A flexible model for exposing and mitigating the hidden curriculum in the transition to higher education

Abstract

The hidden curriculum is the broad set of values, norms and practices in education that are rarely explicitly taught but may be tacitly known. This is particularly acute in the transition from school to university, but also when entering higher education on alternative routes: first-year undergraduate students do not all share the same prior insights into or expectations of university learning, potentially exacerbating systemic inequalities. We present a flexible framework for uncovering and addressing the hidden curriculum in the transition to university, with particular focus on direct entry from secondary school. The framework is designed to be applied in subject-specific contexts to address specific needs and involves three key stages of (i) planning, (ii) investigation, and (iii) analysis and targeting of the hidden curriculum. The planning stage engages current students as co-researchers to identify key areas of the context-specific hidden curriculum and design thematic focus groups. At the investigation stage, student co-researchers lead focus groups to identify key elements of the hidden curriculum, feeding into quantitative data collection reaching a wider sample of the population. Finally, the analysis and targeting stage involves synthesising and interpreting results from data collection to create resources that reveal the hidden curriculum to incoming students early on in their studies. We demonstrate an application of this framework to Linguistics at Newcastle University.