It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it:
Managing the Hidden Curriculum
James Atherton
Peter Hadfield
Pat Jefferies
Additional material includes the empirical research (still in progress) on managing the hidden curriculum of a part-time teacher education programme for teachers in post-16 education, and reflection on that.
To go directly to that additional material, click here. There is also provision for comment at the end of the paper; comments may be incorporated into later versions (that's the joy of the web).
What do we tell students about what is expected of them by the ways in which we organise and present courses? This is not merely a matter of content, but also of process, and what we do not say may shout louder than what we do.
This paper concerns initial attempts to develop a framework for the study of the hidden curriculum, which might be used to expose it (or them) and to develop tools for further analysis.
Note that this is not a formal presentation of the paper. As a web-page it uses hyper-links to expand on some points already covered elsewhere on the site.
For a more formal print-friendly version in .pdf format, click here. (Coming shortly)
Introduction
Recently, interest in the "hidden curriculum" has been replaced by concern for the "student experience", but there are ideas from past research which repay study. This is not primarily an account of a research project, or a case-study, but a call to use the perspective of the "hidden curriculum" to evaluate our own courses in terms of what students are learning by default, simply by participating in them, rather than what we set out to teach them. (Although there is research material included for illustration.)
The following paper draws on previous research (some of it old and almost forgotten), and a neglected theoretical perspective derived from an obscure theory of communication and systems to raise questions which may be asked of any course about the messages it sends to the students, and about how they might be influenced to respond, to the enhancement or detriment of their learning.
The idea of the "hidden curriculum"
Mention the phrase, and people with a sociological background will think of Bowles and Gintis' (1976) study of "Schooling in Capitalist America", in which they argued from a Marxist perspective that the organisation of public schooling in the States was designed to prepare pupils to be wage-slaves. Several subsequent studies have cast considerable doubt on their findings, but have in so doing supported their discourse, in concentrating on resistance to such a curriculum, rather than acceptance of it. It may not "work" in the sense of influencing pupils, but its apparent intentions are not contested.
This tradition, drawing on the critical theory of Habermas (1992) and the work of Bourdieu (1977) has been further developed by Apple (1977) and Margolis et al (2001). It continues to focus on the instantiation of power differentials within educational structures, particularly regarding race, class and gender issues.
Hunter (1994), however, argued that such apparently ideological features of schooling were merely necessary by-products of the "social technology" of setting up a school to teach things; just as some of the "conditioning" against which Bowles and Gintis inveighed was not about capitalism, but merely about the requirements of any industrial society.
More radically, Illich (1970) had already suggested from the perspective of the developing world that the very idea of "schooling" undermined the value of learning from experience, and moreover that it could never address the issue of education in the third world. Lave and Wenger (1991) similarly maintained that the social technology of education distorted "natural" processes of learning—a point which had been made much earlier, and rather less pretentiously, by Becker (1972).
The concern of the current authors, however, is primarily with another tradition, which has not always explicitly embraced the term "hidden curriculum" (although that was the actual title of Snyder's [1971] seminal text). This tradition is more parochial, or perhaps "professional" in its orientation, being less concerned with bemoaning the "political" messages implicit in educational structures, and more with how the micro-structure of individual courses and programmes affects students' learning. What messages do we send through our organisational structures, procedures and requirements, and perhaps particularly through our assessments, about what we expect of students?
Snyder's observations pre-figured all the later research on "Deep" and "Surface" learning; he noted that at MIT in the 'fifties and 'sixties, the curriculum was getting more and more crowded as technological knowledge grew, and so undergraduates were taking "short cuts" in their learning. They could not absorb everything, so they strategically tried to guess what would be assessed, for example, and revised only that. Snyder's additional insight, however, was to realise that unintentionally the Institute was teaching them to act strategically, hence the term "hidden curriculum".
Even earlier, Becker, Geer and Hughes (1968) had noted the impact of assessment practices on student strategies:
If ... the instructor announces that an examination will consist of two essay questions, students may reason that the questions will call for broad interpretive answers, rather than detailed factual knowledge. They will then try to analyze the subject matter into a few major points and not bother to memorize details. Conversely, if the instructor announces a multiple-choice examination of 150 questions, students may reason that such an examination must concentrate on detail and thus devote their time to memorization.
(Becker, Geer and Hughes, 1968:82)
The same point has been made more recently by Prosser and Trigwell (1999) among others. Becker and colleagues went on to argue that the obsession of students with their Grade Point Average (GPA) was distorting the education task; as Becker put it later:
It is hard to say what the desired outcomes of a college's educational efforts are. But if they are a change in values and the acquisition of certain intellectual skills, students might be diverted from such goals by the necessity of studying for exams not requiring those abilities. When what tests require differs from what the school wants to teach and when the school rewards good test performance heavily the structure of the school will systematically divert student effort. In this sense, and to the degree that these conditions are met, schools are structurally self-defeating. Where students have the opportunity to interact and develop collective conceptions of their situation and how it ought to be handled, they may develop a student culture which amplifies and extends this effect.
