Robert Parkes

The University of Newcastle, Australia · School of Education

This article is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the “history wars” (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. Because History curriculum serves as an apparatus for the social (re)production of national identit...

During the decade of the Howard conservative government in Australia, history curriculum became positioned as a vehicle for social cohesion and cultural reproduction. Rejecting the ‘postmodern’ and ‘relativist’ history curriculum reforms of the early 1990s, the conservatives proclaimed that Australia’s past had been rewritten during the decade prio...

History educators frequently ignore, or engage only reluctantly and cautiously with postmodernism. This is arguably because postmodernism is frequently accused of assaulting the epistemological foundations of history as an academic discipline, fostering a climate of cultural relativism, encouraging the proliferation of revisionist histories, and pr...

Many nations have experienced conflict over the content of their History curriculum, and debates over the relative importance of skills (historical thinking) versus content (historical knowledge). Australia is no exception. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions over the importance of historical thinking in History education by exploring the...

Keywords: Epistemic Reflexivity; Meta-disciplinarity; Epistemic Communities; Epistemic Fluency; Mnemonic Communities; Historiographic Gaze; Critical and Effective History; Epistemology of Technique; Historical (Self) Consciousness; Curriculum Ideologies.

Problem. This paper explores a highly influential, but not widely practiced, system of Filipino Martial Arts, De Campo 123 Original, that has survived from the Juego Todo era of stick-fighting duels in the Philippines, but has been in danger of dying out, represent- ing the loss of an intangible Filipino cultural heritage. The art can be recognised...

History education can be seen as a vehicle for promoting national identity, especially when subsumed under “the politics of remembering and forgetting” in relation to matters of national historical importance, and its manifestation in contemporary ideas of what it means to belong to a nation. This chapter shows a diachronic perspective of how the A...

Translated by Bruno Flávio Lontra Fagundes and Sebastián Vargas Álvarez. Reference (including translation): Parkes, R. J., Donnelly, D. J., & Sharp, H. L. (2022). O professor de História como historiador público [The history teacher as public historian]. In B. F. L. Fagundes, & S. V. Álvarez (Eds.), Ensino de História e História Pública: Diálogos...

Inequalities in student enrolment, retention and success for specific demographic groups exist throughout the higher education sector. Although there are numerous and diverse initiatives implemented in universities to support student retention and/or success, experience and/or satisfaction, the feasibility or effectiveness of programs targeting the...

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The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of the ‘Kick-Smart’ martial arts programme using a randomised controlled-trial conducted in one Australian primary school. Kick-Smart involved children 9-11yrs (n= 46) randomised into treatment or wait-list control conditions. Kick-Smart consisted of 2x60min curriculum session...

Historical consciousness is a complex phenomenon that has been defined, in the North American tradition, as how we understand and relate, both cognitively and affectively, to the past (Seixas 2006), and in the German tradition from which it arose, as the act of orienting oneself in time through the construction of narratives about the past (Rüsen,...

Full text available here: https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/3-2015-32/the-irony-of-family-history-as-a-source-of-identity/

Full text available here: https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/2-2014-35/big-history-can-life-go-without-meta-narrative/

Muitos países vivenciaram conflitos em torno do conteúdo do seu currículo de história e tiveram debates sobre a importância relativa de habilidades (pensamento histórico) versus conteúdo (conhecimento histórico). A Austrália não é uma exceção. Este artigo busca contribuir para as discussões sobre a importância do pensamento histórico no ensino da H...

For almost two decades, History education in Australia has been a site of struggle over collective memory of the colonial past, and an object of concern for how this impacts students’ sense of national identity. Since the advent of the history/culture wars and their spill over into History and Social Studies (Society and Environment) curricula, con...

Encounters is a new interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the empirical and theoretical study of historical consciousness, historical cultures, & history education. Submissions from across the fields of public history, history didactics, curriculum & pedagogy studies, cultural studies, narrative theory, and historical theory fields are all welcome...

This paper outlines the complex contemporary milieu of Australian teacher education within which curriculum leaders responsible for designing teacher education programs must make their program design decisions. Particular attention is paid to the collision of vertical (‘hierarchical’ or 'academic rationalist') and horizontal (‘flat’ or 'student-cen...

