Neil M Speirs*

Classism on Campus

‘You know Neil, classism is all over campus – but nobody wants to talk about it’.  That’s what one of our widening participation students told me the other week – she wasn’t the first to say that to me either.  I have 20 years’ worth of stories that testify to this, along with many other stories regarding the working class student experience.  The vast majority of which are underlined by Diane Reay (2016, p70), when she writes that working class students can complete their undergraduate studies ‘with a strong sense of being bruised and battered by the whole experience’.

This classism, as Lott (2002) reports, results in students being excluded, devalued, discounted and separated.  Which is highlighted by Reay (2017, p125) when she notes that ‘the majority of working-class students were trapped in the present as ‘onlookers’ on student life’.  If we find that universities ‘take classism seriously, then this emphasis can translate into students also taking classism seriously and subsequently entering their adult years with the value that classism should not be practiced or tolerated’ (Langhout et al, 2007).  However, as the authors (ibid) rightly note, ‘if students are experiencing classism in college, then their psychosocial and academic outcomes may be compromised’.  We might consider classism on campus then as an act against working class students that results in poor academic outcomes and compromised psychosocial outcomes.  Perhaps on campus we need to be ‘denouncing how we are living and announcing how we could live’ as Paolo Freire wrote (2004, p105).  Part of this surely involves a critical pedagogy, because as Giroux (2013) states, critical pedagogy addresses ‘the relationship between how we learn and how we act as individual and social agents; that is, it is concerned with teaching students how not only to think but to come to grips with a sense of individual and social responsibility’.

Langhout et al (2007) identify the ‘two potential domains of classism as institutional classism and interpersonal classism’.  Institutionally we can think of the organizational structures, policies, curriculum and procedures that facilitate classism.  While at the interpersonal level, I am reminded of the many stories of students humiliated in tutorials and laughed at, dismissed in social settings because of their accent, and patronised as to how well they have done to get to university given where they come from.  This happens year on year, fellow students (and staff) excluding, devaluing, discounting and separating working class students from the university community.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected in 1938; ‘That was always my experience – a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton’ (Minter, 1996, p125).

The Hidden Curriculum

One key way that the attitudes and behaviours that result in classism are transmitted on campus is through the hidden curriculum (Speirs, 2020).  We need to think about what the hidden curriculum might be and then act critically to exclude it.  The hidden curriculum can be thought of as being the implicit

• ways of thinking about the world

• set of values and understandings

• ideas and perspectives

that are embedded in the objects, practices, transmission and social structures of formal education.  The hidden curriculum – which is facilitated by teachers in all educational sectors – delivers social class oriented sub-texts and meanings.  The sub-texts and meanings of the dominant classes and cultures are then legitimised at the expense of other understandings and perspectives.  This in turn facilitates the construction of knowledge and behaviour – leading to compliance with dominant ideologies.  As a result, the hidden curriculum has an alignment process ‘that requires submitting to a distinct class based consciousness in order to acquire necessary symbolic capital…….elements of the hidden curriculum ultimately serve not only in the reproduction of both hierarchy and marginalisation, but alienation as well’ (Gair et al, p35-36).

We can think of the hidden curriculum as being delivered by a particular dominant habitus.  In turn, the hidden curriculum then transmits that particular dominant habitus. Costa et al (2015, p7) note that habitus ‘encapsulates social action through dispositions and can be broadly explained as the evolving process through which individuals act, think, perceive and approach the world and their role in it’.  The authors go on to remind us that habitus signifies a way of being. Moreover, ‘as assimilated past without a clear consciousness, habitus is an internal archive of personal experiences rooted in the distinct aspects of individuals’ social journeys’ (ibid).  Perhaps it’s best to let Bourdieu (2000, p138) summarise; ‘individuals’ dispositions are a reflection of their lived trajectories and justify their approaches to practice’.  Here, Bourdieu shows us the link between dispositions and the justification of practice.  We can reflect on the practice of the dominant habitus and its expression through the hidden curriculum – along with its own internal justification for this. If we think of habitus as comprising a system of;

• dispositions which generate perceptions

• appreciations

• understandings

• opinions

• practices

then we might start to see a little more clearly how it is expressed through the hidden curriculum. As has been illustrated, this practice results in dominant understandings, opinions and appreciations excluding other experiences, opinions and understandings.  We can see how, because of this, working class students are excluded, devalued, discounted and separated.

How can I act critically?

