EMERGING BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE: ENGAGING THE AFFECTIVE HIDDEN CURRICULUM IN UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS EDUCATION By Paul E. Bylsma A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education – Doctor of Philosophy 2023 ABSTRACT 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. Copyright by PAUL E. BYLSMA 2023 This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, John and Henriette Bylsma, and Lawrence and Donna Vander Klipp. You never claimed to be my teacher, but you taught me more than any book. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation process has taught me an incredible amount. But perhaps the most important lesson I have learned, and the most salient for an “Acknowledgments” section, is that learning is not something I do alone. Learning is a communal act. At its best, learning is a relationship. I am proud to acknowledge in this section at least some of those with whom my learning through this process has indeed emerged as a relationship. First, I acknowledge the community at Michigan State and in the College of Education specifically for offering incredible support and friendship over the past five years. Together our community has undergone devastating trauma in the form of senseless gun violence and major disease, we have seen now four people occupy the President’s office, and there is still a sense that things are not OK. Even so, we have been able to celebrate each other’s accomplishments and push each other closer to our ultimate goals. To the HALE “co-heart,” I have valued our friendships so much. Specifically, I am so grateful to have grown so close to Mia Murphy and Andrew Haggerty and to have shared elements of our lives together that we never saw coming. Also, to the 995 class, we struggled and grew together in that intimate setting cultivated under Roger’s caring leadership. Those times are precious to me. While EAD has always been my home, in person and on paper, the TE community also welcomed me with open arms when I needed it the most. Dr. Kyle Greenwalt, thank you for your trust and the opportunities you afforded me. The two years spent working with you and our stunning Year 9 cohort was transformative for me. I am so grateful for your mentorship. Finally, I want to acknowledge, thank, and embrace my dissertation committee and specifically my advisor, Dr. Riyad Shahjahan. Dr. Dirkx, you came out of retirement (like Brett Favre, but in a good way) to continue to inspire me to be a better, more thoughtful, more analytic teacher: for that I am v grateful. Dr. G., your enthusiasm, passion, and high expectations have not only shaped my work but have shaped me as an academic: thank you! Dr. Tetreault, you introduced me to a brand-new field, you challenged the paradigms I took for granted, and you showed special care to ensure I succeeded in class and in this project: you set an example I seek to follow. Finally, Dr. S., you and I have developed a relationship that transcends advisor/advisee, chair/candidate, and teacher/student over the past five years. You have impacted me in nearly every way: how I read, how I write, how I think, how I teach, how I husband, how I father, how I rest, how I plan…the list can go on. I know you understand when I say that words fail to describe my gratitude to and for you, so I pass back to you the reference to Jürgen Klopp that you made to me two years ago. I also want to thank my professional community in Educational Leadership and Counseling at Grand Valley for their support and encouragement, especially over the past year. To my colleagues and students, know that I mean it when I say I enjoy learning with and from you: you have taught me a great deal and I am hopeful that I have reciprocated. There are too many friends and family to acknowledge here, so the list must be short. First, Karyn and Leifa, your love and encouragement and empathy have been so valuable. I hold you so close and am so glad that we can share our lives together. You know what it means to be where I was, and you offered critical support to get me where I am. I cannot thank you enough. Laila, though we have only really gotten to know each other this year, I feel like I have known you forever. Your kindness, openness, encouragement, selflessness, support, and even a hug when I needed it badly have never been lost on me. I am proud to call you my friend and my excitement to continue to get to know you is unbridled! Ben, it was our conversations in your office under that ancient tree that got me started on this journey in the first place. Your expert balance of leadership, friendship, mentorship, and creativity are only some of what make you vi who you are, and I am grateful for all of it. The times we spent around a ping pong table were as important as the time we spent deep in conversation, and it takes a skillful person to make that possible. Grandpa, I do not think there has been a conversation we have had over the past few years where you have not checked in on me and my progress, asked how my studies have gone, and offered pure encouragement along the way. It means so much to me that you are so invested in my work. As I said above, I have learned more