What is hidden curriculum

The above citations are in APA format. If you need some guidance on converting the citations to another format, read my advice here. Skip to content Table of Contents 1. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Hidden Curriculum. Comparison of HC Theories. European Journal of Educational Studies, 1 2 : 83 — Alsubaie, M.

Journal of Education and Practice , 6 33 : — Ideology and Curriculum. Boostrom, R. In: Kridel, C. Encyclopaedia of Curriculum Studies. Cubukcu, Z. Moral Education. Data collection was performed through unstructured interviews and continued until data saturation. Data validity was confirmed based on the proposed Lincoln and Guba criteria. The main theme that emerged in this study was implicit learning.

Professional ethics, spiritual, social and cultural issues, and clinical skills are the five major themes that were presented in this study. These themes and their subthemes are transferred during an implicit learning experience in hidden curriculum. Since a wide range of issues are mostly transferred by hidden curriculum, it is essential to have a dynamic approach to educational environments.

This is especially important in clinical settings, as the process of learning is constantly happening in the backyard. Two decades after the introduction of hidden curriculum by Philip Jackson in , Hafferty put this concept forward in medical education 1. He stated that hidden curriculum is responsible for most of the material that is learned in medical schools 2. Analyzing hidden curriculum is neither simple nor without challenge.

What is directly understood from such an analysis might be odd and shocking or inconsistent with common sense 3. Medical students learn many key and important issues from hidden and informal curriculum and not from formal medical curriculum 4. In the recent years, curriculum is no longer a term that clearly incorporates formal and genuine documents into all planned and unplanned experiences conducted under the supervision of an educational institution 5. Much of what educational systems teach is planned and explicit, but there are topics that are implicit, unplanned and hidden, and can be found in hidden curriculum 6.

Economically, hidden curricula impose a lot of health care costs on the society 5. In medical science education, hidden curriculum has the most impacting clinical education settings 7. It has a very powerful influence on the formation of students' professional development and may change their general ideas about career and clinical practice 8. In Iran, educational researchers have not neglected studies of hidden curriculum and have added to the literature through their research results 9.

Most of this research, however, has been done in middle and high schools, and a small part pertains to higher education, especially in the medical education system.

Considering the importance of hidden curriculum in medical education, especially clinical education, the present study was conducted. The aim of this study was to analyze the content of hidden curriculum in order to determine what it conveys to students in clinical educational environments. This research was a content analysis designed to help understand the concepts in qualitative analysis What made it suitable for qualitative research was the fact that it provided clear evidence of a phenomenon Content analysis has been described as a qualitative study method for subjective interpretation of text data by means of systematic categorization of coding and determining patterns and themes Eighteen faculty members and medical students voluntarily participated in the study.

For maximum variation, they were recruited by purposive sampling from different specialties and levels. The study was conducted between May and February Data were collected through unstructured interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim immediately after being recorded and were then analyzed. The interviewer had formal qualitative curriculum education and several years of experience in academic teaching, which would help in establishing trustworthy communication.

The interviewer did not have any relation to the interviewees. Data collection was completed after 22 interviews four participants were interviewed two times , when no new concepts emerged. Five steps of "framework" process in the conventional content analysis approach were utilized to analyze data in this study.

The first step was familiarization, in which the audiotape recordings were transcribed word forward. The authors began data analysis immediately after the first interview.

To get a sense of the whole subject, the transcribed interviews were read several times. In the second step, or thematic framework identification, the researchers analyzed the data word by word and line by line to identify the meaning units in order to determine the important concepts, themes and issues. Next, they abstracted reduced meaning units and coded them top resent the content.

In the third step, the various codes were compared based on differences and similarities, and the emerged codes were sorted into subcategories and categories.

The fourth step consisted of applying the thematic framework to individual transcripts and making a picture of the data. Collected extracts for each category were read by the authors to form a coherent pattern.

Then, the validity of each category was evaluated in connection to the data set and selected categories. Two researchers examined the data for the categories independently. In the fifth step, or mapping and interpretation, the categories were defined and further refined.

The criteria of Guba were applied in this study to ensure trustworthiness The main researcher used field notes to increase data quality and had prolonged engagement with the study fields. For peer checking, five experts with PhD degrees or medical specialties controlled and confirmed the coding and categorization process. All the peer checkers were faculty members with considerable experience in performing and teaching qualitative studies.

For member checking, the abstracts of the interviews were returned to the participants and they verified the results. The nature and aim of the study were explained to the participants, and their verbal and written consent were obtained. Furthermore, study subjects were assured of confidentiality and voluntariness of participation. Ten faculty members 3 females and 7 male and eight students 4 females and 4 male were interviewed Table 1.

Generally speaking, the concept of a hidden curriculum in schools has become more widely recognized, discussed, and addressed by school leaders and educators in recent decades. In addition, school communities , educators, and students are more likely than in past decades to actively and openly reflect on or question their own assumptions, biases, and tendencies, either individually or as a part of a formal school policy, program, or instructional activity.

For example, topics such a bullying and diversity are now regularly discussed in public schools, and academic lessons, assignments, readings, and materials are now more likely to include multicultural perspectives, topics, and examples. Political and social pressures, including factors such as the increased scrutiny that has resulted from online media and social networking, may also contribute to greater awareness of unintended lessons and messages in schools.

For example, harmful, hurtful, or unhealthy student behaviors are now regularly surfaced on social-networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, which often leads to greater awareness of student behaviors or social trends. For example, long-standing policies may become so deeply embedded in a school culture that people simply forget to question them, or a school faculty that prides itself on celebrating multicultural diversity may find it emotionally difficult to acknowledge and openly discuss behaviors that might contradict that self-perceived identity.

For this reason, every school will always have some form of hidden curriculum. While the hidden curriculum in any given school encompasses an enormous variety of potential intellectual, social, cultural, and environmental factors—far too many to extensively catalog here—the following examples will help to illustrate the concept and how it might play out in schools: Cultural expectations: The academic, social, and behavioral expectations established by schools and educators communicate messages to students.

For example, one teacher may give tough assignments and expect all students to do well on those assignments, while another teacher may give comparatively easy assignments and habitually award all students passing grades even when their work quality is low. They consequently can struggle or even fail to persist in college. Students specifically at risk tend to be from historically underrepresented populations , including first in their families to attend college , multilingual, of color, of nontraditional age, from lower socioeconomic status communities, and from immigrant backgrounds.

If these vulnerable student populations are disproportionately disadvantaged by institutional policies and practices , and educators unconsciously align to the hidden curriculum, this reflects implicit bias. We may operate under the supposition that students will accurately interpret our writing assignment instructions, not plagiarize, and attend to our conscientiously drafted feedback in their revisions.

Our expectations, assumptions, beliefs, and suppositions, thus, may not be fair or even valid. Strategies for Promoting Equity in the Classroom We first can begin to question our own unexamined allegiance to the hidden curriculum. To engender learning and achievement among all our students, it is crucial that we become mindful of our assumptions and expectations that all students are equally familiar with educational norms, attitudes, behaviors, practices, and policies that may be second nature to us.

Writing instructors can build explicit instruction of their hidden curriculum into their formal curriculum and pedagogy. Using rhetorical analysis, we challenge ourselves to reduce the normative filter and so discern where we might need to embed background information, context, or examples in our course content and discussions, especially when communicating instructions for writing assignments that will be graded.