Hidden, Null, Lived, Material, and Transgressive Curricula

Alternative dimensions of curricula fall outside explicit and official curriculum. There is much more to teaching and learning than the formal, planned curriculum claimed by many teachers, administrators, and organizations. Beyond and within the textbooks, lesson plans, tests, and standards exist hidden, null (or absented), lived, material, and transgressive dimensions of curricula (to name only a few). Hidden curricula are messages that are sent implicitly, for example, giving students numerical scores on a quiz and using those scores to assess students as successes and failures functions as a form of micro-tracking, ranking students’ success and achievement in relation to one another in a hierarchical range. This scoring and ranking system implies that students are in competition with one another, that self-worth is evaluated with a score. The action of scoring and ranking itself teaches the lesson and is woven into the fabric of schooling, though it is neither explicitly stated nor explicitly taught (i.e., hidden) that success in learning requires winners and losers at learning. Null (or absented) curricula are topics that are specifically not taken up in the official curriculum. For example, although Protestant Christianity shapes a hidden curriculum of many U.S. schools, religion is largely excluded as an explicit topic of study in most state schools. This fulfills a claim of separation of church and state and religion’s obvious absence reveals a null curriculum. Lived curricula are the lived experience of the learner. For example, a student might experience being bullied, and this would comprise part of their lived curriculum, teaching lessons that are learned, retained, and tapped into over time, long after the specific encounters have passed. Material curricula (a term the authors coin in this article) are the material effects that curricula have on the learner, and more broadly, the world. For example, the grades and scores that students receive in school have direct effects on the future opportunities available to them as people. This is a material curriculum of sorting students into social roles and positionings, with accompanying material outcomes (e.g., a student is denied entry into college and further denied a class of jobs and their corresponding material aspects, such as salary and—in the United States—health benefits). Transgressive curricula are defined through the prism of teaching and learning in resistance to something, in the refusal of something, in defiance of something, or in disregard of something. These alternative dimensions of curricula exist anyplace learning occurs, not just in schools.