Null Curriculum
What schools choose, by omission, not to teach. The concept was introduced by Elliot W. Eisner in The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (Macmillan, 1979; second edition 1985; third edition 1994), where he argued that what is left out of a curriculum shapes learners as decisively as what is included.
Origin
In The Educational Imagination, Eisner distinguished three curricula schools teach: the explicit (officially stated), the implicit (the Hidden Curriculum of routines and norms), and the null. The null curriculum names the intellectual processes, content areas, and ways of knowing that schools fail to address. Eisner pointed to the systematic neglect of visual, metaphorical, and aesthetic forms of cognition relative to verbal and logical reasoning, and treated these absences as deliberate or structural rather than accidental.
Two Dimensions
Eisner identified two analytic dimensions of the null curriculum:
- Intellectual processes that schooling underdevelops, for example visual thinking, ethical reasoning, embodied knowing.
- Content areas absent from offerings, for example certain cultural traditions, languages, or historical perspectives.
The argument is normative as well as descriptive: omissions teach learners that omitted things do not matter. Curriculum design therefore carries responsibility for what it excludes.
Relevance to ELT
The null-curriculum lens is productive across language teaching because every coursebook and every syllabus selects aggressively from a vast linguistic and cultural field.
- Varieties of English: most global coursebooks present a narrow band of British and American standard English. Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean, and other established varieties typically appear only as listening curiosities or are absent.
- Registers and genres: informal spoken English, regional vernaculars, online writing genres, and workplace genres outside white-collar professions are routinely under-represented. The Academic Word List and The Threshold Level are useful but bound their own scope.
- Voices and authors: whose texts appear as reading material; whose accents are modelled in audio; which writers are cited by name. Gray (2010) and Kumaravadivelu (2003) document the narrow band of voices in mainstream materials.
- Topics treated as taboo: religion, politics, sexuality, conflict, and class are filtered out of large international coursebooks under publisher topic-avoidance policies (often called PARSNIP), producing a sanitised cultural picture that itself teaches.
Materials Evaluation benefits from explicit null-curriculum questions: what is not on these pages, whose perspectives are missing, which Englishes are unheard.
Distinctions
The Hidden Curriculum is what is taught implicitly through routines and representations. The null curriculum is what is not taught at all. The Enacted vs Intended Curriculum distinction is orthogonal: it tracks slippage between official plans and classroom practice, not the explicit-versus-absent axis.
References
- Eisner, E. W. (1979/1985/1994). The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. Macmillan.
- Flinders, D. J., Noddings, N., & Thornton, S. J. (1986). The null curriculum: Its theoretical basis and practical implications. Curriculum Inquiry, 16(1), 33–42.
- Gray, J. (2010). The Construction of English: Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching. Yale University Press.