Teaching Between the Lines

How Youth Development Organizations Reveal the Hidden Curriculum

Andrew Maguire

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781636763804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

Buried beneath the formal classes and assignments in college lies a hidden curriculum, a series of unstated but powerful norms, expectations and language of how to operate at universities. Students that don't learn about these academic and social expectations before college face unanticipated barriers. In Teaching Between the Lines, Andrew Maguire shows how youth development organizations (YDOs) prepare students for these unexpected obstacles and support them in dismantling the hidden curriculum's unfair influence.

Teaching Between the Lines tells the stories of YDOs across the country and the predominantly low-income students and students of color they support. Readers travel from the weekend classrooms of enrichment programs in Chicago and New York, where students see college academic norms modeled, to family dinners and college admissions workshops in San Diego and Boston. By sharing the perspectives of YDOs and their students, Maguire hopes to shine a light on these programs' transformative impacts on young people and the challenging choices YDOs face as they support students through a broken education system.

Part 1

Just as students arriving at college need an orientation to the many components of college life, I believe readers need an orientation to the hidden curriculum and the work of youth development organizations. The next two chapters offer a foundation for all readers to build upon throughout the rest of the book. I’ll detail the power of cultural capital and how it influences the hidden curriculum and use language as an example to understand how these dynamics are at play. I’ll also provide an overview of the youth development field and offer some helpful categories to differentiate across different YDO approaches. Much like a college orientation, these chapters will only the scratch the surface, but I hope they’ll get us all headed in the right direction and ready to learn together.

Chapter 1:

In Search of a College Manual

On the first day of class, your professor hands out the syllabus. She walks through the details— the schedule of classes, topics, readings, and assignments. But after just five minutes breezing through the syllabus, she dives right into her first lecture. You look around, but most others seem calm. “Is my copy missing pages of the syllabus?” you think; you’re looking for not just what you’ll do in class, but how you should go about doing it. As you work through your first week of classes at your new college, you realize the professor’s syllabus offers more explicit guidance than you might find elsewhere. From dorms and dining halls to student club meetings, you wonder how so many of your classmates appear comfortable, as if being a college student runs in their blood.

For many underrepresented students, college orientation is disorienting. While their peers who attended prestigious high schools can more comfortably engage in their college environment, many students will be unfamiliar with college cultures. Feeling afloat and intimidated, these same students will yearn for clearer guidance. But as sociologist Dr. Anthony Jack puts it, “No manual of ‘do’s and dont’s’ or ‘when’s and how’s’ circulates during freshman orientation at elite colleges.”

These do’s and dont’s, when’s and how’s make up much of the hidden curriculum. But why is this curriculum visible for some and hidden for others? Much of it comes down to cultural capital. Cultural capital is “the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that a person can tap into to demonstrate one’s cultural competence and social status.” (Cole, 2019) Interwoven with our wealth (economic capital) and relationships (social capital), our cultural capital proves powerful, particularly in institutions built on it. (Bourdieu, 1975) Universities exemplify this, as they are built around a very narrow profile of cultural capital. Cultural capital manifests in several ways, which accumulate to inform how students experience college cultures.

Cultural Capital You Can See (& Eat)

Our first impressions provide a surprising amount of information about a person’s social capital; physical belongings are a clear indication of cultural capital in a material state. From the books you read to the car you drive, your stuff is often reflective of your economic status and the cultural capital you carry. Students at elite universities make this distinction powerfully clear. The playground of wealthy offspring, elite colleges can be startling examples of the trappings of wealth.

Those sensations of intimidating wealth showed up in my college experience, but I had at least been mildly conditioned to wealth after a few years of high school in the wealthy suburb of Newton, MA. I befriended kids with multi-story homes boasting million-dollar price tags. (Every year, the local newspaper publishes the home values of every single home in town, allowing you to compare price points of all of your classmates’ homes. It remains the most apt representation of Newton’s cutthroat status war). Perhaps true of most high schoolers, I was finely attuned to material status symbols. In a sea of UGG Boots, North Face jackets, and Starbucks lattes in hand, I felt out of place in my TJ Maxx sale rack coat. I remember the thrill of receiving a hand-me-down sleek black Lacoste polo, which would normally retail at over $100. I felt the power of wearing such a status symbol, even if it was missing a button.

