Hide and seek: Pedagogic discourse and the hidden curriculum in the secondary music classroom

Abstract

The selective recontextualisation of musical knowledge from societal practice into educational content—mediated by diverse political and pedagogical influences—is neither ideologically neutral nor epistemically determinate. Rather, the reframing of ‘horizontal’ musical intuition into ‘vertical’ musical conceptualisation within the secondary music classroom creates a ‘discursive gap’ with the potential to perpetuate a hidden curriculum of implicit and exclusionary musical values and to cultivate pupils' and teachers' experiences of vulnerability and disaffection. In this article, we use Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse to analyse the findings of a two‐year, collaborative action ethnography with one classroom music teacher and a Year 8 (aged 12–13) class of 16 pupils at one English secondary school. Focusing on the use of iterative action research cycles to introduce examples of diverse musical genres within a topic‐based unit on ‘Music Through the Ages’, we illustrate how the music teacher responded to pupils' musical vulnerabilities through facilitating opportunities for both subjective, everyday musical engagement and objective, conceptual musical engagement. We consider how the shifting locus of power and control in the classroom helped pupils navigate contrasting ways of musical meaning‐making, and how this negotiation was sometimes disrupted by the pressure of summative assessment examining western art music values and vocabularies. Although this legitimised an exclusionary hidden curriculum and negated otherwise inclusive, participatory learning, we suggest that equitable, ipsative and practical modes of assessment could be effective for reattributing value to both horizontal and vertical aspects of musical knowledge.