3 Critical Curriculum

Conversations about curriculum can be very convoluted, since there are many definitions of what a curriculum is, and there are also many different faces or types of curriculum/curricula. In having these conversations, it is necessary to try to be clear about what kind of curriculum you are discussing. While there are different words used by various theorists, in this book we talk generally about the formal, the informal, and the hidden curriculum. The formal curriculum is generally agreed to comprise the official documents and policies that are provincially or regionally developed, usually by departments of education, and then given to teachers for classroom use. The informal curriculum generally is understood to comprise the things that teachers do, and teach, that are not necessarily written down; this informal curriculum might include such things as teaching children to raise their hands to ask to leave their seats, or how to move through hallways when changing classes, or extra-curricular activities (and who gets to participate in them, whether they are sports or drama or music programs) and a range of behaviours that are generally accepted to be a part of “how one does school” and are also generally accepted to be a part of a teacher’s job, although not explicitly written down as such. Then there is the hidden curriculum. As John Portelli articulated in 1993, there was then and remains today some disagreement about how to define the hidden curriculum, or indeed, whether or not such a thing even exists. Most critical theorists, particularly those who believe that schools either are or could be – or should be – spaces that encourage, develop, and support social justice, social equity, social diversity, do believe in the existence of a hidden curriculum within schooling processes. We find Portelli’s (1993) identified meanings (within curriculum discourse) to be most useful:

• The hidden curriculum as the unofficial expectations, or implicit but expected messages;
• The hidden curriculum as unintended learning outcomes or messages;
• The hidden curriculum as implicit messages arising from the structure of schooling;
• The hidden curriculum as created by the students (p.345).

We agree with Portelli that “…educators have the responsibility to make the hidden curriculum as explicit as possible” (1993, p. 343). We tie this to the work of Lisa Delpit (1988) and particularly to her discussion of the “culture of power” that operates in and through schooling processes. It is worthwhile to share these five aspects of the culture of power here, as they are an integral component of a critical pedagogy:

• Issues of power are enacted in classrooms.
• There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power”.
• The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.
• If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.
• Those with power are frequently least aware of – or least willing to acknowledge – its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence (Delpit, 1988, p. 282).

Delpit contends that the first three of these rules are now generally accepted as truisms within academic work around the sociology of education, but that the last two are generally either less accepted, or are seldom discussed. While she made that claim in 1988, this appears to be still the case for many more than thirty years later. Our own experience working with these codes of power with pre-service teachers has been that many of them accept the first two – sometimes three – as being “fact”, but are either less aware of, or less willing to accept the veracity of, the fourth and fifth codes. Thus, we focus much of our discussion around the need for clearly and explicitly bringing students to a conscious awareness of all of the rules or codes of power, in order to develop truly transformative classroom spaces. It must be said here that in no way does making the rules explicit mean that we suggest an assimilation process, as particularly code number four might suggest (“being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier”). Nor is it Delpit’s intent to suggest this; rather, she – and we – believe that it is only through clearly understanding how these codes of power operate that individuals can make choices to be, as Paulo Freire (1998) suggests, liberated and freely choosing humans. Like Portelli (and of course many others), Delpit maintains that educators have an explicit responsibility to both recognize the existence and operations of these codes of power, and to make them explicitly known to students, to offer them greater chances of success in school.

We use a metaphor we call The Lighted House to unpack or illustrate how one could think about these codes of power:

Imagine, please, a large house standing in the middle of a lawn. All around the edges of the lawn are shrubs, then trees. It is night-time, and the house is fully lit up inside. Now, imagine some people inside the house, and more people outside. Some of the people standing outside are quite close to the house, and others are across the lawn, near or behind the shrubs, or standing amongst the trees. Now, imagine all of the people looking at one another. The people inside the brightly lit house can probably see a few of the people who are standing very near the windows, as the light from inside spills out into the yard a few feet. But the inside people will have much greater difficulty seeing the people who are further away, near the shrubs, or in amongst the trees. In fact, from inside of the house, many of the people outside will not be able to be seen at all. However, for the people who are outside, no matter where they are standing, the people who are inside the house, standing in front of the brightly lit windows, are clearly visible.

It is this, we believe, that Delpit is referencing particularly in code number five: “Those with power are frequently least aware of – or least willing to acknowledge – its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence” (1988, p. 282). If the people inside the brightly lit house are the people with power, and the people outside are the people with less or no power, then those without power are able to see the operations of power much more clearly than are the people who have the power and might be unconscious of that fact, or of the operations of that power in their lives.

The Curriculum Circle

Using the three aspects of curriculum as defined by Marsh and Willis (2007), those being the planned, the enacted, and the received curriculum, we focus primarily on the received. We encourage exploring answers to questions such as: who are our students? What are the everyday lived experiences of their lives that they of necessity bring into our shared spaces when they come to school? How do the material conditions of their lives affect how they receive the “stuff” of schooling – the formal curriculum, and also the policies, practices, values, assumptions, and requirements of being a student? Who are we as teachers? And how do our students receive us? For we – and all teachers – are also an integral component of what a curriculum is.

