Pugach, Marleen C. (2006). Because teaching matters , (pp. 134-142). Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Due before class time next Monday January 18 th .
1.
Find (and record in your response) a useful definition of curriculum on p. 134.
2.
In what ways do Middle Years kids know about the hidden curriculum?
3.
Think about the type of seating in your classrooms when you were a Middle Years student (for example, in Grade 7). Were you and your classmates seated in desks? On chairs at tables? Some other form of seating? What might be the hidden curriculum of that type of seating?
4.
Think about some other physical aspect of your school when you were a Middle
Years student. Interpret the hidden curriculum of that physical aspect of your school.
5.
Come to class ready to talk about the good and the bad (and the ugly?) of hidden curriculum.
6.
How do you like the “school lunch” conception of curriculum and pedagogy?
7.
Come to class ready to share an example (preferably from your experience) of a
Middle Years kid who was excluded because they didn’t “get” the hidden curriculum or because the hidden curriculum worked against them.
8.
Identify one aspect of hidden curriculum that you would like to try to alter or challenge, and explain how you might go about altering/challenging it thru your own teaching. page 134
Even though we generally think of schools as places where children learn academics, students learn a lot more in school than just what is in the explicit curriculum.
Simply by virtue of being in school every day, students learn many “lessons” beyond the academic curriculum — lessons about the purposes of schools, what students need to do to please teachers, what is important in schools and to teachers, who is recognized, and much, much more. Schools are social institutions, and since students spend at least 12 years of their lives in schools, they are not oblivious to how these institutions operate. In fact, they are often quite astute observers of their schools. We considered the classroom as a culture in Chapter 2. We can also think of the school as a culture, with its own traditions, practices, and values. The unanticipated “lessons” students learn by participating in this culture, these “by-products” of being in school, can be either a positive or a negative force in a student’s school experience.
Because schools teach more than just the academic curriculum, teachers need to be aware not only of their obligations regarding content and the explicit curriculum, but also the ways the organization and structure of the school and their classroom affect their students. Are the students happy in school? Are they involved? Are they productive? Do students get along? When students encounter problems, are these handled in a way that supports students? Teachers must take responsibility for the kinds of teaching and learning environments they create both at the school and classroom level, and for the

messages students take away from these environments. To do this, they must first realize that “as teachers, all the decisions we make, no matter how neutral they seem, may impact in unconscious but fundamental ways the lives and experiences of our students”
(Nieto, 1996, p. 318).
In order to teach the academic curriculum well, teachers must place a high value on the overall well-being of their students. All
Critical term: hidden curriculum.
The unstated outcomes of education that students experience and learn students are individuals who live in specific social and economic circumstances and attend school in a specific social context. Some students, like James and
Monique, may live in particularly difficult circumstances. Therefore, it is not enough to consider by spending time in schools.
These outcomes may be intended or unintended, your students simply as neutral learners. Being in school can strengthen or diminish students’ well being, and for this reason all education professionals positive or negative. where students thrive. are obligated to work toward making schools places
From Chapter 4 you already have a sense of where the academic curriculum comes from. In this chapter, we will explore a much broader definition of curriculum — that is, curriculum defined as the sum total of a student’s experience in school. We will consider this issue from two perspectives: (1) the hidden messages students get while attending school, and (2) how schools as institutions respond to students’ changing social needs in a changing social context. Finally, we will see how these dimensions affect the lives of teachers and the decisions they make. page 135
The Power of the Hidden Curriculum
The unarticulated lessons students learn and the messages they receive as a result of attending school do not appear in the formal academic curriculum. Yet their collective impact has been deemed so important by educators that it has acquired its own name: the hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968). The hidden curriculum can be thought of as everything students learn in schools that is not explicitly laid out in the academic curriculum — whether it is intended or unintended (Tanner & Tanner, 1980). Although the hidden curriculum was initially defined as the unintended results of schooling, today many would argue that what at first appear to be unintended outcomes are often intended ones — outcomes that may systematically benefit different groups of students.
The hidden curriculum is a companion concept to the explicit curriculum and the null curriculum discussed in Chapter 4. It represents real learning but not the kind one may readily associate with conventional notions of what schooling is for — that is, academic learning. The concept of the hidden curriculum is a powerful way of understanding the total experience children and youth have in school. It is a vital concept mainly because once we realize that this “curriculum” also exists, we accept that in addition to academic outcomes, an unofficial, unvoiced set of other outcomes also result from attending school, outcomes for which teachers and administrators have responsibility.