from you than any book. Mom and Dad, your support and love has been there the whole way. I think the time I fully realized it was when, after declining a full-time job that would have supported my family to take a low-paying assistantship, you both expressed your confidence that we would get through and reiterated your support. You have always been there, and I hope you know that I will always be here for you, too. Finally, Nora, Cortland, and Vera, my beloved family: you have taught me so much over the past five years. Nora, you have been our family’s rock and the consistency that we have all relied upon. The amount of time I have spent in the basement doing schoolwork, and the commensurate amount of time you have spent caring for (and carrying) our children, is unfathomable. Without needing to say a word, you have taught me trust, respect, care, confidence, patience, and certainly not least of all, love. Cortland, you were a baby when I started this and a big kid when I finished. It has been fun to be in school while you are in school! Vera, you entered the world at a troubled time, but you have been making us laugh ever since. I am so proud of you both, you big, smart, strong, silly, sweet guwurs! I love you, family! At its best, learning is a relationship. At our best, our relationships are an incarnation of love. So to all of those acknowledged here, I love you. In different ways, and in different forms, but the love we share in our relationship is real. vii PREFACE I discovered singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s music in 2008. I have been in love with her music ever since I first encountered it. The more I learn about Brandi, the more complex, tragic, and beautiful her story and her music become. The song “In My Own Eyes,” from Brandi’s first album, reveals part of her story. In the song, Brandi expresses doubt and shame through the lyrics, “I don’t really want to be seen / In my own eyes” (Carlile, 2005). As tragic as these lyrics are, I want to appropriate them in a different way. In the exact opposite of what Brandi wished when the album was released, I invite you to see me and all that I have written here through my own eyes. I have a lot to say in the following pages. I will talk about the hidden curriculum, I will talk about business education, and I will talk about affect theory. But before I talk about any of that, I need to introduce a fundamental assumption that permeates throughout this entire dissertation. This assumption is that in the sentence structure “I will talk about X,” the “I” and the “X” are as much a part of each other as they are separate entities. You, the reader, will learn about a lot of different “X”s (e.g., the hidden curriculum, business education, and affect theory). But the “X” in these pages is always mediated by me, the affective “I” who moderates “X.” In other words, to understand what I will say to you, you need to know who I am. I am Paul Eric Bylsma. At the time of this writing, I am 35 years old, stand over six feet tall, and am by normative definition able-bodied and able-minded. My social identity as a cis-gender, heterosexual White man affords me a world of privileges, the extent of which I am beginning to become aware. I am shaped by those around me: I am a husband; I am a father; I am a son; I am a brother. I am shaped by what my body does: I run; I read; I teach; I listen; I think. I am shaped by how I engage with others: I like to laugh; I like animals; I like baseball; I get anxious; I get viii self-conscious; I never know what to do with my hands. I am Paul, and the “X” that we explore below is seen through my own “I.” In many ways, our encounter in these pages resembles a meaningful relationship. Though our encounter transcends space and time (you are not here as I type these words at this moment), it is an encounter nonetheless, and a personal one at that. As I just mentioned, to know me means that you will better understand how I present my research to you in the pages that follow. Further, you need to know me to understand why I am writing about this topic in the first place. An affective hidden curriculum in business education is not just a topic I drew out of a hat. An affective hidden curriculum in business education is a metaphor I use to explore questions that resound deep within me. In short, this dissertation is not simply a disembodied presentation of data, this dissertation is a look at the world through my own “I”s! I encourage you to keep this in mind as we navigate the pages below: the “X” that we are learning about together is a reminder that we are in relationship. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: EXPLORING “A HIDDEN WHOLENESS”.......................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: THE FOREST, THE TREES, AND CONVERSATIONS IN BETWEEN .......... 13 CHAPTER 3: UNDERSTANDING THE SENTIENCE OF OUR BEING ................................. 43 CHAPTER 4: “THE MUSIC AND THE AUDIENCE HAVE MERGED” ................................ 76 CHAPTER 5: WINTER/ING ....................................................................................................... 99 CHAPTER 6: “LOOK HOW SPECTACULAR IT IS THAT WE’RE HERE” ........................ 