Interculturality and Secondary History Education: A Study of Contemporary History Pedagogy

This qualitative study takes a historical understanding of history education to explore the concept of interculturality for history teaching and learning in Australia. This research, set in Victoria, Australia, is contextualized by recent reforms to the history curriculum brought about by the introduction of the Australian Curriculum, which began with version 1.0 late in 2010 and has progressed to a national implementation model of the Foundation to Year 10, version 8.3, from 2018. The Australian Curriculum is intended to be used flexibly by schools and values teachers’ professional knowledge in reflecting local contexts and accounting for individual students’ family, cultural and community backgrounds. The Australian Curriculum includes intercultural understanding as one of seven general capabilities.Interculturality, being when ‘two distinct cultures encounter each other’ and their unknown differences become familiar and known – or their content is exchanged and a space is created where meaning is translated and difference is negotiated (Rozbicki 2015, p.3) drives this research. Therefore, this thesis rests on the melding of two constructs: history education and interculturality. The Literature Review shows an indelible temporal link between history and interculturality; however, it also shows the foci are incongruent at the school level. The methodological framework has been constructed to provide a ‘way in’ to this problem for which there is very little guidance from scholarly research.The framework of the study brings together core elements of historical consciousness, historical narration and interculturality. Data is collected through the methods of textual analysis and four focus group interviews comprising 5 to 6 practising history teachers interpreted through discourse analysis. Discourse analysis and its attested flexibility as method is used in conjunction with a refreshed position of ‘crystallisation’ to span ‘multiple points on the qualitative continuum’ and maximise the benefits of taking contrasting approaches to analysis and representation (Ellingson 2009, p. 11). This is achieved first by encountering the data through ‘multiple ways of knowing’, analogous to viewing an object through a crystal (Ellingson 2009, p. 11), and second, by blending crystallisation with the more traditional qualitative form of discourse analysis to validate its contentions.The study exposes a distinct unfamiliarity and uncertainty associated with interculturality by history teachers and a glaring absence of interculturality in the written and visual language of the history textbook. The study concludes that history education and interculturality operate in isolation from one another and that the field of curriculum and pedagogy provides a critical prism for their interaction. This study makes a further contribution to knowledge by pursuing the underused methodological approach of crystallisation for research into history education.