Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

798 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Eurocentric or predominately white privilege continues to dominate the vastly diverse student
terrain. Educators and students don’t enter the classroom environment free of preexisting frames of
reference, biases, and prejudices. In actuality, each person contributes to the learning environment
either negatively or positively based upon individually adopted ideologies that regulate thinking,
communication, social interaction, and behavior that tend to follow along the lines of some
embedded or adopted belief system. Significantly language and communicative styles reflect
those interior or personal values and assumptions learned during early childhood development and
are engrained over the years unless otherwise challenged by social consciousness or educational
awareness.
Consequently, the classroom dynamic becomes filled with a diversity of Selves, thoughts,
words, modes of being, and lived experiences. Such a potentially volatile climate requires that
educators have interpersonal communication competency to negotiate through a wide range of
issues; and possess the capacity to respond to classroom interactions and student interactions
with an emotional intelligence and maturity involving the human spirit of compassion, care, and
tolerance for difference.
As educators, we cannot simply declare an awareness of diversity among our students, without
applying communicative action supportive of such a claim. A reform of thinking and practice
must occur, beginning with how educators are trained, how they project their identities; and how
they allow a diverse population of students to project their identities.
The Hidden Curriculum in Education and Society
Supporting the existence of the politics, power, and hierarchy of language within education is
what is often referred to as the hidden curriculum in education. This undercurrent of dominant
power and ideologies is found, if not in all, at least most, educational institutions wherein the
beliefs and values of a dominant group are broadcasted or transmitted to students through specific
administrative missions and regulations, mandated curriculums and approved curricula.
This is the case, whether the classroom is single-sex or coeducational, the hidden curriculum
is grounded in cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony impacts and shapes beliefs that influences
our identity, sense of self, and place within the social hierarchy. Educators must be trained to
be aware and understand its power to construct a particular and intended worldview that may
advantage some students, while disadvantaging others. What makes cultural hegemony so potent
in its influence is that over time, the messages broadcasted eventually are perceived as natural
and normal—worthy of our teaching and support.
Awareness of the hidden curriculum should serve to remind us that education cannot be imposed
upon students through mechanized, rote processes without their active participation and voice.
The hidden curriculum in education suppresses the questioning of the role of education as a moral
agent dictating beliefs, values, and ideologies as well as constructing social identifies. Still further,
intelligence is ruled, controlled, and constructed according to manufactured IQ tests and scoring
that reduce student ability to a number, while labeling them as being intellectually superior or
deficient without giving consideration to the potentially many intelligences that students possess
that cannot be empirically measured.
Finally, as educators we must become skilled in recognizing how we have been shaped and
influenced by a hidden curriculum in education and society that is grounded in social class,
patriarchal or male-privileged hierarchy rooted in cultural hegemony. Even our ways of knowing,
believing, learning and living are replete with the residue of the hidden curriculum in education.
Considerable attention and effort is given through education in maintaining the status quo that
may mask oppressive power and inequality. Healthy and competent communication begins to
repair the breech of disconnection addressed throughout this chapter.