Between 1986 and 1991 the study of work in society, located within the Australian Studies Field of Study, was developed and introduced at year 11 level as a common element of the new Victorian Certificate of Education. It ceased to be compulsory after two years of full implementation. This thesis is concernmed with the experience of Australian Studies at all levels, from policy formulation and planning through to the development and implementation of courses in schools and classrooms, and the preparation of curriculum materials and provision of other resources in the wider community. As a curriculum initiative of the postcompulsory stage of schooling, it is made the starting point for a discussion of the relationship between schooling and society, and between curriculum theory and social theory, under circumstances which are characterised in much of the latter as 'postmodernity'. Some critique of Australian Studies is implied. However in its main argument the thesis searches for a theoretical form which can give an account of emergent Australian Studies pedagogy in which ' pedagogy' is no longer a matter, mainly, of the book, the pen and the teacher as cultural authority, but is defined broadly enough to encompass other forms and levels of person to person, or voice to voice interaction. Pedagogic fundamentals such as the classroom, literacy and school knowledge, are all reconsidered in relation to Australian Studies practice. The thesis focuses particularly on the intellectual in contemporary society and the social relations of intellectual work. It suggests a framework for theorising postcompulsory curriculum in which postcompulsory students are discursively constructed, not simply as learners or putative workers but as intellectuals, who both cultivate a body of technical skills, and interact within a technologically extended classroom which is coterminous with the society of which they are also members. It is argued that a curriculum which is actively designed according to interpretive principles of the latter kind, though still preserving a concern for and impetus towards the 'good' society, might lay claim to being a curriculum for postmodernity.