual expansion in all areas of language education, guided by the state’s commitment and its full acceptance of Federal policy initiatives; By 1999 97% of primary (primary, or K-6) schools offered at least one language, with over 90% of all primary pupils studying a language, all secondary schools offered at least one language, the vast majority more than one, with a network of specialist language schools offering many. 18 languages were taught in government primary schools, 17 in secondary schools and a further 39 were offered by the Victorian School of Languages, itself a government specialist school that makes available teachers to schools that cannot staff an in-demand language in a particular area. The VSL also offers Saturday language programs; By 2006 practically all primary schools taught at least one second language and several states had supplemented these with extensive state based curriculum planning, bilingual education and various kinds of cultural studies (Indigenous, Asian and multicultural mixtures); After-hours (ethnic, or heritage, community–run schools) teach 52 languages which have varying but often very high levels of collaborative relations with relevant government or public schools. There are more than 190 such community organizations. Most have become solid and professionally organized in recent years, and all receive state funding supplementation to Federal ‘per capita’ funding. Many also offer “insertion programs” in which the community school employs teachers and “supplies” these to the day school (though administratively effective these programs are not always of high quality). Insertion programs are more common in the non-government sector; The most widely taught languages, in alphabetical order, are Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Greek and Vietnamese; however overall some 52 languages are taught, and well over 70 are examined publicly and students can present other languages for final year assessment. While this seems a large number there is also concentration. In 2006 47% of students studied either Italian or Japanese, the number reached 77% with the addition of Indonesian and French; and 91% with the addition of Chinese and German (Lo Bianco, 2009); Most states also offer satellite and visiting teacher schemes in remote areas for both primary and secondary levels, and although 91% of Victoria’s primary schools offer face to face, or direct contact, language teaching, 96 of remote schools offer their only
18
language, or an additional one, or extended and enrichment language teaching, via satellite schemes and 167 secondary colleges do likewise but overwhelmingly this is enrichment or additional teaching. The expansion of language education and its diversification has been one of the great success stories of Australian language policy since the multicultural movement of the 1970s turned its attention towards school language policy, but most particularly from the adoption of the National Policy on Languages in 1987. Japanese and Italian represent an interesting cultural and national identity contrast. Japanese is perhaps the exemplar of the Asianism phase while Italian is perhaps the exemplar of the multiculturalism phase. Japanese primary enrolments have almost doubled every two years over the past 10 years while the growth of Italian is from an earlier period; it has maintained its presence in the primary sector of schooling. At the post-compulsory school years Japanese has considerable holding power on its enrolled students due to its association with vocational and professional careers. For Italian the strong primary school showing, as a language of initial bilingualism for the majority of learners, is depleted somewhat into secondary education but continues to attract strong numbers. Both are represented at virtually every university from ab initio programs to full PhD courses. In different ways Japanese and Italian represent experiences in which wide strata of previously steadfastly monolingual Australians have discovered Australian-specific motivations to study languages. These two languages epitomise two distinct phases of the history of language policy making: multicultural reconstruction of Australian identity on the one hand, and regionalism on the other. The changing fortunes that individual and whole groups of languages have encountered in public policy are captured by the eras and policy texts that brought Japanese and Italian into mainstream education as mass educational offerings and not for elites or for specifiable target populations. The continuing presence of Japanese and Italian in public education, one the nation-making experience of immigration, and the other the momentous re-orientation of the nation towards Asia, encapsulate the identity shifts that have characterised national cultural policy since the middle part of the twentieth century. NEW TIMES AND NEW CITIZENSHIP The current era of global history has been described as the New Times. The immense complexity of this phase of integrating history involves multiple literacies (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Street, 1995), multiple forms of citizenship (Janoski, 1998; Kymlicka, 1995; Schuck, 1998) and more flexible constitutional arrangements for society (Tully, 1996) all of which percolate across the world through consumerism, mass media and popular culture to link children across the world as ‘World Kids’ (Luke, 1990; Luke and Luke, 1990). Multiculturalism is both a precursor and a consequence of these new kinds of connections. It is unlikely that this interaction globally will lessen, sustained as it is by ‘the network society’ (Castells, 1996), or the hi-tech, bohemian, culturally hybrid ‘urban spaces’ (Florida, 2002) in which more and more people live as a result of the vast population mobility of the contemporary age, the Age of Migration (Castles and Miller, 2009). Such changes require greater efforts to understand new forms of culture, how humans interact with each other (Bauman, 1998; Giddens, 1999), and how this interaction demands new kinds of understanding of human identity processes.
