Unintended Hidden Curriculum: How to deal with it?

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Given the meaning of hidden curriculum as ‘implicit message’ from school ethos (Jackson, 1968), it is the school vision that becomes pillar to sustain positive school climate. When all components in school system are integrated and stay ‘on the right track’ as demanded by stakeholder,  school can play its role and existence to be main contributor and catalyst of change in the society. These are the role and existence which are significantly desirable to counterbalance the incoming ‘new’ values as product of modernization.

In the classroom and within the curriculum track, students might easily explain what the subject is all about. It is all formally organized and mentioned in the curriculum. The procedures, approaches and methodologies for formal teaching-learning activity are ruled out in the curriculum. The outcomes (action, behaviour, and values) which are expected by curriculum are clear and well-defined. However, often times students experience hard time to ‘digest’ the subject, and at the same time, to put it into practice. Value construction through the subject is failed due to the presence of other dominant values. Here the unintended hidden curriculum happens, the ‘outlier’ of formal curriculum, because there is no such strong main value. The word ‘value’ itself is missing.  Most specially in today’s creation of virtual world, students may have conflict with new values as product of intensive ‘unhealthy engagement’ with social media. Looking at the ‘undeniable existence’ of social media, it is very relevant to put social media awareness as part of value education which is, ideally, embedded in each subject.

In many cases, construction of new ‘unexpected and unintended’ values happens in the family where the parents’ role model is ‘sterile’ and can not be well-communicated. The school can institutionalize Parents Support Group (PSG). In our school we have this PSG and together with the parents we develop focus group discussion. This platform is very helpful to identify creation of new values within the trend of ‘social media connectivity’ and  to give recommendation for further research opportunity. Other productive aspect of focus group discussion is to develop database for all values classified under unintended hidden curriculum. This database can be used for curriculum workshop.(c) ignherisw2017






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