Contributed by Zoe Speidel

Over the years, the emails from my students have embodied a broader and broader range of formality. Emails with no subject lines, no salutations, and very little detail are the norm. While sometimes frustrating, I can’t fault my Gen-Z students for writing to me the way they would text a parent: this is the way they’ve grown up communicating. 

But I would also be doing them a disservice if I didn’t help them understand that this kind of email communication is not typically tolerated in the world outside of our classroom. I do this in the first week of class by providing the link to “Emailing a Professor” from Purdue, a concise overview. I have also pulled content from the lengthier, though extremely pleasing, “Writing Emails to Professors and TAs” from Boston University. These sources are great, but writing a professional email is only one of hundreds of frequently untaught skills students need to know for college and beyond. Providing this information makes what many call the “hidden curriculum” visible.

The hidden curriculum is the “unspoken or implicit academic, social, and cultural messages that are communicated to students while they are in school.” For some students, their educational and personal backgrounds set them up to learn elements of the hidden curriculum before arriving in college. Perhaps they went to a high school with college prep courses or visits from college counselors, or they have family members who attended college and can help them learn the ropes. This means that students who are more familiar with the cultural expectations, values, perspectives, and topics of college have an initial leg up on those who don’t. Those who don’t are more likely to be students of color, students from economically disadvantaged high schools, and first-generation college students.

I became aware of and interested in the characteristics of the hidden curriculum in graduate school when I took a practicum on teaching developmental writing. The writing program was phasing out the remedial writing courses some students were required to take and phasing in developmental writing courses.

“Remedial” describes courses that are pre-college level. Students who do not meet the requirements for the college-level courses (based on whatever placement methods the institution uses) must enroll in remedial courses that are often non-credit-bearing. According to the report “Remedial Education: The Cost of Catching Up”, students pay the same tuition rates for these courses, even though they don’t count toward their degrees, and the courses increase students’ time to degree completion, making it less likely students will graduate at all. Add these factors to the stigma and shame students experience upon being told they aren’t ready to enter the college they were already accepted to, and the result is decreased retention, persistence, and graduation rates for students in remedial courses. 

Obviously, this is not a good model and seriously disadvantages students who already need additional support learning “how to college.” 

According to Elder and Davila in their 2017 paper “Stretch and Studio Composition Practicum: Creating a Culture of Support and Success for Developing Writers at a Hispanic-Serving Institution from the Compositional Studies,” the purpose of the teaching practicum was to prepare instructors to support the needs of students in the developmental writing courses. They did this by preparing instructors in “the theory and pedagogy of basic writing …multilingual writers, metacognition, and reading instruction.” While not explicitly described as “hidden curriculum,” much of what we learned about the students we would be teaching indicated that many of them would need additional support navigating the cultural expectations, values, and perspectives, in addition to their academic pursuits at college.

At the time of taking this practicum, OER was not on my radar. My students purchased an expensive writing textbook that, fortunately, would last them through their required English composition courses. But the textbook did not contain any of the materials I needed to teach aspects of the hidden curriculum. I pieced it together with various websites, TED Talks, and personal anecdotes. While these sources did not require any additional purchases for my students, they were haphazard in what they covered and how, and they were slanted toward my individual understanding of what may present challenges for my students.

I eventually realized that it wasn’t enough for me to explain various parts of the hidden curriculum, such as email communication, what a syllabus is, or what office hours are. With most textbooks, instructors assign several chapters but the students have access to the entire textbook; with writing textbooks, this usually means that learners have access to grammar and style guides, even if those tools aren’t directly covered in class. So even though I only had time to highlight a few areas of the hidden curriculum, I wanted a comprehensive guide that would give my students one-stop access to a wealth of information about “how to college.”

I also learned that this kind of information isn’t only useful for students enrolled in remedial or developmental courses, who are first-generation, or who come from economically-disadvantaged high schools. This kind of information is essential for learning for the vast majority of students. Even someone like me, who grew up with a graduate-level-educated parent in a house with lots of books, did not receive the vast breadth of insider knowledge about how to be successful in college that I needed. As a result, it took me 8 years, 2 universities, and 1 community college to graduate with my bachelor’s. 

Fortunately, there now exist several OER textbooks that help make the hidden curriculum visible, including How to Learn Like a Pro, University 101: Study, Strategize and Succeed, Liberated Learners: How to Learn with Style, The Word on College Reading and Writing, and Blueprint for Success in College and Career. In my next blog post, I am going to review a few of these that I have found particularly useful for my students. 

This post is by Zoe Speidel and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.