19
A reflection of New Times has been the more complex work that the words citizenship and literacy are required to do in forging our understanding of the world we live in. Citizenship used to mean carrying the passport of a given country, voting in its national elections, paying taxes to its administration authorities and being prepared to serve that polity, potentially paying ‘the ultimate price’. These duties, and their related responsibilities, assumed a broadly homogenous population makeup, and more dense relations within states than across them. Neither of these assumptions holds today. Countries everywhere are vastly more ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than ever, and global communications make horizontal connections across countries within interest and professional or family connections as dense and sometimes denser than intra-national ones. As a result, many countries provide dual and multiple citizenship, even in the formal sense, so that paying taxes, voting and residence are dispersed beyond one state for growing numbers of people. The term citizenship is also qualitatively more complex. Citizenship is invoked in discussions of participation, used to mean specifiable stocks of knowledge, skills and capabilities that education systems should produce to enable citizens to contribute in ‘substantive’, rather than simply formal, ways of governance, public policy and national debate. As a result the aims of language education, and the citizenship aims of the general curriculum, demand acknowledgement of the trans-national possibilities of the future, and the world of global competitiveness into which today’s students are likely to enter, a world still characterised for all its diversity by immense and persisting social and economic inequalities. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS The results of this analysis of multicultural education show that Australia was one of the world leaders in innovative educational responses to diversity from immigrant sources, and that some of these innovations remain strong and present in contemporary education. Many initiatives in Australia’s experiment with multicultural education transcended political-ideological differences to become included into programs of pedagogical and curriculum innovation. However, the analysis also exposes inconsistency of implementation and weakness of conceptual clarity as well as contest and disputation around the meanings, content and practice of multicultural education. While prospering through the 1970s and 1980s multicultural education eventually came under challenge during the early 1990s and has since waned as an educational focus. It is unlikely however, in light of changes in global culture and internationalism which will continue to impact on educational design and delivery that the demand for a multicultural ethos to education will disappear, instead it will only intensify the need for a pluralistic understanding of curriculum. However, multicultural education has been revealed to be a complex, ill-defined and often contested conceptualisation of several distinctive domains in Australian education. These have concerned immigrant and Indigenous populations and their cultural and linguistic representation in curriculum, the cultural and linguistic education of the mainstream Australian population and the growing cultural and linguistic integration of Australia into the Asia-Pacific region. Much greater effort is required to conceptualise well the relation between differences of identity at the sub-national level, the demands of national curriculum, and the realities of global interconnectedness. This effort is required within subject fields like languages, history, geography, economics and social studies, as well as pervasively across all educational practice. In its historical experience multicultural education in Australia began as a pragmatic and effectiveness motivated response to cultural and linguistic pluralism. One source was the immigration servicing pragmatism of the 1947 Post-war migration program. Another was the
20
progressive recognition of the legal rights of Indigenous people. These were supplemented and extended by ideological interpretations of the presence growing numbers of non-English speaking culturally and linguistically diverse settlers, research into the effectiveness of formally acknowledging cultural and linguistic differences in pedagogical intervention. A particular feature of the Australian scene has been the combination of compulsory voting and citizenship laws, which have often meant that issues of language and cultural rights can arise within public policy through direct citizenship action in electoral democracy. Multiculturalism has suffered from ambiguity as to its scope and limits and contestation as to its methods and purposes. When applied to education, as multicultural education, these problems have become magnified. Over time we have seen how the goals of multicultural education have come into collision with other movements for curriculum and pedagogical reform, in particular with the extra-national context of Asia and Australia’s growing response to and acceptance