ABSTRACT
Introduction What is the hidden curriculum? The hidden curriculum is a complex and ambiguous term which has been used in a range of different ways since it was coined by Philip Jackson in 1968. In “Life in Classrooms,” Jackson explored what he saw as the disconnect between what is overtly taught in educational institutions and what pupils actually learn-the “unpublicised features of school life” (Jackson, 1968, p. 17). In higher education, this may be made up of the societal, institutional or lecturers’ values that are transmitted unconsciously to students. Much hidden curriculum research has been concerned with its undesirable aspects, such as the tendency to reproduce the inequalities of wider society. A classic example is the ethnographic study by Willis (1978), “Learning to Labour” which-as well as looking at working class subcultures-described the ways in which the organization of secondary schooling contributed to the preparation of working class pupils for a lifetime of work in factories. However, the hidden curriculum is not inevitably negative: “the notion of
conspiracy is not always implied” (Portelli, 1993, p. 344). Apple and King (1977), for instance, differentiate between “weak” and “strong” conceptions of the hidden curriculum, using “weak” to refer to features inherent in educational processes, such as student socialization and professionalization (including punctuality, neatness and obedience), that may provide benefits for wider society and community cohesion, and “strong” to describe processes of social and cultural reproduction that serve to ensure the “preservation of existing social privilege, interests, and knowledge of one element of the population at the expense of less powerful groups” (Apple & King, 1977, p. 34).