page 136
The Hidden Curriculum and the School as a Culture
Much like a classroom can be thought of as a culture with its own set of customs, assumptions, and expectations, schools, too, can be regarded as cultures. If you think of schools from this perspective, you can begin to understand the concept of the hidden curriculum. In the same way that the official academic curriculum is a statement of values about what is important to learn, the atmosphere and expectations that are constructed in a school also represent a statement of values. We do not usually question the assumed values and expectations that fall outside the academic curriculum, but they represent enduring features of schooling nevertheless. Precisely because they are so embedded in how schools operate, we rarely question or discuss them. This is why they function as a hidden curriculum.
The hidden curriculum, though unspoken, operates so regularly in schools that it would be nearly impossible for students to miss its message. Eliot Eisner (1979) prefers the term implicit curriculum (1979) to hidden curriculum, signifying that these expectations, or outcomes, are implicit in the act of attending school. He describes the phenomenon as follows:
Thus, the implicit curriculum of a school is what it teaches because of the kind of place it is. And the school is that kind of place through the ancillary consequences of various approaches to teaching, by the kind of reward system it uses, by the organizational structure it employs to
Students learn more than just academics sustain its existence, by the physical when they spend time in school. (Digital characteristics of the school plant, by
Vision) the furniture it uses and the surroundings it creates. These characteristics constitute some of the dominant components of the school’s implicit curriculum. Although these features are seldom publicly announced, they are intuitively recognized by parents, students, and teachers. And because they are salient and pervasive features of schooling, what they teach may be among the most important lessons a child learns. (Eisner, 1979, pp. 82-83)
For example, one common feature in most schools is grouping students in classes with peers of the same age. This fact of schooling provides a lesson to students about the value of working with those of your own age — and devalues the power of cross-age peer learning and tutoring. Nowhere in the formal curriculum is it stated that students are better off in same-age classes or even that such classes are desirable. But that is what most schools assume. So it is, in effect, a “hidden” outcome learned as a result of spending time in school — and hence, an example of the hidden curriculum. As we will

see in Chapter 8, some schools defy this cultural norm by practicing multi-age grouping and so send a different hidden message than that communicated in most schools.
In most schools it is assumed that teachers have greater power than students. After all, teachers organize the curriculum, develop activities and projects, construct and grade tests, and generally run the show. Frederick Erickson, the scholar of classroom culture mentioned in Chapter 2, commented on this assumption as follows: “Classrooms are characterized by marked asymmetry of form and informal rights and obligations among participants. Formally and informally the roles of teacher and student are asymmetric”
(Erickson & Shultz, 1992, p. 469). Year after year students learn that this asymmetrical relationship is a regular part of the schooling and that only rarely do students themselves have greater say than their teachers. It can be done otherwise, and schools and philosophies exist in which there are less hierarchical definitions of the teacher-student relationship. But common practice in Canada is an hierarchical one.
What about the seemingly simple question of furniture that Eisner raises as an issue related to the hidden curriculum? The arrangement of your classroom sends page 137 a message to the students you teach. If each desk stands in isolation, this conveys the idea that working in isolation is valued. When desks are paired or arranged in groups, a different message is sent, creating the possibility for shared tasks. If you have movable desks but students always face the teacher and never regroup for purposes of class discussion, it’s likely that fewer students will participate, especially those who sit in the back rows, without heavy prodding by the teacher. This also sends a particular message
— that students who sit in the back of the classroom may not be expected to participate regularly or to be fully engaged
Big decisions about how to interact with students or organize the classroom, as well as smaller decisions such as seating patterns and the arrangement of furniture, all communicate messages to students about why they are at school. (Michael J. Doolittle/The
Image Works) in the lesson. And if the furniture is screwed to the floor, as it often is in large lecture halls, the instructor is, in essence, stuck with the message that instruction is to proceed in lecture format in front of a large group.
As another example, until the advent of cell phones, teachers could only communicate with families after school hours and at appointed conference times. Most schools had only a single telephone line teachers could use, and it was typically located in