(Becker, 1972 [1995: 105])
At the same time, John Holt (1970) was observing a similar distortion in elementary school pupils' approaches to learning, as they tried to guess what the teacher was thinking and what answer would please her, rather than to come up with their own answers. Such views have been reproduced many times since.
Current thinking often suggests that these issues are the consequences of course design (Biggs, 2003) and the lack of "constructive alignment", and/or of staff orientations to teaching (Prosser and Trigwell, 1999). However, this paper argues that the situation is more complex than that, and goes beyond deep and surface learning strategies.
Moreover, the idea of a single "hidden curriculum" may be something of a misnomer; there are many hidden curricula—perhaps one for each module, or each tutor. There are few straightforward linear courses in universities nowadays; each new module or course and even each contributing lecturer presents students with new challenges, so the "survival curricula" are different. Claxton (????) for example. has argued that students make "cost-benefit" assessments of the best strategies to adopt in relation to specific courses or modules.
One Theoretical Perspective
The simple part of the shared theoretical perspective on the hidden curriculum is that institutions "send messages" to those who participate in them, often unintentionally and covertly. The messages are conveyed and coded in myriad ways, from the quality of the furniture, to the security arrangements, to course regulations, and practically anything else which happens within an institution. Universities are no exception. At a very basic level, this is being recognised in the UK as higher education contemplates the introduction of "top-up" fees; there is a new rhetoric about the student as a discerning consumer, who must be made to feel welcome, with improved student services, better accommodation, and the like. Our marketing staff readily speak of a sending messages to students about how much they are valued.
Clearly, the messages can work in three ways:
See for example Gair and Mullins (2001)
"Good": covert message
reinforces formal message
- The covert message can reinforce the formal message;this is the consummation devoutly to be wished. So on our journalism course there is no such thing as an extension to a coursework deadline; if you can't get the work in on time you will be no use as a journalist.
- It can inhibit, undermine or negate the formal message; which is problematic in the case of a hidden curriculum. A social work course on which J. used to teach , staffed largely by former practitioners, was notorious for arguments about extenuating circumstances for failing students.
- Or of course it may simply be irrelevant;which is of little interest.
Clearly in the real world there are so many of these messages that they are almost inevitably "mixed".
The other theoretical point is a more difficult one, and concerns the nature of such hidden or encoded messages. Since they do not have explicit content, it is up to recipients—in this case, largely students—to make of them what they will. So they follow the rules of what I have called elsewhere on this site "process communication" rather than "content" communication, renaming in the light of current trends the distinction made by Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson in 1967. They referred to "digital" (content) and "analogic" (process) communication, but the terminology has been overtaken by the rise of the computer.
Three main features of process communication are significant for present purposes:
- As Watzlawick et al. (and Goffman, 1970) point out, at this level "One cannot not communicate".
- So in process terms, the absence of communication is itself a communication. It is the fact that something happens rather than its explicit content which matters. Thus, on one slightly non-standard course (discussed below), we took great care over the handbook, amounting now to about 150 pages. Yes, it has a lot of content in it, but its initial message to the students is that "no matter how unusual this course may seem to be, the tutors have thought about it and prepared it carefully". It conveys (we hope) a message of security.
- However, since the content of such process messages is only ever implicit, it lies with the recipient to confer meaning on them. So the inferred "meaning" may be extremely variable.
- And epistemologically, process "statements" do not have a "truth value". They just are; and they cannot be negated.
The learning acquired from the hidden curriculum will be referred to as "default learning"; learning acquired by default through sheer participation in the activities of a school or college, rather than what has been directly taught.
It is worth noting that this work owes a great deal to Gregory Bateson. See Harries-Jones (1995)
Some instances
This is something of an excursion or digression for those who are primarily interested in the notion of hidden curriculum as a tool for analysis, and was not part of the main paper. We return to the substantive material later
All students come to learning with some personal "baggage". Some of that may have been acquired from the hidden curriculum of their schools, and may profoundly "frame" their understanding of their university or college experience.
Labelling
Perhaps the commonest instance of such default learning is the internalised label, of the "I'm no good at maths" variety. Or of course, more rarely, "I'm God's gift to academe". Each has been acquired through repeated failure, or success, in school. Because university education follows twelve or so years of schooling, it simply inherits such default learning and may not add much to it, but we may be faced with students who are convinced that they are, for example, bound to fail the statistics component of a course in the social sciences. It then becomes important to convey—somehow—the message that "this is not like school".
