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Showing posts from May, 2019

The Hidden Curriculum

The first year is done and so, in my effort to procrastinate on working on the dreaded certification exam that we have been hearing contradictory information about all year (the exam is required for first year doctoral students in my program to determine if we get to stay), I thought I would take some time to reflect on the other kind of learning that has happened this year. This is the learning that is not within the curriculum. It is not what is necessarily intentionally taught but is the growth that happens alongside the theories and articles and papers and statistics that we learn in the classroom. In education, we call this the hidden curriculum, which usually refers to the ways in which children are socialized to learn their "place" in society, such as along class lines. Making children walk the halls in quiet, orderly lines, emphasizing Standard English over student dialects are ways in which the hidden curriculum silently, subtly, teaches children what society deman