of its geographic location at the edge of the Asian landmass. It is relevant to observe that in the current moves for a national curriculum, the Australian Curriculum, as it is to be called, will have three crosscurriculum themes. These are Indigenous culture, Asian context and issues of environmental sustainability. Questions of diversity arising from immigrant-sourced pluralism are not included. The sources of population and curriculum diversity are the extra-national (the Asian geographic setting) and the sub-national (Indigenous and immigrant) have always been defining aspects of the Australian social, political and economic story. Indeed a key defining act of the Australian nation, the political federation of the British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, was conditioned by both of these. One of the first acts of the new parliament of the Commonwealth was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, better known as the White Australia Policy, whose clear purpose was to prevent the growth of precisely the kind of culturally, linguistically, religiously and racially diverse country which Australia has since become. The extent to which different political actors have taken up the term ‘multiculturalism’ and its educational derivative have shifted dramatically over time. Various political interests and times have interpreted multiculturalism as the national condition to prevent, at other times and by other interests as the condition to produce, or to manage, or to minimise or control or embrace. There are, therefore, conflicting versions of the story of the history, achievements and problems of multiculturalism in Australia, from political and educational conservatives and from political and educational reformers in Australian public life. Unlike in other countries responses to multiculturalism do not align neatly with political ideology: it is not the case for example that radicals always embrace multicultural ideologies and conservatives always reject it. This is partly because of the various meanings of the term and of a multitude of varieties and meanings of its educational consequences. All depend, however, on one primary and underlying social condition: demographic diversity, especially of racial and ethnic difference; languages spoken; cultural values and identities; and religious affiliation and practices. The extent to which multicultural populations are reflected in educational programming is predicated on the degree of political and policy participation of its advocates and the depth of its pedagogical effects. Therefore there are two fundamental axes in the multiculturalism story: the descriptive account of population diversity, and the normative account of the public policy and social consequences of that diversity.
21
It is concluded that multicultural education, as official conceived in Australia, never fully resolved and occasionally provoked problematic relations with cognate curriculum reform processes aiming to incorporate difference and diversity into curriculum, and specifically Indigenous and Asian Studies. However, at the level of pedagogical practice the long period of debate, innovation and response to diversity which was brought about by the multicultural education movement produced many innovative practices and experiences which still enrich the public education scene. Despite largely fading from the Federal government scene, as we see with its downgrading in the plans for the Australian curriculum, multicultural education has become the operating assumption of educational practice in at the local area in several parts of Australia, those with the highest concentration of immigrant and Indigenous learners, and as such continues to exercise an important role at the local level of many regions and individual schools. Recommendations 1. Much more serious effort is required to define precisely the content and limits of what counts as multicultural education 2. More systematic exploration of the links and limits between related curriculum diversifying movements is required 3. It is critically important to distinguish the unique and separate roles of languages and cultural content included in public education to support the cognitive and social/affective learning of minority populations from the teaching of prestige foreign and second languages and cultural knowledge which might be incorporated into curriculum under national interest considerations. REFERENCES ABS, (2007), 2006 Census, Community Profile Series (Basic Community Profile), Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/home/home?opendocument#frombanner=GT Accessed 4, 8, 24, 27 September 2010 Bauman, Z. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Castles, S. and Miller, M. (2009), The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan Clyne, M.G. (1991), Community Languages, The Australian Experience. Cambridge University Press. Cope, C. and M. Kalantzis, M. (2000), Multiliteracies, Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge. COAG (1994), Asian Languages and Australia's Economic Future. Council of Australian Governments, K. Rudd Chair, Brisbane: Queensland Government Printer.