We work with the belief that school success is more often achieved, or more easily achieved, when students are able to connect themselves in some positive way to at least one aspect of school, whether that aspect is a subject, a friend, an activity, or a teacher. This connection allows for the sense that one belongs, or has a place of belonging, within this space; if one does not belong, it is difficult to connect, to engage. But if one does have a sense of belonging, then engagement, while not guaranteed, is more possible. Some might ask – indeed, some do ask – why it’s so important that teachers help to create an environment where students can see themselves? We start with our students by asking them to think about socially comfortable environments versus socially uncomfortable environments, whether it’s a library or a cocktail party, or standing on the side of a mountain tied to a zip line harness. After a brief discussion of how an individual might experience these varying spaces where one is either comfortable or uncomfortable, we then ask them to think about what happens for children when they come to school.

It is a commonly held understanding – although occasionally challenged – that the primary task of students in school is to receive the information that is the content of the formal curriculum – that is to say, the things we teach – and to absorb those things and then reflect back to us what they have taken in (learned). This is generally acknowledged to be the primary process of school. There is, however, another significant aspect to this process which remains largely undiscussed and unacknowledged. We refer to this as the Curriculum Circle, and in general terms, it looks as follows:

We draw a circle on the board and write formal curriculum inside the middle of it. So you have a child that comes to kindergarten on the first day, and that child walks into school and they see teachers who look like them. They encounter teachers and curriculum documents and school policies and practices, particularly when we’re talking about kindergarten and grade one, with which that child is very comfortable. They know, or they very quickly cue into or pick up on the inflections in teachers’ voices. We reference again Delpit’s (1988) codes of power – the ways teachers speak, so that some children come to school and they understand when the teacher says “let’s all line up now, okay?” that it is not actually a request. It is a requirement, even though the inflection of the teacher’s voice has turned it into—and the use of the word ‘okay’ has turned it into – an apparent question that might for some children seems to imply choice.

So some children see themselves in the faces and bodies of the teacher, they encounter norms and values inside school policies and practices that they either already know or they’re comfortable with. That is, they go through school and develop more and more familiarity with the curriculum content. They, again, see themselves, hear themselves, encounter their communities and values and ancestors being presented, and in positive ways. Their task is a single one – to proceed through school and demonstrate how successfully they have absorbed the information that we call knowledge that is contained within the formal curriculum.

For many children, however, school consists not of one process, but of two, both of which happen on a daily basis from the first day of school to the last. Children who come to school and do not see themselves in the formal curriculum, whose history/ies are not the ones contained in the texts, whose values and beliefs are not those espoused in the policies and practices of school, whose teachers do not look like them – these children must do two things. They must still absorb the information of school and return it to their teacher in a demonstration of “what has been learned”, and they must also try to make sense of the reality that school, which is supposed to be a welcoming space of belonging, seems to not be a place of their being able to belong, for they see themselves reflected nowhere. This cognitive dissonance – this ongoing event which makes no sense for many children – can lead to resentment, confusion, despair, apathy, anger, or leaving. Not always, but often.

These children come to school and they encounter the same expectations and curriculum content, and policies and processes, and the same teachers, but they have to do two things because they don’t see themselves reflected, or reflected positively, in curriculum content. They don’t encounter policies and practices that value the communities from which they come, or the family in which they live, or take into account their families and their values, community culture, traditions, or beliefs. As an example, there’s an expectation on the part of many school teachers and many schools that field trips are just a good thing, without acknowledging that for some families, they’re not at all a good thing because they cost money that the family doesn’t have.

So some students have to do two things. They still have to take up the content, reflect it back in defined, appropriate kinds of ways that demonstrate that they have taken up this knowledge. They know stuff, so they have to pass the tests or the projects or whatever. But they also, and simultaneously, have to try and make sense of being required to be inside an institution every day where they can’t find a place of belonging for themselves; an institution that in many instances says fairly specifically to kids, ‘you don’t belong here. We’re not talking about your history or we’re not talking about it in positive kinds of ways. We’ll refer to your ancestors in derogatory kinds of ways. We won’t talk about contemporary First Nations people (as one example). We won’t talk about the history of colonialism and colonization, and deprivation and the residential schooling system, and the reservation system. Those things will not be part of our curriculum,’ so the only ways some children are going to encounter themselves at all in formal curriculum is through very negative kinds of ways, or exclusion. And if they try to speak their reality, they’re often shut down or punished, made to leave the room because they’re disruptive.

Our work as educators begins, therefore, with an acknowledgement of all of those wonderfully disparate bodies that occupy our classroom spaces. We must believe that all of our students can succeed. We need to see our students as individuals with immense capacity for creativity. We must respect the individual needs of all students and foster a caring and creative environment that supports the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual development of each person. Big responsibilities? Absolutely. But not impossible. We’re teachers: we’ve got this!