This project summary, Student views of curriculum (3 pages), provides an overview of the findings from a Curriculum Transformation Programme research project that considered student views of the curriculum. The findings indicate that for many students the curriculum is impersonal; something which is 'done' to them. Students’ emphasis on content and structure echo staff definitions of curriculum, and there were vast differences in the level of agency students experienced in relation to the curriculum.

In this ENGAGE event video - How do students define and relate to the curriculum? Findings from a recent study at The University of Edinburgh (42 mins) - students and staff discuss:

• What do students understand the term 'curriculum' to mean?
• What role do they consider themselves to have in relation to the curriculum?
• What role would they like to have?

The term ‘hidden curriculum’ is, put simply, all those things that we teach that aren’t written down explicitly in course and programme documents. It refers to certain implicit ‘rules of the game’ that higher education students are presumed to have, but are not part of the written curriculum, such as morals, norms, gender roles, and power hierarchies. Below are a few resources to help you understand the hidden curriculum in relation to your teaching:

• In this Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education resource, Unpacking your Hidden Curriculum: A Guide for Educators (3 pages), the authors highlight some of these unspoken rules and processes that contribute to the hidden curriculum in an attempt to encourage educators to think about what this means, and to help us consider how to overcome these invisible barriers which students need to navigate.

• Dr Neil Speirs, a Widening Participation manager, practitioner and researcher at The University of Edinburgh, introduces the concept of the hidden curriculum, how we may be complicit in it, and what we can do about it in a Teaching Matters Podcast episode: The Hidden Curriculum and its impact on working-class students (28 minutes), in a blog post: Let’s talk about the hidden curriculum and classism on campus, and in a video presentation: IAD Hangout: Reflections on the Hidden Curriculum and its Impact on Working Class Students.

• ‘Critical approaches to the hidden curriculum with hybrid learning in Music’: This presentation by Eli Appleby-Donald and Dr Nikki Moran from The University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference 2020, highlights how to critically think about the hidden curriculum in course design.