In this paper, we analyse results from one classroom session within an 8-week program in which Year 10 students constructed ‘trash’ puppets of endangered Australian animals. In making the puppets and using them as part of a ‘theatre in a suitcase’ performance at Melbourne Zoo, students were expected to integrate both scientific and artistic goals to demonstrate knowledge of specific endangered species. In this process, students needed to learn how their more immediate, everyday positive and negative aesthetic responses could be made continuous with a scientific aesthetic to produce both a coherent puppet and an advocacy performance. Through micro-ethnographic practical epistemology analysis of video data of this session, we demonstrate how this mix of everyday and subject-specific aesthetic responses, judgements and intentions interacted to shape and promote students’ learning in science. In addressing this multimodal and multi-purpose task, students learnt and applied science knowledge to a real-world issue of species endangerment.

Research to date has pointed out that during periods of curriculum reform, public debate gets politicised resulting in an over-emphasis on top-down approaches to curriculum making. As a group of curriculum inquiry researchers, we are concerned that teachers, students, school leaders and community organisations are often side-lined as integral curriculum actors in curriculum making processes. This paper challenges top-down, discipline-siloed conceptualisations of curriculum making by bringing together three separate curriculum projects, as illustrations, for the purpose of rendering diverse articulations of curriculum as a social process. We apply Priestley et al.’s (Priestley et al., Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021) sites of curriculum making as a conceptual frame, to articulate the diversity of curriculum making activities, curriculum actors and sites of curriculum making in primary and secondary settings. The three illustrations include examining how teachers and students participate in curriculum making about Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia at macro and meso sites; how listening to secondary students as curriculum actors allows them to contribute to shaping school History beyond the nano sites of the classroom and how community and arts-based approaches empower primary students to engage in nano curriculum making (e.g. Hannigan & Kelly, Hannigan and Kelly, Lin et al. Sinner et al. Irwin (eds), Community arts education: Transversal global perspectives, Intellect, 2023). By engaging a collaborative approach that uses illustrations to draw a complementary transdisciplinary picture of the realities and possibilities of curriculum making across different sites, this paper makes a novel methodological contribution to the field of curriculum inquiry.

Unlike Canada and South Africa, Australia has not completed a national Truth‐telling of First Nations histories. As a consequence, the curriculum is at risk of excluding Truth‐telling, leading to indoctrination of past injustices as part of school learning. Our analysis critically examines the use of Truth‐telling language in the Australian Curriculum—Version 9. Eighteen Truth‐telling terms were identified from a chapter on Truth‐telling in the 2018 Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples . Using Bernstein's strong and weak classification, instances of Truth‐telling terms were identified in the curriculum. There were three instances of Truth‐telling in the mandated Content Descriptors of discipline‐based learning areas. Only one of these instances was in the primary years. Across the weak classification where teaching was optional, there were 31 instances in the Content Elaborations, one instance in the Cross‐Curriculum Priority and no instances in the General Capabilities. And 16 of the 32 instances in the Content Elaborations were in secondary History which not all students study. With only weak classification of Truth‐telling, students will continue to be indoctrinated into an unconscious learning of bias and erasure of First Nations histories. One way to limit the settler colonial violence in the Australian Curriculum is to mandate more Truth‐telling to overcome what is perpetuating a Great Australian Silence.