I was interested in the hidden curriculum that is in our school systems. In researching this topic, I came across Rhianna Thomas’s article. It is titled Identifying your skin is too dark as a put-down: Enacting whiteness as hidden curriculum through a bullying prevention programme. Rhianna speaks about a time when she experienced bullying because of race in her classroom. She was able to deal with the situation because her school did have a guild line that any sort of put-down if a form of bullying. So, she talked to the children and the situation was dealt with. However, when looking more into the situation she realized that there had to be a reason that her students would bully another student based on race. Thomas explains that bullying is “the imbalance of power between the perpetrator and the victim” (page. 7). With this, she realized that race has been in our society a hierarchy system that ended with white people being at the top. So, this imbalance of power that her students were seeing is being of constructs that they see in society and potentially in the school. Because Thomas was able to realize that there was a hidden racial construct evident in her classroom, she then started to work to combat this.

In Thomas’s attempt to prevent racial bullying from happening again she did research on different events that this happened in. “In order to explore how bullying prevention curricula are enacted in the school context within the larger racialized society, [she] offer[ed] an analysis of a personal critical incident [she] experienced early in [her] teaching career” (page. 7). In this research she realized “how messages of white supremacy are often delivered quietly rather than overtly in the day-to-day business of whiteness” (page. 10). She started to pick out little evidence of racism in her classroom and removed them. One example that she gave was that all the princesses in the books that were on her shelf were white with blond hair and blue eyes. With this information, Thomas was/is able to slowly reverse the hidden curriculum of white supremacy that is present in her classroom.

In doing prep research for our critical summary paper I found an interest in the hidden curriculum. When initially reflected on the hidden curriculum after one of our lectures I had thought that it was only positive hidden curriculums. For example, punctuality, kindness, listening when someone else if talking, etc. After reading this article I realized that there are so many more hidden curriculums that often will never be noticed. If it was not for this incident Rhianna Thomas may have not realized that the books that she had on her shelves were leading the students to think that straight blond hair is good. Most people would have never considered her books racist, however, they were teaching a hidden curriculum that will now be stripped away because Thomas was able to see past the hidden curriculum. I hope that I am also able to see past the surface level responses of my students and search to find and uproot any negative hidden curriculum that is in my class in the future.