How, then, can we act critically to exclude the hidden curriculum?  Firstly we might reflect on Peter Roberts (2013, p4) writing about how ‘in the latter part of his career, Freire came to believe that education is politics’.  Roberts (ibid) outlines some key areas where we can observe and experience education as politics;

‘The political nature of education is evident in the views both teachers and students bring with them to a learning situation, in the way teaching and learning occur, in the forms of assessment and evaluation conducted, in the funding arrangements for an educational process, in the physical layout of a teaching and learning environment, in what appears and does not appear in the curriculum, in the justifications provided for education, in the reading and writing completed or recommended, in the value (or lack of it) placed on credentials and qualifications, in the language of instruction, and in the government policies that frame the learning process, among other ways’. 

Roberts (2013, p77) goes on to assert that – from a Freirean point of view – as education is politics, we therefore need to decide on which kind of politics that we wish to encourage in the classroom. Surely, it isn’t one that excludes, devalues, discounts and separates.

It is difficult to acknowledge, but we are all complicit in the transmission of the doxic messages of the hidden curriculum.  The hidden curriculum, in plain sight on our university campuses, does not help to develop a culture of understanding, compassion and desire to enable not just equity of access but equity of experience and participation for all our students.  One academic noted to Gair et al (2001, p24) that ‘part of surviving an institution and making it in a profession is learning to ignore, or to become part of it, and so that it also all of a sudden dissolves, it becomes invisible. So then, we also become part of the institution’.  The danger is that we ultimately see the neoliberal careerist take over campus life. Where the focus is on the gain of symbolic and economic capital and not becoming the public intellectual that can be part of the struggle to expose and remove the hidden curriculum.  We can choose not to allow the hidden curriculum to operate in plain sight.  We can choose to believe in the emancipatory nature of education and not to facilitate its role in social and cultural reproduction.  We can choose to reach out in solidarity with our working class students in a generous and compassionate manner.

In doing so, we may be faced with anxiety and uncertainly, perhaps a sense that it’s just not possible.  There are some solutions though, according to one of the interviewees that spoke with Gair et al (2001, p36), ‘you need to be conscious when you are challenging the system so that you’re not doing it kind of naively. Through a lot of negotiations and struggles, people like myself have carved out spaces to do a different kind of work…. We carve out spaces, and the question then is how you actually operate in those spaces’.  Once we carve out these spaces, the first thing we can do is to consider conscientisation.  This is the deeply powerful process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action.  Freire (1974) writes that conscientisation ‘is the most critical approach to reality, stripping it down so as to get to know the myths that deceive and perpetuate the dominating structure’.  As we develop a deeper understanding of conscientisation, we begin to see how ‘others live through us.  We are not isolated, autonomous selves; rather, we are always connected’ (Roberts, 2013, p41).  The second thing we can do is to acknowledge that ‘the most effective approaches, in the long term, are the quiet, unnoticed forms of gentle intellectual ‘subversion’ practiced by educationalists and others as they go about their daily work’.  As we begin to see the value and legitimacy in the small and generous acts carried out by university staff and students each day, we are awakened to the solidarity on campus that really does connect us.  From here we can begin the process of re-humanising our pedagogy and curriculum.

References

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian meditations. Stanford University Press.

Costa, C., & Murphy, M. (Eds.). (2015). Bourdieu, habitus and social research: The art of application. Springer.

Freire, P. (1974). Conscientisation. CrossCurrents, 24(1), 23-31.

Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Routledge.

Gair, M., & Mullins, G. (2001). Hiding in plain sight. In E. Margolis (Ed.), The hidden curriculum in higher education (pp. 21–42). Routledge.

Giroux, H. (2013, January). A critical interview with Henry Giroux. Global Education Magazine. http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/critical-interview-henry-giroux/

Langhout, R. D., Rosselli, F., & Feinstein, J. (2007). Assessing classism in academic settings. The Review of Higher Education, 30(2), 145-184.

Lott, B. (2002). Cognitive and behavioural distancing from the poor. American Psychologist, 57(2), 100-110.

Minter, D. (1996). A cultural history of the American novel. Cambridge University Press.

Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation – inequality, education and the working classes. Policy Press.

Reay, D. (2016). Outsiders on the inside: Working-class students at UK universities. In A. E. Stich & C. Freie (Eds.), The working classes and higher education (pp. 67-87). Routledge.

Roberts, P. (2013). Paulo Freire in the 21st century: Education, dialogue, and transformation. Paradigm.

Speirs, N. M. (2020). The hidden curriculum as doxa: Experiences of the working class. In T. Hinchcliffe (Ed.), The hidden curriculum of higher education (pp. 130-141). AdvanceHE.

*Dr Neil M Speirs is Widening Participation Manager at The University of Edinburgh 

Let’s talk about the hidden curriculum and classism on campus / Higher Education Research Group by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0