| Abstract [eng] |
This study addresses one of the most relevant issues in contemporary education – the content and implementation of the hidden curriculum in the professional practices of Lithuanian teachers. Although the formal curriculum is clearly defined in educational documents, schools also function as socialization spaces where values, norms, and social expectations are transmitted to students through everyday, often unconscious pedagogical practices. In the Lithuanian educational context, there is still a lack of empirical research identifying what specific content of the hidden curriculum is conveyed to students and how these processes are realized in daily pedagogical interactions. The aim of the study is to examine the role, manifestations, and impact of the hidden curriculum in contemporary Lithuanian teachers’ professional practices. The object of the research is the value-based, social, and cultural content consciously and unconsciously transmitted by teachers, as well as the modes of its transmission. The theoretical framework is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which enables education to be analyzed as a social field structured through habitus, forms of capital, and doxa, as well as through the dynamics of power relations. The research findings reveal that the manifestations of the hidden curriculum can be systematically categorized into three models: active value transmission, reflective regulation, and situational enactment. These models demonstrate varying levels of teacher awareness and degrees of value integration, ranging from deliberate value formation to spontaneous, situation-dependent pedagogical responses. Empirical data also highlight that, in everyday classroom situations, teachers employ several key strategies for managing conflict and regulating behavior – discipline, persuasion, compromise, and ignoring. These strategies are not mechanically predefined but emerge situationally and serve as an important mechanism through which students internalize social norms, boundaries, and classroom power relations. The analysis shows that teachers’ reflection on their influence on students is multidimensional and can be categorized into conscious, fragmented, and unconscious reflection. Conscious reflection enables purposeful adjustment of pedagogical practice, fragmented reflection appears episodically, while unconscious reflection contributes to the reproduction of naturalized educational practices. Teachers transmit values related to responsibility, respect, discipline, critical thinking, social justice, and community through everyday interactions with students; however, these values are most often realized in a situational manner – in response to specific classroom situations, behavioral issues, and social conflicts. A substantial proportion of value-based and social content is transmitted based on teachers’ personal experience, habitus, and school culture rather than deliberate planning. These processes may both foster students’ social awareness and critical thinking and reproduce hierarchical relations and social inequality. In conclusion, the hidden curriculum represents a significant yet insufficiently reflected dimension of the educational process, with long-term effects on students’ social, emotional, and cultural development. These processes can be understood as the outcome of the interaction between habitus and doxa, whereby everyday pedagogical practices naturalize certain values as “self-evident,” thereby reproducing social structures at the micro level. |
