Response to Eisner

Eisner’s proposed division of a school’s curriculum into three conceptual parts will be helpful for me going forward. The contrast between the explicit curriculum (what is being directly taught), the implicit curriculum (what is being taught about proper comportment indirectly through social and disciplinary forces), and the null curriculum (what is not being currently taught but could be). I’m curious about the process by which decisions are made about what belongs in the explicit curriculum and the null curriculum. Does Eisner go too far in saying that the decisions are mostly the product of status quo bias and “largely unintentional”? Or are current curriculum designers making pragmatic decisions about what are more “useful” subjects, or what stakeholders they are accountable to believe to be useful? Eisner argues convincingly that subjects in the null curriculum have much to offer students and that they can help them navigate the increasing complex and often overwhelming modern world. The challenge is of course convincing people that this is the case, and that resource- and time-constrained schools should make room for material from the null curriculum. I am reminded of the concept of opportunity cost in economics, which states that the cost of a decision isn’t just the direct costs required to enact the decision, but also the benefits of forgone decisions. The opportunity costs of swapping out one class for another, or emphasizing one and deemphasizing another, are significant, making decisions that much more challenging and the tradeoffs that much more sizeable. Do we think it is likely that stakeholders will allow, for example, reading and English to cede bandwidth to a lesser-known subject like anthropology? I think many parents would also object to this, and not necessarily because of traditionalism. Perhaps a solution is to identify the key skills that subjects in the null curriculum offer and incorporate them elsewhere in the current explicit curriculum. For example, it seems like media literacy could be taught in another course. 

I am still getting familiar with the BC Provincial Curriculum, but it does seem like there are to efforts to teach material that may have been previously consigned to the null curriculum. My understanding is that Indigenous studies plays a much more prominent role, not only as a subject, but also as a tool for gaining a deeper understanding for or appreciation of what may have been previously considered unrelated subjects. Though this example does illustrate that moving things from the null curriculum to the explicit can be politically challenging and take time.