ABSTRACT
The daily life of physical education teachers and students is filled with routines: dressing for activity, taking attendance, forming teams, doing warmups, practising skills, playing games. While the substance of the lesson changes from week to week, the routines and the interactions which accompany them often retain remarkable consistency. The term ‘hidden curriculum’ has been used extensively in educational literature since the early 1970s to refer to ‘what is taught to students by the institutional regularities, by the routines and rituals of teacher/student lives’ (Weis, 1982, p. 3). The concept of the hidden curriculum has been analyzed in relation to physical education (Bain, 1975, 1985a; Dodds, 1983, 1985) and has served as a useful framework for interpreting research on the operational curriculum.