One teacher in the UK has suggested that the word "fail" should not be used in schools
Of course we get that message over in many different ways in any case. The more amorphous nature of a large institution, the relative anonymity of the academics/faculty, the impersonal nature of teaching in large lectures can be a culture shock in itself, but many messages in that part of the hidden curriculum are not helpful, and do not address the labelling which has already taken place.
Challenges
So the university environment is an unfamiliar and challenging one for students, who have to learn how to survive in it. It is often compounded by the shock (and opportunities) of living away from home and parents for the first time. This naturally means that freshers can be both impressionable, and yet keen to hold on to some parts of their baggage; and part of that baggage may be the study strategies which have worked to get them this far, although those strategies may not be the best for full engagement with the new discipline of undergraduate study.
Induction programmes may well help at the level of content communication, but this might also be undermined by the way in which, at the process level, they make challenges into "problems". If such programmes are experienced as patronising there can also be a danger of alienating students.
Reinforcement
Again drawing on the school experience, it is commonplace for behavioural psychologists to point out that some disciplinary interventions in the classroom can be counter-productive, because attention (whether positive or negative) is a potent reinforcer for children. However, as teachers point out, poor behaviour cannot be ignored.
Fortunately, higher education does not often suffer from such gross issues of discipline, but there is still the issue of what behaviour gets reinforced.
- Is there encouragement for asking questions or challenging the lecturer? Or is such behaviour met with a put-down?
- Is it safe to venture an opinion in a seminar, or is it treated as naïve?
- Does higher-order thinking or originality (however half-baked) really get rewarded in assessments?
- What messages do we send by tolerating, or not tolerating, absence from class?
Trust and security
Trust—and the lack of it—is the clearest exemplar of process communication. And so the question of whether students trust us, and whether we trust students, is a critical component of the hidden curriculum.
- Testing for plagiarism is a necessity nowadays; but what messages does it send to students?
- We may want to offer students more choice in how they study; but does it merely leave them bewildered?
James' initial research (Atherton, 2000) on a course for mature students on andragogic principles (also the base the following empirical material) indicated that what was initially intended as a humanistic programme offering a high degree of student freedom came across as confusing and even inhibiting. Students indicated that the more secure they felt, the greater they felt able to take risks.
James' paper on this is available (slightly amended) as a download here
Conclusion
There isn't one. There is no point in drawing substantive conclusions from case-studies and action research. All that can be offered is an often-neglected perspective, asking what it is that we teach unintentionally, and how by adopting this perspective we may seek to reinforce valuable process messages and diminish the others.
Click here to go on to more empirical research on the course mentioned earlier
References
APPLE M (1977) "What do schools teach?" Curriculum Inquiry 6: 341-358
ATHERTON J S (2000) "Containment and Adult Learning: theory and practice" Socio-Analysis Vol 2, No 1, pp.28-46
BECKER H S (1972) “School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything In” American Behavioral Scientist 1972 pp 85-105, also in Burgess (ed.) (1995) q.v.
BECKER H S, GEER B, and HUGHES E C (1968) Making the Grade: the academic side of college life New York; John Wiley
BIGGS, J (2003) Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd edn.) Buckingham; Open University Press: SRHE
BOURDIEU P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice Cambridge; Cambridge University Press
BOWLES S and GINTIS H (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
BURGESS R G (ed.) (1995) Howard Becker on Education Buckingham, Open University Press
HABERMAS J (1992) "Themes in post-metaphysical thinking" (W. Hohengarten, Trans.). In Post-metaphysical thinking: Philosophical essays (pp. 28-57). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
HARRIES-JONES P (1995) A Recursive Vision; ecological understanding and Gregory Bateson Toronto; University of Toronto Press
GAIR M and MULLINS G (2001) "Hiding in Plain Sight" in E Margolis (ed.) The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education London; Routledge, 2001
HOLT J (1970) How Children Fail Harmondsworth: Penguin
HUNTER I (1994) Rethinking the School: subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism London; Alan and Unwin
ILLICH I (1970) De-Schooling Society Harmondsworth: Penguin
LAVE J and WENGER E (1991) Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
MARGOLIS E (ed.) (2001) The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education London; Routledge
PROSSER M and TRIGWELL K (1999) Understanding Learning and Teaching; the experience in higher education Buckingham; Open University Press: SRHE
SNYDER B R (1971) The Hidden Curriculum New York; Alfred A Knopf
WATZLAWICK P, BAVELAS J B and JACKSON D (1967) The Pragmatics of Human Communication New York: W W Norton