Course:LFS250/Week 23

Overview

In this session, we will discuss the concepts of visible and hidden curricula and how they relate to school food systems. While the idea of a ‘visible’ curriculum may seem obvious (course learning objectives, for example), it is the idea of the hidden curriculum that is less obvious, yet still quite meaningful.

• PRESENTATION in tutorial

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Articulate and analyze the values and assumptions that commonly exist in school food systems and their impacts on individual, community, and environmental health

Key Terms + Concepts

• Hidden curricula

Required Readings + Resources

• Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2011). Why Education Researchers Should Take School Food Seriously. Educational Researcher, 40(1), 15–21.

Hidden curricula are most often undeveloped and non-defined. Bloom (1981) believed that “the hidden curriculum in an education system is made during everyday life and interactions in learning settings” (Azimpour & Khalitzade, 2015).

In schools across Canada, there is a health education curriculum, both visible and hidden. Students are taught about healthy diets and exercise in health classes and they participate in physical education classes. Then students are implicitly taught contradictory food and health related messaging when they step outside of the classroom and have access to vending machines swaddled in Pepsi or Coke logos or when there is a pizza fundraiser and the pizza is a cheesy pepperoni pizza with a pigs-in-a-blanket crust with pools of grease accumulating on the top. Or perhaps students are taught in science class about the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and then are served meat products originating from concentrated animal feeding operation-raised beef in the school cafeteria at lunch, a method of raising animals for foods that is one of largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Awareness of the contradictory practices, policies and messaging in the school environment has led to US and many Canadian provinces implementing policies that aim to address this hidden curriculum by attempting to align the food and health messaging both in and outside of classroom. One way to begin illuminating the messaging being presented about food, health, and the environment through the hidden curriculum is to start to pay attention to the food environment in the school and ask yourself “what message is this sending to students? What value system is this implicitly promoting?”. What did you notice in the schools you visited? Further, think about your experience in the K-12 system? What elements of the hidden curriculum influenced you?

In this TED talk, educator Stephen Ritz describes significant and powerful changes to his students that he has witnessed by re-thinking food-based relationships. Much of his story is about addressing the hidden curricula of school settings. Can you identify these moments of change?

In this TED talk, chef Ann Cooper, discusses the relationships between school food, health and the environment and the potential damage caused by allowing food to be ignored in a school setting.

References

• Azimpour, E., & Khalilzade, A. (2015). Hidden Curriculum. Retrieved from http://worldessaysj.com/files_site/paperlist/r_88_150412145439.pdf
• Bloom, B. S. (1981). All our children: A primer for parents and teachers. NC Cromhin, York.

Tutorial Session

In your tutorial session, two groups will be debating an issue from the week’s readings. See course assignment description for session details.

Additional Material

Although at a different scale (a city rather than a school), Pam Warhurst's TED talk touches on the same theme of making the invisible, visible, with respect to food.