Ethics and the hidden curriculum Dr Hilary Engward

1. Ethics and the hidden curriculum Dr Hilary Engward

2. Learning Outcomes • To consider values and ethics (in a wider sense) in (health professional) education • To explore the concept of the hidden curriculum • To consider the relevance of these concepts to individual educational contexts

3. Ethics and Education Can you teach people to be ethical? Can you assess ethical conduct? Education

5. Hidden Curriculum • Processes and constraints which fall outside the formal curriculum, unarticulated & unexplored (Cribb & Bignold, 1999) • Languages, strategies that teachers, mentors or role models use in classrooms or practice settings (Cribb & Bignold, 1999) • The hidden curriculum consists of those things pupils learn through the experience of attending school rather than the stated educational objectives of such institutions. Haralambos ("Themes and Perspectives", 1999) 

6. Jackson (1968) argues that we need to understand "education" as a socialisation process. • Argues that if people are to succeed within the education system, they have to learn to conform not just to the formal rules of the school but also to the informal rules, beliefs and attitudes perpetuated through the socialisation process. (Jackson,1968 "Life In Classrooms”)

7. Sociological perspective: the institutional role of education Three main perspectives: • Functionalism: Weber, Durkheim • Conflict Theory: Marx, Critical Theory • Post Modernism: Bernstein, Bourdieu, Foucault,

8. Functionalism • Functionalist theory focuses on the ways that universal education serves the needs of society. • Functionalists see education in its manifest role: conveying basic knowledge and skills to the next generation.

9. Function education 1. Educational Function: Preparing individuals for the roles that they are to play in their adult lives: • People have to be socialised into the knowledge and skills that a society requires if it is to function technologically. 2. Solidarity: • Experience of the collective consciousness necessary for the integration of individuals into the social collective called "society".

10. Co-ordination of human resources • societies must develop ways of managing their human resources: • doctors, dentists, accountants, police officers and labourers, there is no point in producing so many trained doctors that they cannot get employment because there is no demand for their services. • Any examples of this in this room? • Made different to each other in some way (such as, in modern societies, through the possession of educational qualifications) • Does it bring about a sense of solidarity? • Should it?

11. Marxist:Education The dominant ideology thesis: • the nature of ideological transmission and that schools alone are responsible for socialising their pupils into an ideology that serves the interests of a Capitalist ruling class. • Schools as agencies of ideological transmission beneficial to the basic interests of a ruling class. Althusser, and Bowles & Gintis how the “fit” between these two institutions corresponds to the interests of an economically-dominant social class.

12. Structured Inequality • ‘Training’: children do not simply have to be “trained” for their future adult roles; they also have to be “trained” to accept the basic ideas of Capitalism. • One aspect of educational training is to socialise people into an acceptance of ideas like: • Different academic capabilities, • Individual competition, • Inevitable inequality, • Different reward systems

13. So Education Systems Give people the impression the educational system is based on merit. Control and limit people’s expectations by definingvalid knowledge (in such a way as to ensure that the bourgeoisie have an in-built advantage over all other classes in society). • The main agents of ideological reproduction within the school are teachers.

14. So •  For those destined for the lower levels of work, rule following is emphasised in the classroom (students are given little responsibility, made to do simple, repetitive, tasks and so forth). •  For those destined for middle levels of work, “dependability” and some ability to work independently is emphasised. •  For those destined for the higher levels of work, the emphasis is on making the pupil believe in the significance of what they are doing. The ability to work independently and to take some level of (guided) control over their academic work is also emphasised.

15. Organised via: • various forms of streaming, setting and banding: •  lowest streams - low skill, low-wage, manual work - will be most closely supervised in terms of their work and behaviour. •  For those labelled as “low ability” or “non-academic”, vocational training, rather than academic education • “higher ability pupils” theoretical/academic skills that can be applied to a range of higher status occupations.

16. The Alienated Pupil • Lack of control over the educational process as a whole • Examples from your context? • Have you known an alienated learner? Why?

17. Symbolic Interactionist Perspective • Ordinary experiences of everyday life • Views symbols: things to which we attach meaning as the basis of social life: • through he use of symbols we define and co ordinate relationships • Small-group issues in education: • Teacher-student interactions • Student self-esteem • Self-fulfilling prophecy

18. The Self-fulfilling Prophecy Rosenthal & Jacobson experiment: • Five random elementary school students were labeled as having superior intelligence and ability. • Teachers expected them to do well and treated them in a way that encouraged better school performance. • Rosenthal and Jacobson gave an intelligence test to all of the students at an elementary school at the beginning of the school year • They then selected 20 percent of the students at random - without any regard to their intelligence test results - and told the teachers that these students could be expected to "bloom" or "spurt" in their academics that year • At the end of the year, they came back and re-tested all the students.