Clothing proves a powerful chasm between university students of different socio-economic backgrounds. Numerous students featured in Dr. Jack’s book The Privileged Poor reference the proliferation of Canada Goose jackets on campus. The next iteration of what in my college days was the esteemed North Face jacket, the Canada Goose jacket is an overt signal of one’s wealth. Their thousand-dollar price tags may as well replace the logo. The effects of their ubiquity are immediate. One student I spoke with, Andrew, a first generation, low-income student at the University of Pennsylvania coyly wondered, “Do I really belong in this sea of geese?” Though he was being tongue-in-cheek, it does reflect the reality that cultural capital alignment influences belonging on college campuses.

When peers with different cultural capital mix, their mismatched norms and expectations breed conflict. I distinctly remember one meal with high school buddies. I strategically scoured The Cheesecake Factory’s (notoriously dense) menu to find something under ten dollars, while my wealthier friends ordered themselves a salad, entrée, and, of course, some cheesecake for dessert. When the time arrived to pay, I gave my ten dollars and a few extra bucks for tip and tax, much to the chagrin of my friends. “Let’s just split the bill, Andrew,” they retorted, scoffing that I’d want to make the payment calculations more complicated by paying specifically by our orders. This continued to be a point of contention for years, with my wealthier friends not understanding how much cost-consciousness dictated my behaviors and decisions. With more financial stability today, I can appreciate the sentiment, the generosity, and trust you signal by agreeing to pay more than your due with the faith others will return the favor in the future. But as a cash-strapped teenager, I felt frustrated by my friends’ blindness to my very real constraints.

These memories all rushed back to me as I read Dr. Jack’s profile of William, a white student who attended public school before attending an elite university. In Dr. Jack’s book, William is considered “Doubly Disadvantaged,” a student from a low-income community with a school that didn’t model a collegiate culture. This contrasts with the “Privileged Poor,” those low-income students who were able to attend elite high schools that modeled and discussed college norms.

Food frequently made William feel marginalized at his university. He explains that for his wealthier peers, eating out was a weekly or even daily experience. “They say, ‘I hate going to the cafeteria for lunch. I went to town and got a lobster; cannot believe it’s only $30. Home it was like $80 to get lobsters. It’s so cheap here.’” You can feel his eyes roll as he says this. I know mine did. He quickly notes, “I cannot eat anywhere else because my meal plan is paid for and that is amazing. To not eat basically free food is ridiculous sounding to me. All you have to do is walk there. Why would I pay for food?” (pg 46)

William is confronting the very different values and norms that he and his peers carry. While his peers place value in the luxury of lobster dinners, he values resourcefulness. Having to confront these misaligned values, and then having to explain your perceived divergence from the “norm” proves an unexpected element of college. In other words, it is a powerful part of the hidden curriculum.

Prevailing Norms

While the cultural capital that’s visible to students can feel daunting, cultural capital also manifests in subtler, normative ways, which can prove much more challenging. This type of cultural capital can range from the manners we learn and the values we live by to the norms we adhere to. This cultural capital is taught and reinforced through socialization and education. We pick up on what’s seen as having cultural value throughout our lives.

Academic and social norms on college campuses narrowly define what it means to be a successful student. As Dr. Jack describes in his book, “Those students who are not familiar with the unwritten rules are unaware of what they are being asked to do—unaware that a crucial part of college is more than mastering the material that they encounter in the classroom...some students discover, to their great consternation, that they are also responsible for deciphering a hidden curriculum that tests not just their intellectual chops but their ability to navigate the social world of an elite academic institution, where the rewards of such mastery are often larger and more durable than those that come from acing an exam.” (pg 86)

For instance, university faculty largely expect that students will approach their academic career proactively. This doesn’t mean that students must doggedly perform the best in their academic outputs, though that’s of course welcome. What faculty expect is that students will proactively seek them out as individuals, mentors, and supporters.

The expectations around being proactive closely track two other influential norms: building relationships and asking for help. Faculty and other academic leaders want to position themselves as resources. Faculty make themselves available for counseling and individualized support during office hours (more on that confusing concept in Chapter 5). They readily offer career advice to students who want to pursue a similar path. And importantly, faculty want to connect students with academic resources when they are struggling with course content.

