By Dr Beverley Gibbs, Dept of Mechanical Engineering
This post was originally written in 2019, and was published on the original Elevate blog.
In July I presented a paper at AdvanceHE in York about using curriculum redesign as an opportunity to uncover the hidden curriculum - this post tells you a bit about how that came about and my thoughts on it.
Here in Mechanical Engineering we are using the opportunity the PLA represents to review and refresh our curriculum. This is raising loads of interesting questions and I wanted to talk them through with someone so I could refine my own scholarship focus, so I scheduled a one-to-one with the Elevate team. I met with Sarah Moore and actually we talked about loads of things (it was great!), but one thing that had been bugging me was the idea of professionalism in students, something I hear quite a lot in passing.
Professionalism - the idea that the University is a place for students to learn to become professional, and that they should behave in professional ways, and that this should be manifest in their approaches to study and their interactions with us. I was fascinated by this - what kind of professional culture should students be emulating? Do we agree on what being professional means? Do we model these behaviours? Should that be what HE is for? If it is important, shouldn’t ‘being professional’ be a learning outcome? So, a concept agreed to be important, but one we don’t specify and don’t explicitly teach. Are there other expectations like this in our courses? “It might be useful to look at the literature on hidden curriculum” said Sarah, and off I went.
The hidden curriculum is a term given to the ‘unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and perspectives that students learn’, or its ‘invisible rules and unspoken expectations’. What is invisible or unspoken can support the formal curriculum, or it can clash with it. It can be benevolent, and it can be malign. It is unlikely to affect all students equally. Whilst much has been written about the hidden curriculum in schools, Eric Margolis’ edited volume of work argued that the impacts of the hidden curriculum are carried into HE through social orders associated with race, class and gender (see page 12 specifically). For programme directors and PLA Leads aware of the BME attainment gap, this is something that will raise flags (the inclusive curriculum can be thought of as a closely related concept here).
At the AdvanceHE symposium a lot of attendees were looking at the hidden curriculum through a lens of inclusive curricula and transitions into University. My own perspective was on how curriculum change as a process could be used to ‘unearth’ and respond to the hidden curriculum, and some of the practical tools we have used to do that in my Department. We have put lots of work into being explicit about how we want to see students developing, how the learning and teaching environment supports that, and how we ensure each and every student is given the tools they need to succeed.
What I found is that it’s really difficult to talk about, and to be honest I did pull my punches. Nobody likes to talk about their blind spots, especially when this might be impacting students adversely, and especially when you are saying things about a curriculum which involves many capable and committed colleagues. And yet, without that reflection and speaking out loud, how can we ever hear what it is that we take for granted, take action, and improve the learning experience for every single student?
References:
Hidden Curriculum (2015, July 13). Hidden Curriculum Definition. Retrieved from https://www.edglossary.org/hidden-curriculum/
Margolis, E. (2001). The hidden curriculum in higher education. New York: Routledge.