The field of curriculum studies has become increasingly sensitive to the “effects of global flows, transnational connections, and transcultural interactions” ([1], p. 43), and an international dialogue has begun to take shape between the European bildung-influenced tradition of Didaktiks and the Anglo-American psychologised Curriculum Studies tradi...

Poststructuralism is one of the most important social theories to have emerged from Europe in the late Twentieth Century, yet it remains notoriously difficult to define. With a mission to make theory make sense, this concise introductory text provides: (1) an original and accessible guide to the three orientations that underpin poststructural thoug...

Since the emergence of postmodern social theory, history has been haunted by predictions of its imminent end. Postmodernism has been accused of making historical research and writing untenable, encouraging the proliferation of revisionist histories, providing fertile ground for historical denial, and promoting the adoption of a mournful view of the...

For over a century, teachers, parents, and school leaders have lamented a loss of ‘discipline’ in classrooms. Caught between guidance approaches on the one hand and a call for zero tolerance on the other, current debates rarely venture beyond the terrain of implementation strategies. This book aims to reinvigorate thinking on ‘discipline’ in educat...

This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples’ rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to soci...

It is common for poststructural analyses of curriculum and pedagogy to question perceived pedagogical truths as part of a strategy of challenging injustices produced through the institutions, practices and knowledge structures of education. However, poststructuralism itself has often been subject to the criticism that it is incapable of offering an...

University curriculum is complex and abstract - indeed, it becomes increasingly more complex and abstract as students progress through their degree programmes – third year is, or should be, more abstract and complex than first year. What kinds of intellectual demands typify academic learning, and how do these change over time? In understanding this...

This paper is concerned with enduring histories and micro‐geographies of the (post)colonial Australian nation, played out through contemporary connections between Aboriginality, inner Sydney and educational policy change. This paper traces the ‘racialization’ of space and place in the Sydney inner city suburb of Redfern, including the Aboriginal‐‘o...

In this study, the authors sought to establish the differential effects on achievement of embedding evidence-based practice in the design of an inclusive education teacher preparation course. Embedded design involves creating self-repeating patterns in the instructional design of a course by expressing essential design features at multiple levels i...

Calls to internationalise higher education have intensified in recent years, particularly as educational services have grown to become a significant export industry within the Australian economy. This measure is indicative, however, of the relatively narrow way in which internationalisation has been constructed, and its political utility in compens...

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This analysis is set in the context of Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on the structures of knowledge, in particular the place of the social sciences past and present, and the potential contribution of a more integrated approach (historical social science) to the broader political project of building a more democratic, equal and just world-system. Our...

In recent years, a federal government dedicated to using curriculum as a vehicle of social cohesion and cultural reproduction, has questioned the apparently ‘postmodern’ and ‘relativist’ History curriculum reform efforts of the 1990s that occurred in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Arguing for a “root and branch renewal” of Australian hi...

In this position paper, reservations are presented regarding the potential of knowledge management (KM) as it is currently applied to the learning and teaching activity of schools. We contend that effective KM is contingent upon the explication of a deep and shared understanding of the learning and teaching process. We argue that the most important...

This paper is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the ‘history wars’ (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. What is at stake in these history wars is not only national identity according to Chrisitine Halse an...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal application of a suite of curriculum authoring tools (CATs) to inclusive classroom teaching practice in a secondary school setting. The study sought to establish whether the incorporation of the CATs into the teachers’ curriculum development and implementation covaried with improved impl...

Omnipresent in educational discourse, constructivist learning theory is often misrepresented in the literature as a theory of instruction. Appearing as social or personal constructivism or a hybrid, underpinning it is a belief that learning manifests as the reorganisation of cognitive schemata. In recent years, there have been moves to rethink cons...

This paper represents an on-going attempt to establish a dialogue between educational theories of mind and society. It is part of a continuing project to formulate a critical pedagogy that is comfortable under postmodern conditions. I will begin by briefly exploring the ways in which various "radical pedagogues" have attempted to respond to the cri...

Underlying important critical-theoretical work of the late Russian psychologist, educator and semiotician, Lev Semonovich Vygotsky – including his concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – was an attempt to address what he perceived to be a crisis in psychology (Kozulin, 1990; Veresov, 1999). In Vygotsky's (1997) posthumously published pa...