22
Dawkins, J. (1992), Australia’s Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And How Its Transforming Work, Leisure Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Fox, E. 2001. The emergence of the international baccalaureate as an impetus for curriculum reform. In: Hayden, M. and Thompson, J. (Eds.) International Education, Principles and Practice. London: Kogan Page, pp. 65–77. Giddens, A., (1999), Runaway World. London: Profile. HCA, (1992) Mabo v Queensland (No 2) ("Mabo case") [1992] HCA 23; (1992) 175 CLR 1 (3 June) http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23.html Accessed 8 June 2010 Herriman, M. (1996), Language Policy in Australia. Pp. 35-62 in: Herriman, M. and Burnaby, B. Language Policy in English-Dominant Countries, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Janoski, T. (1998), Citizenship and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lo Bianco, J. (1987), National Policy on Languages. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Lo Bianco, J, (2001a), From policy to anti-policy: How fear of language rights took policy making out of community hands, pp 11-45 in J. Lo Bianco and R. Wickert (eds), Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy. Melbourne: Language Australia Publications. Lo Bianco, J. (2004). A Site For Debate, Negotiation And Contest Of National Identity: Language Policy In Australia, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/LoBiancoEn.pdf Lo Bianco, J. and Gvozdenko, I. (2006), Collaboration and Innovation in the Provision of Languages Other than English, DASSH, Department of Education, Science and Training. http://www.dassh.edu.au/publications/CASR_ARCHIVAL_REVIEW.pdf Lo Bianco, J. (2009), Second Languages and Australian Schooling: Review and Proposals, Australian Education Review 54, Camberwell, Vic: Australian Council for Education Research.
Luke, C. (1990), Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of American Discourse of Television and Children, 1950–1980. Praeger: New York. Luke, C. and Luke, A. (1990), Theorizing interracial families and hybrid identities: an Australian perspective. Educational Theory 49(2), 223–249. Martin, S. (1999), New Life, New Language: The History of the Adult Migrant English Program. Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University.
23
Moore, H.M. (1996), Language Policies as Virtual Realities: Two Australian Examples. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 1 (Autumn), 473-497. Nicholls, C. (2001), Reconciled to what? Reconciliation and the Northern Territory’s Bilingual Education Program, 1973-1998. Pp. 325 – 341 in J. Lo Bianco and R. Wickert, eds, Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy, Melbourne: Language Australia. Nieto, S. (2000), Affirming Diversity. The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. New York: Longman. OECD, (1992), Adult Illiteracy and Economic Performance. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. OECD, (1996), Human Capital Investment, An International Comparison. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Ozolins, U. (1993), The Politics of Language in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Ruiz, R. (1984), Orientations in Language Planning, National Association for Bilingual Education Journal, 8:15-34. Singh, M. (2001), Advocating the sustainability of linguistic diversity. Pp. 123-149 in: Lo Bianco, J. and Wickert, R. Eds, Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy, Melbourne: Language Australia. Street, B. (1995), Social Literacies. London: Longman. Tully, J., (1997), Strange Multiplicity, Constitutionalism in an age of diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickert, R. (2001), Politics, Activism and Processes of Policy Production: Adult Literacy in Australia. Pp 75-92 in J. Lo Bianco and R. Wickert, eds, Australian Policy Activism in Language and Literacy, Melbourne: Language Australia.
