The hidden curriculum has been theorized and researched as imposing messaging that students learn but are not explicitly taught. However, few studies considered the hidden curriculum as an integrated and embodied function of students' lived experiences, or students' role in their encounters with the hidden curriculum. This study investigated how undergraduate business students engaged with hidden curricula as an emergent, embodied, and relational (i.e., affective) phenomena. Employing affect theory and a qualitative methodology, I examined how students engaged with a hidden curriculum that emerged in a particular assemblage, i.e., the spaces, people, objects, and temporality that students encountered during their business education. I found that students responded to, mediated, and co-created the hidden curriculum with which they engaged in varying forms. Findings suggest that the hidden curriculum is not a hegemonic force to which students uniformly respond, but a mutual encounter between heterogeneous students and their dynamic assemblage.
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