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Giroux & Purpel, 1983; Whitty, 1985). For the purposes of this research, the hidden
curriculum focuses on curriculum content, rather than pedagogical practices, discipline,
praise, or other aspects of everyday schooling experiences. In more recent times, Zumwalt
explains this concept as “…lessons students learn that are not necessarily part of the planned
or even the enacted curriculum…The hidden curriculum involves learned outcomes that are
not openly acknowledged to the learners and sometimes not even known by the teacher”
(2007, p. 128). It is the mitigated meta-discourses present in textbooks—the unstated
content—that is a focus of the final stage analysis for this project, that become apparent
through the application of CDA.
Textbook is taken to mean “a focused educational programme in text allied to a scheme of
work” (Issitt, 2004, p. 685), and for this project, published for and used in school classrooms.
2.2 Introduction to Official Knowledge
This section addresses the topic of what constitutes the official knowledge in school
curriculum and how this official knowledge is generally determined. Within this topic, issues
of content selection in textbooks and other curriculum resources are considered as an
influencing factor in the teaching of History. It is important to recognise that there are many
contentious issues and arguments associated with ‘the school’ as an institution and that the
socially constructed economic and political values it reinforces to students is not a “neutral
enterprise” (Apple, 2004, p. 7). The concept of official knowledge theorises the way
dominant values are communicated to students as a type of non-overt way of inculcating
students to view the world in particular ways. It is argued that dominant values are those
usually viewed in society as being ‘normal’, ‘just’ or ‘right’ and broadly accepted to be
‘true’. In a sense they have been repeated so many times, they become naturalized as a way
of understanding the way the world is, becoming part of the hegemonic practice of schooling
students (see, for example, Luke’s, 1995-1996 understanding of hegemony). Hall explains
how this concept is practiced:
The social distribution of knowledge is skewed. And since the social institutions
most directly implicated in its formation and transmission—the family/school/media
triplet—are grounded in and structured by the class relations that surround them, the
distribution of the available codes with which to decode or unscramble the meaning
of events in the world, and the languages we use to construct interests, are bound to
reflect the unequal relations of power that obtain in the area of symbolic production
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