Null Curriculum

The concept of the null curriculum initiates a critical analysis of curriculum that explicitly seeks to attend to that which is absent, left out, and overlooked how curriculum is conceptualized, created, and enacted. The null, or nonexistent, curriculum, in directing focus on what is not present, brings to the field of curriculum studies an important theoretical tool for considering that which is not offered to students, and the potential educational significance and effect of such neglect. As such, the null curriculum keeps alive the classical curricular concern and question most famously expressed by Herbert Spencer in 1860—“What knowledge is of most worth?,” alternately asking what of worth has been unaddressed, left out of what constitutes knowledge, in the curriculum. Additionally, here the null curriculum raises awareness about the deliberative nature of curriculum work itself, by which selections are made and omissions committed ceaselessly based on decisions regarding what is valued, or not. In its explicit address drawing attention to the curriculum that is not, was not, but could have been, the null curriculum also implicitly offers scholars in the field an interpretive impetus for imagining possibilities for the curriculum that might be.

In his 1979 analysis of the “educational imagination” at work in designing the curricula of schooling via its program offerings, Elliot Eisner coined the term null curriculum to identify one of three forms of curriculum he posited the school “teaches” its students. Distinguishing the null from the curriculum explicitly introduced and that offered implicitly, in describing a curriculum constituting what schools do not offer to or do for students, Eisner highlights the intellectual perspectives and processes unavailable to them, and raises questions about the educational significance of what is left unattended via schooling, of what is taught by omission, in absentia. He notes how, for instance, visual and metaphorical thinking is neglected in favor of verbal and logical reasoning—also calling attention to the art implicit in curriculum work, which requires imagining what is not present as if it were, to better understand and transform what is.

A source of debate, the emergence of the null curriculum concept can be situated within a larger call for reform, begun in the 1960s, aimed at inquiring into how schools overtly, tacitly, and unintentionally fail students and systematically produce consequences of ill-effect. Postulating a formally authorized curriculum and attempting to identify other curriculum forms operative in relation to it—unsanctioned, yet influential and enduring in effect—this criticism has generated a variety of curriculum distinctions for analysis, that is, the [Page 614]unstudied, unwritten, lived, and hidden curriculum. The null curriculum, among them, has been called ambiguous and operationally indefinable, but its usefulness as an analytical and speculative device is largely acknowledged nonetheless. This has brought into view much that has been formerly ignored and generated new alternatives for curriculum thought and practice for consideration. Scholarship issuing from the null curriculum has explored broad educational exclusions with respect to social class, race, and gender, for example, as well as particular silences, such as neglecting the Holocaust in school curricula. Extending Eisner's academically oriented conception, such scholars have suggested that the null curriculum consists largely of those aspects excluded from the curriculum because of emotional content or potential conflict, reflective of differences in basic values, and beliefs about the purposes of schooling.

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