Rethinking “Curriculum”: What We Teach Is Not Enough

For any of us who write, curate, or teach curriculum, it’s good to remember that what we usually call “curriculum” is just one of (at least) four kinds of curricula that shape all of us.

One of the best seminary textbooks I read was Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church. The book is so rich that even its footnotes are thought-provoking.

In one footnote, authors Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang talk about three kinds of curriculum:

1. explicit curriculum: this includes documentation around vision, the scope and sequence of teaching curriculum, and what we hope students will be, know, feel, and do.
2. implicit curriculum: I think of this as not just what’s formally “taught” but what’s “caught.” It’s the ethos or environment that a person feels as they encounter the explicit curriculum. Implicit curriculum includes the actions (culture) that “speak louder than words.”
3. null curriculum: this is what we don’t teach. Better, it’s: “what a teaching institution chooses not to teach at all” (my emphasis). If what we teach is a choice, so is what we don’t teach. Parrett and Kang quote Elliot W. Eisner: “Ignorance is not simply a neutral void; it has important effects on the kinds of options one is able to consider, the alternatives that one can examine, and the perspectives from which one can view a situation or problems.”

To consider one example of null curriculum: trauma responses may not make sense to someone who is not trauma-informed, so if something like “trauma and its effects” or “where Jesus is present in trauma” are not in a church’s explicit curriculum, they are now null curriculum, and a student may not have robust categories and language to process difficult events.

I’d add a #4 to the above three kinds of curriculum.

The church doesn’t do spiritual formation in a vacuum. So we also want to ask: what is the external curriculum all our people are already being formed by, in their other 160+ hours/week?

There is family, greater society, school, friends, advertising, media, etc. But this “curriculum” is only “external” from the vantage point of the church. These character-shaping forces move from external to internal for all of us. We have an internalized curriculum that has formed and is forming us. And we each bring our formed self to any event, group, gathering, or relationship where explicit curriculum is present. There are no blank slates.

As a full-time vocational minister for 20+ years, knee-deep in the life of a church or Christian community for 40+ hours a week, I’ve tended to focus on #1 and #2—explicit and implicit curriculum.

That’s necessary, but I’m realizing it’s not enough. I want to pay more attention to null curriculum and external curriculum.

Even in strategic planning and documenting discipleship pathways, how can we take into account all four of these kinds of curricula?

As we go about learning and growing in the faith, we can ask: what areas have we missed, glossed over, or refused to engage in (null curriculum)? Are there things we Christians need to un-learn, or re-learn? What other lived contexts do we need to take more seriously as we do spiritual formation (external curriculum)?

And—most important—how does the good news of Jesus speak into all of the contexts that shape us?

Attending to more than just explicit and implicit curriculum requires more creative thinking and deeper work, but the result—more fully formed disciples of Jesus— is worth it.