Doing science and home economics: Curriculum socialisation of new arrivals in Australia

Abstract

Learning at school is a complex process of socialisation into selected and valued practices of a society. As children and students progress through levels of education, they are instructed in increasingly specialised cultural practices defined in the curriculum as subjects. This paper describes subject-specific teachers working with non-English-speaking immigrant students in a secondary school in South Australia. It examines teachers' subject discourses as opportunities for students' apprenticeship into the practices of two secondary school curriculum subjects, science and home economics. The focus of this paper is on the way teachers' practices and discourses constructed specific cultural domains of the school curriculum for immigrant students. In class, students experienced language in context, which served the social purposes of their community of practice. Teachers and students carried out practices of science and home economics with distinctive spoken and written discourses, which were linked with material and behavioural semiotic resources in the processes of instruction. The study proposes that through their involvement in the social practices of content subjects, newcomers experience and are apprenticed into selected discourses for cultural participation in education. The study suggests that for new arrivals or immigrants, the curriculum experiences are engagements with cultural practices, which constitute part of their socialisation into new cultural contexts.