a public place, so that holding a private conversation was nearly impossible. The message this arrangement sent was that teachers could not easily contact the parents and families of their students and that doing so was not a high priority. In contrast, today many teachers have cell phones in their classrooms and use them to keep in touch with family members and even, on occasion, to have students talk with their family members during the day in relationship to problems that may arise. The context of schooling changes significantly when students call their families with a teacher standing right there, in close proximity, rather than waiting to see if their teacher might call home in the evening. This creates a very different set of relationships between teachers and parents or guardians.
The hidden curriculum is the result of decisions made by educators regarding how schools should work — even if those decisions were made a long time ago and are in place today simply by force of tradition and custom. Seymour Sarason (1982), an astute observer of schooling, calls the unexamined practices that have resulted from these past decisions and traditions the regularities of schooling . He states that recognizing these regularities, or patterns, is critical because if they are not acknowledged in the first place, we cannot even begin to imagine changing them. If some of these regularities of schooling are not the best way to support student learning, then recognizing them and talking about them are the first steps to creating new regularities with more beneficial outcomes.
The hidden curriculum operates at every level at which decisions are made and directly influences how students experience school. Every decision regardless of whether it has been thought through explicitly represents some kind of purpose.
What patterns exist in enrolling students in Advanced Placement classes in high school? Which students are represented in leading roles in school plays? Are those elected to student council year after year representative of the entire student body or rather of a narrow group? If there are separate classes for students who are identified as gifted and talented, who ends up in those classes, and who does not? These are all examples of the hidden curriculum.
Critical term: regularities of schooling.
A term coined practices other ways. by
Seymour Sarason to describe the traditions and of schooling that are taken for granted and are not questioned – even though schooling could be organized and carried out in page 138
As a new teacher, you will find many of the regularities of the school culture determined for you. However, within your own classroom you do have control over many of the choices you make about what kind of experience you create for your students.
Whether or not these choices are directly related to the academic curriculum, they influence how your students experience school. Every choice you make about how you organize and deliver the academic curriculum carries with it implicit messages about the kind of place your classroom is.
For example, if you are planning to be an upper elementary or middle school teacher, you may decide to structure your curriculum around a series of contemporary problems (e.g., environmental protection or segregated housing patterns) and integrate reading, mathematics, social studies, and science as you address these problems. This is a

curriculum approach that may not be dictated at the school level. If you make this choice, the hidden message you are sending is that the traditional academic subjects are [not] useful for studying complex problems. Similarly, if you are a high school physics teacher, you may choose to teach chapter by chapter in the book with few demonstrations, or you may elect to make demonstrations of physical phenomena a centerpiece of your teaching.
If you choose the latter, you are communicating the hidden message that as a teacher, you value having the students observe and interact with the phenomena they are studying.
As another example, if you are a first grade teacher, you may choose to teach your students to take responsibility for retrieving materials from around the class room or for choosing activities for specific times in the day. When you teach your students to take on these responsibilities (and you will have to teach them specifically how to do this at this age), you are communicating the idea that in your class room, you trust them to take on this level of responsibility. If you pass out all materials yourself and control all choices for the students, the message they receive is that they are not ready to exercise any freedom of choice within the classroom.
As Sarason points out, many of the regularities and hidden outcomes of P-12 schooling can be changed, depending on the political pressure that operates in a school or local district. When various people in powerful positions are wedded to the fundamental purposes of the hidden curriculum, it may be difficult to change. However, we cannot assume that all implicit, or hidden, outcomes of schooling are problematic. Some may be beneficial to students, whereas others may be detrimental.
Benefits of the Hidden Curriculum
What benefits might accrue to students as a result of spending time in schools? Obviously, the answer to this question depends on the particular school and school district the students attend, but we can identify some general factors that are often said to have a positive effect on students.
School provides the opportunity to learn and practice the social skills associated with being part of a group. This opportunity arises naturally since students go
Every day they are in the classroom, teachers convey messages about who they believe can or cannot learn rigorous material in school. (Digital
Vision) page 139 to school with lots of other students and interact directly with them every school day.
Social learning includes learning to listen, share, take turns, and work with others.
Depending on the demographic makeup of the school, education also includes learning to be part of a classroom community with students of different backgrounds and life experiences. In any individual classroom, the proportion of group interaction, and thus the potential for social learning, depends on how a teacher chooses to organize the work.
The “hidden” social learning outcomes of schooling are diminished when parents choose

