A History of the Frames

This paper proceeds from an ongoing investigation of three curriculum reforms in art education from 1980 to the present. I am interested in showing how art education has constituted itself both as a subject of knowledge and as a knowing subject. This research reveals the politics of curriculum practice. Discourse analysis and theories of governmentality, arising principally from the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, are utilised. This investigation offers an alternative to orthodox curriculum history of a teleology grounded in transparent argument. Curriculum discourses are analysed to disclose concealed authority. I will give an account of one reform, The Frames, including their antecedents in the four Focus Areas, a curriculum device for classifying art and design content as Art in Australia, Art and Culture, Art and Media, Art and Design (1987). The four F/frames are written and spoken of in three discursive forms: I will firstly refer to 'the Frames'; secondly, the four frames are named as a set or series comprising subjective, cultural, structural and postmodern, and as they usually appear in that order, in an implied hierarchy; and the third form is to name all four frames discretely as the Subjective F/frame, the Cultural F/frame, the Structural F/frame and the Postmodern F/frame. The paper is divided into three sections. They are to begin, 'Background: Curriculum Practice in New South Wales, Australia' where a sample of contextual features are discussed. The second part introduces the investigative procedures employed as 'Methodology: Discourse Analysis'. The concluding section gives an account of the Frames as 'Discourse: The Frames'.