24
APPENDIX I: Current General Population Data
DECEMBER KEY POPULATION FIGURES Population at end Dec qtrChange over previous Change over previous 2009 year year PRELIMINARY '000 '000 % DATA New South Wales Victoria Queensland South Australia Western Australia Tasmania Northern Territory Australian Capital Territory Australia(a)
7 191.5 5 496.4 4 473.0 1 633.9 2 270.3 505.4 227.7
115.8 114.6 106.6 21.2 58.7 4.4 4.9
1.6 2.1 2.4 1.3 2.7 0.9 2.2
354.9
6.4
1.8
22 155.4
432.6
2.0
(a) Includes Other Territories comprising Jervis Bay Territory, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 24/06/2010
25
APPENDIX II: Indigenous Status by Age and Sex
Persons 55,562 57,954 57,581 48,501 37,504 30,835 31,466 30,878 26,899 22,533 17,981 13,221 8,980 15,123
NonIndigenous Persons 1,130,015 1,175,830 1,235,749 1,236,565 1,222,112 1,164,021 1,288,492 1,357,708 1,368,898 1,351,131 1,231,403 1,158,488 897,975 2,448,441
455,018
18,266,828
Indigenous 0-4 years 5-9 years 10-14 years 15-19 years 20-24 years 25-29 years 30-34 years 35-39 years 40-44 years 45-49 years 50-54 years 55-59 years 60-64 years 65 years and over Total
26
not stated
Total
Persons 74,834 75,083 74,601 71,832 87,745 82,062 79,504 77,601 75,870 73,071 66,404 62,893 51,130 180,812
Persons 1,260,411 1,308,867 1,367,931 1,356,898 1,347,361 1,276,918 1,399,462 1,466,187 1,471,667 1,446,735 1,315,788 1,234,602 958,085 2,644,376
1,133,442
19,855,288
APPENDIX III: Ancestry by Country of Birth of Parents
Both parents born overseas 138,313 1,045 29,227 594,962 85,844 161,159 1,470,190 135,674 47,467 201,326 235,140 47,108 212,029 263,619 435,338 134,319 67,001 87,626 68,814 97,836 109,336 47,102 333,288 75,662 64,885 65,556 58,271 50,516 162,632 47,385 1,034,657 172,666 6,735,993 5,868,729
Australian Australian Aboriginal American Chinese Croatian Dutch English Filipino French German Greek Hungarian Indian Irish Italian Lebanese Macedonian Maltese Maori New Zealander Polish Russian Scottish Serbian Sinhalese South African Spanish Turkish Vietnamese Welsh Other(d) Ancestry not stated Total responses(c) Total persons(c)
Father only born overseas 705,564 2,654 13,186 12,867 11,165 49,218 564,843 2,529 8,256 62,053 35,798 8,088 7,556 118,394 103,264 17,671 5,897 19,678 9,134 29,336 15,631 5,445 134,279 7,588 3,394 5,963 5,603 3,817 1,615 12,843 100,014 30,617 2,113,960 1,299,784
Mother only
Bo paren
born overseas
born in Austral
500,017 1,049 7,724 15,337 4,533 29,146 409,818 15,365 5,668 39,200 14,137 3,220 5,540 75,501 38,466 6,671 2,342 10,102 6,483 21,283 9,005 3,550 94,620 3,053 2,272 4,534 4,011 1,618 2,099 8,089 70,540 23,302 1,438,295 879,691
5,846,74 107,03 5,10 32,71 14,04 65,42 3,682,96 1,64 34,98 493,08 71,20 8,09 4,75 1,308,38 255,22 16,20 6,54 32,89 4,73 8,64 27,11 9,65 911,16 7,03 1,78 2,27 14,14 1,43 1,05 43,15 153,25 313,34 13,485,82 10,282,28
a) The most common 30 Ancestry responses from 2001 census; b) Includes country of birth for either/both parents not stated; c) Since this table counts multi-responses the total responses count will not necessarily equal total persons count; d) Includes ancestries not identified individually and ‘inadequately described’.