to school their students at home (for a detailed discussion, see Chapter 9). Parents who choose home schooling are opting for academic over social interaction benefits, or at least over interaction with a diverse group of students.
Some would argue that another beneficial lesson of schooling is learning to take responsibility. In the early grades students may take responsibility for smaller aspects of their education, while as they progress to high school they take much greater responsibility for their assignments, long-term projects, and so on. Completing homework may also be interpreted as an example of students’ learning to take responsibility. As we will see in the next section, some educators believe that students are not given enough responsibility for their own learning.
Eisner (1979) identifies some additional potential benefits of being in school:
“punctuality, working hard on tasks that are not immediately enjoyable, and the ability to defer immediate gratification in order to work for distant goals” (p. 81). To this list one might add learning to follow directions and to get one’s work done in a timely fashion.
Depending on the quality of the teaching to which they are exposed, students may also learn that learning is exciting, that the study of various subjects is stimulating, and that academic skills can be applied to many problems and situations both inside and outside of schools.
Liabilities of the Hidden Curriculum
The hidden curriculum is more often seen as a liability than as a benefit. Two issues are usually raised with regard to the hidden curriculum as a negative force in school: (1) the issue of the passive nature of much educational practice; and (2) the issue of whether schooling differentially favors those who already come to school with social and economic privileges. Both have long histories as political critiques of schooling.
Education as a Passive Experience.
The typical organization of schooling has long been seen as teaching students to be passive consumers of a not-too-interesting education. Instead of motivating students to explore academic areas in which they are passionately interested and to engage them in authentic problems in which they are invested, schools are said to lock students into a life of rote, boring encounters with the curriculum. The structure of the explicit curriculum itself page 140 and its ubiquitous presence in the classroom can potentially have a detrimental impact on how students think about the process of learning — and on what they actually learn. As a result, the hidden message students may come away with is that learning is boring and that any excitement they may feel about academic subjects occurs outside of school.
Erickson and Shultz (1992) use the comical metaphor of the school lunch to capture students’ passive consumption of the curriculum:
In ordinary classroom practice in US schools it appears that the reigning conception of curriculum and pedagogy is that of school lunch. It is as if the job of the teacher were to take packages of mind-food from the freezer (the curriculum), thaw them in a microwave (instruction), and see to it that the

students eat it until it is finished (classroom management to maximize time on task). It is not the teacher’s responsibility (nor that of the student) to decide what or how much should be eaten or when and how long mealtime should be. Not only is the food served entirely prepackaged but much of each student’s daily portion is chopped into small bits, boiled, or mashed in an attempt at predigestion that lowers its basic nutritional content. Moreover, large amounts of sugar, salt and fat are found in the food. Although these substances enhance palatability somewhat, they are deleterious for the students’ long-term health and well-being.
(p. 467)
In this ironic view of students’ experience of schooling, Erickson and Shultz
(1992) raise serious questions about the structure of the curriculum when teachers merely follow it explicitly and deliver it without consideration of how to teach it well to their particular group of students. This view also raises questions about what messages students are receiving when teachers choose to follow the explicit curriculum narrowly.
These authors also lampoon the “dumbing down” of the curriculum and the tendency to teach specific aspects of it as isolated, small segments of information rather than in a context of meaningful classroom experiences. Their metaphor seeks to imply, of course, that no student should be subjected to the “school lunch” philosophy of experiencing school. Schooling should not result in students disliking learning, but instead should be rich with experiences that convey the message that learning is exciting, motivating, highly integrated across subjects, and meaningful.
Certainly, not all teachers and all schools provide a “school lunch” learning experience. However, through this metaphor Erickson and Shultz are pointing out that given the demands of the academic curriculum and additional pressure to meet curriculum standards, it is all too easy to create this kind of educational experience.
The Hidden Curriculum and the Question of Privilege.
One of the most contentious issues related to the hidden curriculum is whether schools are intentionally designed to promote the academic achievement of every
Critical term: critical theory.
Analysis of student, or whether by design some groups of students systematically have much less chance of achieving well. The education that focuses on understanding and changing structural inequities that argument that schools are not created to ensure that everyone learns at high intellectual levels is based in the belief that the purpose of school is to reproduce the existing, dominant economic system. From this perspective, which is called systematically advantage certain groups of students page 141 over others. critical theory , the idea is that those who come to school privileged continue to be privileged, receiving better education and better opportunities for advancement than those who are not so privileged. Instead of leveling the playing field, these critics argue, schooling can reinforce existing socioeconomic divisions among students, failing to serve all students well and making it difficult, if not impossible for students in lower socioeconomic classes to gain the education they need to move up the economic ladder. We will explore this issue in much greater depth in Chapter 6.

