Tacit Teaching and the Educative Context: Bringing Intentionality to the Hidden Curriculum
Date
2015-09-01
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Abstract
Education, as conventionally practiced and colloquially understood, focuses on students’ learning of knowledge and skills. Yet the ambitions of most educational programs also include deeper aspects of learning and development—those related to students’ character, attitudes, and dispositions. This is particularly the case in specialized programs with goals related to social development (democracy education, environmental education etc.). This type of learning is associated with the “hidden curriculum,” which refers to the tacit learning that takes place through students’ daily immersion in the schooling context. However, the hidden curriculum is usually characterized negatively, as a hegemonic force. Literature on the hidden curriculum tends to focus on un-hiding it, and offers little guidance on how to counteract or reorient it. To partially address this, the idea of “tacit teaching” has been introduced as a way of discussing how non-explicit activities of the teacher can contribute to students’ deep learning.
This research attempts determine a more comprehensive and systematic approach to bringing intentionality to the hidden curriculum, by expanding the notion of tacit teaching to include a broader range of factors that contribute to students’ daily experiences. The research introduces the term "educative context" to refer to these factors collectively, as the mechanism by which the hidden curriculum is taught and learned. The research draws on data generated in three alternative schools with strong philosophies related, respectively, to: democracy and autonomy; sustainability and sense of place; and bioregionalism. The methodology blends critical ethnographic and case study approaches, and included approximately 200 hours of immersion across the three sites, interviews with 33 students and staff, and a review of documents and artifacts from the schools. The data analysis identifies 110 different contextual factors across the three schools. These factors are clustered to develop a model for the educative context consisting of four categories: social, physical, institutional, and content-related. The factors are further classified according to the level of the education system they are associated with. The research concludes with an argument in favor of a broad conceptualization of teaching and learning that takes full account of the educative context.
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Education--Curriculum and Instruction, Education--Philosophy of, Education--Sociology of
Citation
Hiebert, M. (2015). Tacit Teaching and the Educative Context: Bringing Intentionality to the Hidden Curriculum (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27966