curriculum and types

1. Core, Hidden & Null Curriculum
Dr.A.Thangasamy
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Gandhigram Rural Institute
Gandhigram.

2. Core Curriculum
• Traditionally includes all required content
areas in the school programme
• the term “core” refers to type of course such
as general education, united studies, common
learning, social living and integral programmes

3. • The two ideas common to the
concept of core are that they provide
experiences needed by all youth and
the experiences cut across subject
lines.

4. Objectives of Core Curriculum
• To provide a youth a common body of
experience organized around personal and
social problems.
• To give boys and girls successful experience in
solving the problem which are real to them
here and now, thus preparing them to solve
future problems.

5. • To give youth experience which will lead them
to become better citizens in a democracy
• To increase the holding power of the
secondary school by providing a program that
has meaning for all, these are some of the
needs of the core curriculum.

6. Characteristics of Core Curriculum
• Core Curriculum utilizes the problems of
personal and social development common to
all youth
• It develops these problems without reference
to the traditional subject matter fields.
• It encourages the use of the problem- solving
technique to attack problems.

7. • It requires a wide variety of techniques and materials
for their development
• There is a provision for individual and group
guidance
• It provides for a scheme of organizing around the
core, the majority of the teachers of the school in
relation to dominant central purpose that of the
school programme around individual interests and
purpose of supplementing the core work

8. Hidden/ Latent Curriculum
A hidden curriculum can be defined as
the lessons that are taught informally,
and usually unintentionally, in a school
system. These include behaviors,
perspectives, and attitudes that
students pick up while they are at
school.

9. • A hidden curriculum is a side effect of an
education which are learned but not openly
intended" such as the transmission of norms,
values, and beliefs conveyed in the classroom
and the social environment.
• Any learning experience may teach
unintended lessons areas of hidden
curriculum in our schools that mold
perspectives of students deal with issues such
as gender, morals, social class, cultural
expectations, politics, and language.

10. • Hidden curriculum is often found within the
formal curriculum of a school; this may be
partially in what is not taught.
• Various aspects of learning contribute to the
success of the hidden curriculum, including
practices, procedures, rules, relationships, and
structures.

11. • Many school-specifiy sources, some of which
may be included in these aspects of learning,
give rise to important elements of the hidden
curriculum. These sources may include, but
are not limited to, the social structures of
the classroom, the teacher’s exercise of
authority, rules governing the relationship
between teachers and students, standard
learning activities, the teacher’s use of
language, textbooks, audio-visual aids,
furnishings, architecture, disciplinary
measures, timetables, tracking systems, and
curricular priorities.

12. • Although the hidden curriculum conveys
a great deal of knowledge to its students,
the inequality promoted through its
disparities among classes and a social
status often invokes a negative
connotation. Since the hidden curriculum
is considered to be a form of education-
related capital, it promotes this
ineffectiveness of schools as a result of
its unequal distribution.

13. • As a means of social control, the hidden
curriculum promotes the acceptance of a
social destiny without promoting rational and
reflective consideration. Although the hidden
curriculum has negative connotations, it is not
inherently negative, and the tacit factors that
are involved can potentially exert a positive
developmental force on students.
• Some educational approaches, such as democratic
education, actively seek to minimize, make explicit, and/
or reorient the hidden curriculum in such a way that it
has a positive developmental impact on students.

14. • it is considered that the social development of students
are important as well as cognitive development and
proving social development they give importance to a
second curriculum, including social and cultural
features of school, rather than formal curriculum.
• Except from the curriculum which is written at school,
this curriculum is referred to as a second curriculum
and referred to names such as ‘the hidden curriculum’,
‘secret curriculum’, ‘stored curriculum or ‘non-written
curriculum’, but it does not provide a clear and
distinctive elements of the official curriculum for
students, such as feelings, values, attitudes and habits
of the official curriculum of the correct knowledge is
stated to be more effective (Yüksel, 2004). Within the
context of hidden curriculum,

15. • it is suggested that elements like social class of
the students that they come from and their
academic achievement levels, social and
academic life in schools, interactions between
school and the environment, management
and organizational preparations of the school,
position of the teacher and the students in
classroom and school environment should be
properly taken into account during the
process of character education

16. Null Curriculum
• The ‘Null’, or ‘excluded’ curriculum is a concept that
was formulated by Elliot Eisner (1979).
• Null. Eisner defined null curriculum as information that
schools do not teach: ... Another example would be the
exclusion of Darwin's theory of evolution from the
official biology curriculum.
• Null content may represent specific facts omitted in a
particular unit of study.
• Eisner suggests that all schools are teaching three
curricula: the explicit, the implicit, and the null.

17. • The explicit curriculum simply refers to
publicly announced programs of study-
what the school advertises that it is
prepared to provide. Such a program
typically includes courses in
mathematics, science, social studies,
English, art, and physical education.

18. • The implicit curriculum includes values
and expectations generally not included
in the formal curriculum, but
nevertheless learned by students as part
of their school experience.

19. • The null curriculum Eisner defines as what
schools do not teach: “ ... The options
students are not afforded, the perspectives
they may never know about, much less be
able to use, the concepts and skills that are
not part of their intellectual repertoire”

20. • ‘The null curriculum’ is a multi-faceted
concept. Eisner himself identifies two major
dimensions of the null curriculum: intellectual
processes and subject matter. These two
dimensions may be supplemented by a third,
that of affect.
• Null content can also consist of subfields
within a discipline. Topics within sub-fields
represent yet a more specific level at which
we may identify components of null content.

21. • The concept of evolution omitted from a
biology curriculum would be an example
of this type of exclusion. Null content can
be considered in terms of particular
facts.

22. Potentials of Null Curriculum
• Visual and Performance of Arts
• Relationship and sexuality
• Contraceptive method
• Conservational second language
• Home economics
• Carpentry and Industry Arts
• Basic life skills

23. Contribution to Students
• Clear cultural and political statements about
what is ‘significant’ in a society as made by
excluding content
• Increased knowledge leads to increased
understanding leads to increased acceptance
leads to increased and more collaboration
• More than excluded culture/perspectives, null-
curriculum can be expressed through excluded
methods or modes of expressions