Teacher bias a challenge
Curriculum review targets Holocaust education as ACARA warns teacher prejudice poses a bigger challenge.
The national curriculum is being reviewed to strengthen how Australian schools teach about the Holocaust and antisemitism, but the head of the body conducting the review says confronting teachers’ own prejudice may prove a bigger obstacle than anything written into the content.
Stephen Gniel, CEO of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), told a Melbourne Holocaust Museum panel on July 23 that the Antisemitism Education Taskforce had asked ACARA to examine three areas.
They were strengthening understanding of the Holocaust alongside a broader understanding of Jewish history and cultures; calling out both an understanding and a rejection of antisemitism in all its forms; and building that work on a values base.
He said taskforce members had written the second element into the terms of reference themselves, insisting on both the understanding and the rejection rather than one or the other, and had specified all forms of antisemitism, including newer versions emerging through social media.
But Gniel said the curriculum alone would not solve the problem, describing instead a program of work involving teachers, principals and parents.
He said he wished he could sit there and say that pulling the lever of curriculum would see everything taught properly and the problem fixed, but that the reality was more complicated.
Asked what he saw as the hardest part, he pointed not to content but to educators themselves.
“I think the harder part is actually confronting some of their own prejudice.
That, to me, is probably a bigger challenge, to be honest, than content parts of this,” he said.
“I think it is the bias and the misunderstanding that our society has at large, of which teachers are a part, and so we have all of that in the teaching workforce.”
Gniel said curricula could no longer remain static, suggesting that in New South Wales some content had gone unrevised for as long as two decades.
Antisemitism, he said, was a “now issue” requiring immediate response.
Melbourne Holocaust Museum CEO Breann Fallon told the same panel that resourcing was not the constraint, pointing to a 10-lesson Holocaust sequence being distributed to every departmental school.
“Clearly, the resources are there,” she said, arguing the real difficulty lay in whether adults could hold open dialogue about hard subjects at all.