19. Rosenthal & Jacobson Act in a manner consistent with the expectations of others.

20. Summary: In relation to education: • A functionalist approach: functions of education in maintaining a social system as a whole • A conflict approach: how education perpetuates class/cultural division • Interactionist approach: daily activities/forms of interaction between social actors

21. Post Modernists • Bourdieu • Foucault • Bernstein

22. Bourdieu’s Key Claims • Social class is a social fact • Society works to keep the upper classes powerful and the lower classes powerless • A lot of this happens unintentionally; not a deliberate manipulation by the powerful To understand why social inequalities: • Are reproduced over time: Retention of wealth, prestige, power • Why are these accepted by the lower classes • To liberate social actors from oppressive social and mental conditions:

23. Field

24. Two of the concepts he proposed—“habitus” and “cultural capital”—provide a unique perspective from which to analyze the function of education. Bourdieu conceives of “habitus” as a set of social and cultural practices, values, and dispositions that are characterized by the ways social groups interact with their members; whereas “cultural capital” is the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are transmitted to an individual within their sociocultural context through pedagogic action1 (Bourdieu, 1986), in particular by the family. Formal education is important because it can be viewed as an academic market for the distribution of cultural capital: Those who enter the classroom with sufficient cultural capital of the appropriate, dominant type—capital that fits well with the discourse and values of schools—are well positioned to increase their cultural capital further. In addition, research shows that the habitus of such students enables them to acquire substantial additional capital in informal contexts (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2007; Tavernise, 2012). In contrast, students who possess cultural capital of a form that is incongruent with the culture of the school, or who lack it altogether, are at a distinct disadvantage. One of the challenges of education in general, and science education in particular, is how to increase a student’s stock of the dominant cultural capital, regardless of the nature of any prior capital they may, or may not, already have acquired. CLAUSSEN & OSBORNE 2012 Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications for the Science Curriculum Science Education (see VLE)

25. Fields are based around specific types of capital: e) Fields are organised to the advantage of elites • Not level playing fields • Fields are organised to favour the sorts of capital elites happen to possess

26. Consequence: Reproduction of inequalities - Successful actorshave large amounts of the right sort of capital for the fields they are in • They pass that capital onto their children • Or:- (un)successful actors pass onto their children small amounts of useful capital and large amounts of useless capital…….. ‘THE WINNERS KEEP WINNING THE LOSERS KEEP LOSING’ (Most of the time)

27. EDUCATION FIELD Unconscious level: Educational success = having the right sort of capital Teachers have middle class habitus Evaluations in terms of amount of Cultural Capital the child has (due to its habitus) Labels: “sloppy work”, “inarticulate”, “lazy”, “disruptive” Or “good work”, “articulate”, “bright”, “attentive”

28. Examples: • Becker : Chicago High schools classified and evaluated their pupils against the standard of the "ideal pupil". • Becker found that those pupils who came closest to the ideal were mainly drawn from middle-class backgrounds, whilst those who were furthest from the ideal were mainly from working class backgrounds. ("Social Class Variations in the Teacher - Pupil Relationship") • UK: Hargreaves (“Social Relations in a Secondary School”) indicates much the same as Becker observed in American schools thirty years before. • Labelling process is set in motion on the basis that teachers create definitions of "pupil types" based on their past experiences.

29. Relevance: • People draw from doxa (doxic experience) - i.e. their 'taken for granted world beyond reflection‘ • Educational awards (degrees) are a form of cultural capital which are ‘traded’ for money, good jobs, social prestige. • Thus higher education can be seen as a valued commodity which reproduces the three different elements of capital (economic, cultural and social) • But: class elitism evident in recent controversies about ‘dumbing down’, complaints about the 'illiteracy' of younger generations and the establishment of 'Mickey-Mouse degrees‘ • We need unpack the nature of social rules, practices and strategies and the intuitive, automatic way people read and understand the social world in which they operate.

30. Basil Bernstein (1971) • Background: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: • Sapir (1921): “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in that society.” • As a result of differences in language, people in different cultures will think about, perceive, and behave toward the world differently. • So language determines, enables and constrains.

31. Read this: "They're playing football and he kicks it and it goes through there it breaks the window and they're looking at it and he comes out and shouts at them because they've broken it so they run away and then she looks out and she tells them off" while others said: "Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball and it goes through the window the ball breaks the window and the boys are looking at it and a man comes out and shouts at them because they've broken the window so they run away and then that lady looks out of her window and she tells the boys off.“ How would these differences affect someone who was listening to the two accounts?

