The Hidden Curriculum of Media Education

All educational programs have a formal and a hidden curriculum (Mertala, 2020). The formal curriculum is the texts and materials students learn and work on; the hidden curriculum is made of underlying beliefs and views that manage to be transmitted to the students unconsciously and without being questioned (Mertala, 2020). This project investigates whether and how the hidden curriculum of the communication programs of Roskilde University manages to reinforce and reproduce sustainable or unsustainable ideas about media. It does so by conducting an ecolinguistic analysis (Stibbe, 2015) of the program description, study regulations and course descriptions of the communication programs, as well as of interviews with professors teaching and involved in the shaping of the communication programs offered in English by Roskilde University both at the bachelor and master level, according to an ecological philosophy rooted in deep ecology.