Aussie Math Teachers Will Be Expected to Incorporate Indigenous Dance and Storytelling Into Lessons

Maths teachers will be expected to incorporate Indigenous dance and storytelling into school lessons under the revised national school curriculum.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority began developing the current version of the national curriculum in 2022.

An analysis of the new curriculum by the federal opposition has found that, of the 2,451 lesson suggestions, three-quarters relate to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture.

The mathematics curriculum includes 37 instructions for teachers to use Indigenous dances, storytelling, reconciliation plans and traditional weaving to teach skills such as addition, subtraction, algebra, statistics and trigonometry.

Kindergarten and prep-school teachers can use ‘body-tallying that involves body parts and one-to-one correspondence from counting systems of First Nations people’ to help their students count to 20.

The elaboration for Year three teachers instructs them to prepare a lesson that explores First Nations Australians’ stories and dances.

The stories and dances will show the ‘connection between addition and subtraction, representing this as a number sentence and discussing how this conveys important information about balance in process of Country/Place’.

This elaboration is set to help seven-year-old students understand and learn addition and subtraction.

Year five teachers are instructed to use Acknowledgment of Country to help their 10-year-old students learn about binary computer coding.

‘Making collaboratively a long thread with beads representing binary for the letters that spell the Country/Place name in the local First Nations language and English, and could be displayed as a ‘binary banner’ as an Acknowledgement of Country that we are on the Traditional Lands of the (insert name) peoples,’ the elaboration reads.

Teachers are also given the option to use data relating to Australia’s reconciliation process with First Nations people to teach the collection, validation and reporting of data.

When introducing Year seven students to algebra, teachers are advised to link the core mathematical skills to Indigenous culture.

The elaboration reads:’recognising and applying the concept of variable as something that can change in value, investigating the relationships between variables, and the application to processes on Country/Place including how cultural expressions of First Nations Australians, such as storytelling, communicate mathematical relationships that can be represented as mathematical expressions’.

Teachers are encouraged to study ‘traditional weaving designs’ when explaining the mathematical formulas in calculating the area and circumference of a circle.

Meanwhile, when year 10 students are being taught Pythagoras’ theorem in geometry, teachers can ‘explore navigation design of technologies or surveying by First Nations Australians’.

Australian Government Primary Principals Association president Pat Murphy said the new curriculum was ‘better’ than the previous, but that the ‘cross-curriculum priorities’ had ‘overcomplicated’ maths and made it almost ‘impossible to teach’.

‘The curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ Mr Murphy told The Australian.

‘There is so much to cover across so many subjects, you don’t get any depth around the really important elements of literacy and numeracy.

‘A primary teacher is generally teaching six to eight subjects, so it becomes impossible for them to be across every one of those subject areas in such depth.’

Mr Murphy called for the curriculum to be revised for primary school students to focus on the basics of numeracy and literacy.

‘It really challenges every child – let alone a student who might be struggling. We’ve tried to jam too much into each subject area,’ Mr Murphy said.

He added the complexity of the national curriculum meant it was open to individual interpretation, allowing for a ‘choose your own adventure’ style of teaching.

The opposition had endorsed the current curriculum when it was last in government in 2022.

Federal Opposition Education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson slammed the current curriculum, labelling it as ‘unwieldy and ideological’.

Senator Henderson claimed the Coalition government, if elected, would ‘get back to basics’ by focusing on evidence-based teaching’ with a priority on reading, writing, maths and science.

She added learning about Indigenous history and culture was vital for a child’s education but claimed prioritising was motivated by ideology.

‘The classroom is for education not indoctrination, and I am concerned the cross-curriculum priorities are motivated more by ideological causes than what is in the best interests of children,’ Ms Henderson said.

It is unclear whether the Coalition would order the states and territories for a review of the current curriculum.

The curriculum, which can be read in full on the The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s website, is not due for a revision until 2027.