32. Types of language Middle class families • Higher social mobility • Dispersed nuclear family • Negotiated social roles • Individual beliefs • Diversity of experience “I” OPEN SYSTEM • Language is complex, unpredictable, abstract ELABORATED CODE • Useful to explain, enables access to different groups. Working class families • Lower social mobility • Confined, close-knit communities • Fixed, traditional gender roles (economic division of labour) • Strongly shared assumptions • Common experience and expectations “WE” CLOSED SYSTEM • RESTRICTED CODE • Useful for expressing solidarity, reinforcing social relations, confirming group identity

33. Elaborated code • Elaborated code spells everything out. • It does so because it is necessary – otherwise not everyone can understand what is said. • It has to elaborate because the circumstances do not allow speakers to use “shorthand.” • Any examples?

34. Which code is “better?” It depends on what the language is suited for. • Restricted code (RC) works better than elaborated code in situations where there is a lot of shared and taken-for-granted knowledge among the group of speakers. • Under these circumstances, RC is economical and rich, conveying a vast amount of meaning with a few words. • Any examples?

35. Important Implications Bernstein’s research: • showed that working-class students had access to their restricted code • but middle-class students had access to both restricted and elaborated codes.

36. Why is this important? Because schools are: • concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings • So schools (and teachers, students, etc.) need to use elaborate and restrictive codes. • How do you use elaborate and restricted codes?

37. Problems with Bernstein’s Research • The social conditions which working class and middle class children live in nowadays are not the same as when he did his research – working class communities not so cut off • Terms like ‘restricted and elaborated’ implies deficiency (something missing) from working class language • Bernstein did not question the implication that children are expected to use elaborated code as a convention of the education system – is this actually true? • Some of Bernstein’s research used limited data on topics more accessible to middle class speakers like capital punishment. • Later researchers found that working class speakers did use elaborated code in different contexts. • Bernstein carried out research in artificial situations – university departments.

38. Foucalt: In general: • If it is true that we are the sum of our experiences (the knowledge we encounter), • then those in control of our early life experiences have enormous power. • In an isolated family, a child's knowledge depends upon a few people. • In a sense, those few people create the child's identity. • The child cannot know anything but what is communicated by them. • it is through discourse (through knowledge) that we are created. • discourse is conversation, or information.

39. Foucaltian Discourse • Every age has a dominant group of discursive elements that people live in unconsciously. • Discourse will ultimately privilege ideas of what is normal ("good" and "normative" morals); • by stressing these values, education will implicitly marginalize those who don't hold those values. • Discursive practices are characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate exclusions and choices. (Foucault, 1977, p.199) • Counter discursive: change may only happen when a new element begins to receive wide attention through the means of communication.

40. Overall conclusion • Students and educators will have different ideas about the curriculum, the purpose of, content and the ethics of education. Clarifying how these are understood is important. • Of equal importance is how they are conveyed in the educational/practice context • The Hidden Curriculum is one such means of exploring this.

41. Overall, questions to ask? • What labels, metaphors and titles are used (intentionally/unintentionally) in the educational process? • What dividing practices are used to group, differentiate or identify a subjects/learners in the discourses of the curriculum/learning context? • What do learners learn from these hidden processes about: • The type of professional they aspire to become • The context of learning • The purpose of learning and their practice • How do educators add to/perpetuate discourse hidden in the curriculum?

42. References Baker, B. (1998). "Childhood" in the emergence and spread of U.S. public schools. In T. S. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge and Power in Education (pp. 117-143). New York: Teachers College Press. Castel, R. (1994). "Problematization" as a mode of reading history. In J. Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History (pp. 237-252). Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (A. M. S. Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1977). History of systems of thought. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (pp. 119-204). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1986). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (pp. 208-226). Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1991a). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87-104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1991b). Politics and the study of discourse. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1991c). Questions of method. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 73-86). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (2000). Polemics, politics and problematizations: An interview with Michel Foucault. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984 (Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, pp. 113-119). London: Penguin. Green, B. (2003). (Un)changing English: Past, present, future? In B. Doecke, D. Homer & H. Nixon (Eds.), English Teachers at Work: Narratives, Counter-Narratives and Arguments. Adelaide: AATE/Interface & Wakefield Press. Hall, S. (2001). Foucault: Power, knowledge and discourse. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor & S. J. Yates (Eds.), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (pp. 72-81). London: Sage Publications. Hunter, I. (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Kemp, D. (1996, 21 June). A National Literacy Goal. Paper presented at the Australian College of Education Conference on General and Vocational Education, Sydney. Lee, A., & Poynton, A. (Eds.). (2000). Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Rose, N. (1998). Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free Association Books. Threadgold, T. (1997). Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories. London: Routledge. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

43. Questioning content Read: The hidden curriculum revisited: a critical review of research paper. • Identify at least 3 points this paper indicates you should look for when reading research based papers. • How can you incorporate these points into your essays?