Kenneth Sirotnik (1991) cites some essential questions he believes critical scholars of education must ask: “Whose interests are, and are not, being served by the way things are?” and “How did it come to be this way?” (pp. 250-251). By asking questions about “the way things are,” Sirotnik invokes the concept of the hidden curriculum and challenges the reader to make the implicit purposes of schooling visible.
For example, if urban and rural schools consistently receive less funding than suburban schools, the inequitable distribution of resources disadvantages urban and rural students.
If teachers do not believe that racial and ethnic minority students, or students whose first language is not English, are capable of high levels of intellectual challenge, these teachers can contribute to a cycle of poverty and low-level jobs and aspirations for their students. If guidance counselors often advise racial and ethnic minority students and students from low socioeconomic levels to consider the military or technical school upon graduation, but often advise middle- and upper-middle-class students to pursue a college track, then that school is differentially advancing the interests of students from higher socioeconomic classes. These are all instances of how the hidden curriculum operates as a powerful negative force every day in school. By maintaining a cycle of low achievement for some students and high expectations for the already privileged, teachers may help reproduce the socioeconomic structure of society.
In a famous study comparing working-class, middle-class, and upper-class elementary schools, Jean Anyon (1981) described how schools in poorer areas did not challenge students intellectually and exposed them to a much more rote approach to learning than was used for students in higher income neighborhoods. Depending on where they attend school, students may learn that their teachers care a great deal about their achievement or that their teachers believe they are not capable of learning complex material. As the following Case in Point illustrates, even a seemingly neutral lesson may carry a powerful negative message from a teacher.
Current Events as the Hidden Curriculum
Harper Lee, author of the classic 1960 novel To Kill a
Mockingbird , weighs in on the hidden curriculum as a negative force in students’ experience of school in her description of required current events in the third grade classroom of the novel’s main character, Scout Finch.
The unintended outcome of this seemingly innocuous, simple activity operated against students who were already at a disadvantage in school. A character wise beyond her years, Scout appears to understand a great deal about the hidden curriculum and the implicit outcomes of schooling.
Once a week we had a Current Events period. Each child was supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This practice encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made

him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his memory; page 142 being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the
Group.
The idea was profound, but as usual, in Maycomb it didn’t work very well. In the first place, few rural children had access to newspapers, so the burden of current events was borne by the town children, convincing the bus children more deeply that the town children got all the attention anyway. The rural children who could, usually brought clippings from what they called The Grit
Paper, a publication spurious in the eyes of Miss Gates, our teacher. Why she frowned when a child recited from The Grit
Paper, I never knew, but in some way it was associated with fiddling, eating syrupy biscuits for lunch, being a holy-roller, singing Sweetly Sings the Donkey and pronouncing it dunkey, all of which the state paid teachers to discourage (pp. 279-280).
While Scout Finch certainly understood how the experience of schooling for white town children differed from that of white rural children and how the same educational setting can hold profoundly different meaning for students in different socioeconomic groups, it is likely that Miss Gates did not think twice about what she was communicating to the poor rural students in her classes.
Your turn ...
How could Miss Gates have changed the hidden curriculum around current events in her class room? Can you think of a similar example from your own schooling?
The Hidden Curriculum as a Commentary on the Social
Purposes of Schooling
The choices teachers make about how to structure their classes have profound social consequences for students. Every choice a teacher or a school or a school district makes affects how students feel, how they believe they are valued, and what they believe they can do academically and socially. Every choice sends messages to students about the purpose of their time in school. If teachers challenge students wisely, then students learn that their teachers wish to develop their intellects. If teachers extend a hand to help struggling students, then students learn that their teachers want everyone to learn, and not just those to whom learning comes easily. The hidden curriculum reminds teachers that

they are responsible for creating a total school experience that is fair, safe, and responsive
— in short, classrooms in which every student is motivated to learn.
The hidden curriculum also sends messages to students about how the school responds to their particular social circumstances outside of school. It is this topic we explore next.