Curriculum justice: Redistributing, recognition and representation through the inclusion of Indigenous ways of knowing in a national curriculum

Abstract In this paper, we present an analysis of the Foundation to Year 10 Australian Curriculum in relation to its adequacy as a tool to support the provision of curriculum justice. We identify how Indigenous mandated content is dispersed across disciplinary structures unevenly, and provide insights into how this enables certain ways for teachers and students to understand Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Indigenous content is included in the Australian curriculum in the form of cross curriculum content, fragmented and then deployed only to provide context for disciplinary content and outcomes. In this paper, we consider Fraser's three‐dimensional frame for social justice to interrogate the response of consecutive governments to the inequitable education provided to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. We then accept the policy logic to look at what the curriculum offers in regard to Indigenous content and the representations offered to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their non‐Indigenous peers.