All of these beneficial resources and relationships depend on a student understanding that they are not only allowed, but encouraged to seek out that kind of support. As Dr. Jack describes in his book, and I heard affirmed in my interviews with first-generation students, this isn’t obvious or ever explained. Those students who understand these concepts have seen them modeled in their high schools, which are intentionally trying to mimic college norms, or by their families, who have shared their own experiences in college.

I’m particularly interested in these dynamics because I still struggle to see through them. As an undergrad who had depended so heavily on academic performance to get ahead, I felt allergic to the idea that relationship-building could prove just as powerful. And despite coming to realize so many of these dynamics, I still found myself falling into the same habits when I returned to graduate school a few years later.

The “Right” Way to Speak

While the norms above inform how many students and faculty behave in school, there is another powerful way of signaling one’s cultural capital alignment: language. Language is deeply linked to one’s identity, from the smallest dialectal differences to speaking completely different languages than the one dominating the spaces you occupy. The way language is taught, judged, and reinforced has enormous ramifications on educational opportunity and equity.

In American classrooms, students are taught to learn and use “standard” English, one which is grounded in white speech patterns and no dialects. As the norm established by educational institutions and workplaces, the dominant “standard” English strain implies any variations are non-standard, and therefore wrong. Sociolinguist Dr. Walt Wolfram states it simply: “If people belong to a socially oppressed group, they can count on having their language stigmatized; if they belong to a prestigious group, their language will carry prestige value.” (2000)

Educators have been grappling with this dynamic for decades, through their students’ biases and their own. “People’s intelligence, capability and character are often judged on the basis of a sentence, a few phrases or even a single word.” Wolfram explains, “Studies show that children as young as three to five years of age show strong preferences—and prejudices—based on dialect variations among speakers. Teachers sometimes classify students’ speech as ‘deficient’ when it is simply different from the testing norm.” (2000) The way students understand the value and appropriateness of their native dialect or language has enormous consequences on their sense of self and educational engagements. Teachers assign and signal those values.

With this in mind, some educators, including Wolfram, have worked to make classrooms more welcoming to linguistic diversity. The most notable flashpoint of this work arrived in Oakland public schools in 1989 when some teachers sought to affirm Black students speaking African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the classroom. Some teachers in Oakland decided to work against what Wolfram described to me as a common misconception that AAVE is “basically a collection of errors.” To counter this, these teachers want to acknowledge the grammatical rules AAVE followed, teaching students how to harness the power of their dialect in parallel with learning standard English. The so-called “Ebonics controversy” became national news, a warped story that suggested these teachers were teaching students how to speak AAVE. Although the Oakland school district relented and removed that portion of the curriculum, the controversy opened the door for continued educational action around linguistic diversity. (You’re Wrong About, 2019)

Wolfram exemplifies these efforts. For one, he and his colleagues designed a linguistic diversity series that is now embedded in statewide middle school history lessons across North Carolina. The state boasts some of the highest linguistic diversity nationwide, so there are many audiences the lessons resonate with. Through Wolfram’s lessons, students learn about the structures and patterns of different dialects and reflect on their own beliefs and biases about language; students, especially students with minority dialects, respond positively to these classes. As Wolfram writes, “Students noted that ‘dialects aren’t sloppy versions of Standard English’... They came to understand ‘there are tons of stereotypes, which are almost always wrong’ and that ‘dialects represent people’s culture and past.’” Teachers, too, see a difference. Wolfram shared a testimonial from one teacher, who noted that “the examination of dialect differences ‘has proven to be empowering for my minority students. For many of them, this is the first time they have been told in a school setting that their dialect is valid and not broken.’” (2013)

Language variation is an important part of inclusivity because it is a subtle but powerful dynamic in the classroom. The ways that teachers and students from majority identities might discriminate, intentionally or not, against minority dialectical students cannot be ignored. And yet it often is buried beneath the surface as part of the hidden curriculum.

Code-Switching as Hidden Curriculum Response

Even in progressive classrooms with openness for linguistic diversity, there is still an assumption that young people will be better equipped to navigate through elite universities and prestigious future careers if they ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Annex: YDOs At-A-Glance
• Bibliography