27
APPENDIX IV: Languages other than English spoken at home by sex
Speaks English only Speaks other language: Arabic Australian Indigenous Languages Chinese languages: Cantonese Mandarin Other(b) Total Croatian Dutch Filipino (excludes Tagalog)(c) French German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Iranic languages: Persian (excluding Dari) Dari Other(d) Total Italian Japanese Khmer Korean Macedonian Maltese Polish Portuguese Russian Samoan Serbian Sinhalese Spanish Tagalog (excludes Filipino)(c) Tamil Turkish Vietnamese Other(e) Total
28
Males
Females
Persons
7,671,497
7,909,835
15,581,332
124,976 27,105
118,696 28,600
243,672 55,705
115,718 103,305 16,601 235,624 31,311 16,243 15,150 20,544 34,720 124,253 36,414 9,773 19,489
128,839 117,292 18,721 264,852 32,300 19,936 23,902 22,662 40,905 127,963 33,591 11,783 22,548
244,557 220,597 35,322 500,476 63,611 36,179 39,052 43,206 75,625 252,216 70,005 21,556 42,037
11,649 7,669 3,544 22,862 153,981 14,362 11,726 25,610 34,046 17,770 23,806 12,727 15,914 13,839 26,167 14,949 46,615 21,098 16,695 27,111 94,332 233,532 1,522,744
11,192 6,643 3,075 20,910 162,913 20,743 12,993 29,020 33,787 18,745 29,577 13,054 20,579 14,689 26,371 14,110 51,381 32,188 16,006 26,752 100,531 231,365 1,623,452
22,841 14,312 6,619 43,772 316,894 35,105 24,719 54,630 67,833 36,515 53,383 25,781 36,493 28,528 52,538 29,059 97,996 53,286 32,701 53,863 194,863 464,897 3,146,196
APPENDIX V: Proficiency in Spoken English by Year of Arrival in Australia by Sex
Before 1991
19911995
1996-2000
2001
2002
2003 MALES
Speaks English only
768,542
59,409
91,059
21,689
20,112
24,363
435,530 94,517 3,872 533,919 2,879 1,305,340
87,276 15,899 788 103,963 306 163,678
105,267 18,199 1,032 124,498 417 215,974
26,448 3,531 289 30,268 132 52,089
24,848 3,549 266 28,663 96 48,871
Speaks English only
762,035
61,608
89,143
21,415
20,189
31,297 4,584 385 36,266 132 60,761 FEMALES 24,118
Speaks other language and speaks English: Very well or well Not well or not at all Proficiency in English not stated Total
437,466 132,327 4,376 574,169
96,117 30,780 946 127,843
112,230 30,216 1,212 143,658
27,483 5,227 280 32,990
27,248 5,731 316 33,295
32,407 6,806 404 39,617
Language and proficiency in English not stated Total
3,607 1,339,811
327 189,778
417 233,218
127 54,532
116 53,600
Speaks English only Speaks other language and speaks English: Very well or well Not well or not at all Proficiency in English not stated Total
1,530,577
121,017
180,202
43,104
40,301
132 63,867 PERSON 48,481
872,996 226,844 8,248 1,108,088
183,393 46,679 1,734 231,806
217,497 48,415 2,244 268,156
53,931 8,758 569 63,258
52,096 9,280 582 61,958
63,704 11,390 789 75,883
Language and proficiency in English not stated 6,486 Total 2,645,151 (a) Excludes persons who did not state their country of birth. (b) The year 2006 is the period 1 January 2006 to 8 August 2006.
633 353,456
834 449,192
259 106,621
212 102,471
264 124,628
Speaks other language and speaks English: Very well or well Not well or not at all Proficiency in English not stated Total Language and proficiency in English not stated Total
29
APPENDIX VI: Religious Affiliation Persons Buddhism Christianity: Anglican Assyrian Apostolic Baptist Brethren Catholic Churches of Christ Eastern Orthodox Jehovah's Witnesses Latter Day Saints Lutheran Oriental Orthodox Other Protestant Pentecostal Presbyterian and Reformed Salvation Army Seventh-day Adventist Uniting Church Christian nfd(b) Other Christian Total Hinduism Islam Judaism Other Religions: Australian Aboriginal Traditional Religions Other Religious Groups Total No Religion(c) Other religious affiliation(d) Religious affiliation not stated Total
418,749 3,718,241 8,194 316,744 24,225 5,126,884 54,823 544,161 80,914 53,202 251,107 32,710 56,100 219,687 596,672 64,202 55,257 1,135,417 313,192 34,097 12,685,829 148,130 340,394 88,832 5,380 103,649 109,029 3,706,550 133,818 2,223,957 19,855,288
(a) Religious affiliation is coded to the Australian Standard Classification of Religious Groups, Second Edition. (b) Comprises 'Christian nfd', 'Apostolic Church, so described', 'Church of God, so described', 'Australian Christian Churches, so described', and 'New Church Alliance, so described'. (c) Comprises 'No Religion, nfd', 'Agnosticism', 'Atheism', 'Humanism' and 'Rationalism'. (d) Comprises 'Religious belief, nfd', 'Not defined', 'New Age, so described' and 'Theism'.
30
