Curriculum in conflict: how African American and Indigenous educational thought complicates the hidden curriculum

This article is a discussion of the hidden curriculum and the settler-colonial erasure that it propagates. There are two guiding questions that focus this work: (1) what are the assumptions that underlie the concept of the hidden curriculum and what do those assumptions obscure or erase; and (2) having raised the first question, is there a way forward for hidden curriculum analysis that can address the still valid concerns about tacit ideological messages in public schools without repeating the original constituting displacement of the hidden curriculum? I will employ a comparative analysis of select literature most commonly associated with the concept of the hidden curriculum and writings on education by Feminist, Black and Indigenous leaders and thinkers that speak to its ideas in a way that broadens and complicates its construction. I conclude this article with a discussion of the potential implications of these altered understandings for teacher and researcher practice.