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 ...