117 CHAPTER 7: “YOU NEVER WRITE THE SAME POEM TWICE” ...................................... 142 CHAPTER ∞: “YESTERDAY IS GONE, TOMORROW IS FOREVER”.............................. 164 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 192 APPENDIX A: OBSERVATION PROTOCOL ........................................................................ 206 APPENDIX B: LETTER OF INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 207 APPENDIX C: RECRUITMENT EMAIL ................................................................................. 208 APPENDIX D: INTERVIEW INTEREST FORM .................................................................... 209 x CHAPTER 1: EXPLORING “A HIDDEN WHOLENESS” In my previous employment working in the alumni office at a local university, I was tasked with organizing an “executive breakfast” in partnership with the Business Department. Invitations were emailed out of my office to alumni in the area who had studied business or worked in a business-related field. The Business Department emailed invites to their listservs of local business partners and handed out postcards to personal contacts. Students enrolled in business or business-related programs at the university were also invited to attend. The event was promoted as a networking opportunity with the chance to hear from a speaker, a local marketing professional and university alum. On the morning of this particular event, I arrived at the conference center early to set up name tags, test the microphones, and ensure that the slides were projected correctly. As the first attendees arrived, I assumed my “customer service” role and watched from a distance as the social rituals unfolded in front of me. The more experienced attendees were shaking hands and laughing with each other, some retired and wearing a jacket with jeans, others looking like they were still immersed in their field and walking in with pressed blouses and sharp suits. The less experienced or more introverted attendees seemed to find each other and engaged in small talk over a cup of coffee while scoping out the breakfast buffet or scanning the room for someone else they knew. The students seemed to navigate the room well, dressed in their Sunday best and seizing the opportunity to rub shoulders with more experienced figures in their fields of study. Regardless of their role, everyone arrived on time if not early, and everyone apparently had someone to talk to and something to talk about. These experiences ignited my interest in studying the kind of learning that goes on “behind the scenes” in a business school; that which is learned without explicitly being taught. I reference this behind-the-scenes learning in the title of this chapter. Poet and Trappist monk 1 Thomas Merton referenced “a hidden wholeness” in his (1963) poem “Hagia Sophia.” In this poem, Merton describes encounters with the divine not as a comprehensible being but as a presence that we encounter as we make our way through the world. My appropriation of Merton’s work is not a perfect analogy, though parallels persist. Like Merton’s understanding of the divine, I have come to understand education not as something that we can grasp, but as something that we do. Even further, I have come to see education as something through which we become, in the sense that we are changed by our encounters with/in educational experiences. My understanding of education resonates with Merton’s understanding of the divine. Behind all the textbooks, behind the tests and lectures, behind the lecture halls and PowerPoint presentations, is a hidden wholeness. This hidden wholeness, or the education that we encounter without recognizing it as such, is what I wanted to know more about and ultimately what my research engaged. This study investigated how the hidden curriculum in an undergraduate business program prepared students to “embody” or “be” a business professional. Watching people navigate different business environments left me wondering what it means to “be” a some-body in business, as opposed to simply knowing how to run a business. In short, my curiosity about the hidden wholeness behind business education drove this study. In this chapter, I outline the study that I conducted in the spring of 2022. This study was set in a school of business and investigated how students learned how to “be” in business by engaging with an affective hidden curriculum. The Calls to Study Business Education In my study, I set out to answer the question of how to “be” in the business profession by studying the hidden curriculum in an undergraduate business program. Though the norms that govern how to act in any given profession are worthy of study, business in particular called out 2 to me. First, business has a tremendous influence on my ordinary life in the United States. Studying business can make more sense of the contemporary neoliberal socio-economic paradigm that American society inhabits at the time of this writing. I define neoliberalism as an emphasis on economic interests, personal responsibility, and broad deregulation that pushes market logic into everyday life (Jones & Calafell, 2012; Torres, 2011). For example, consider how business logic has manifested in casual language. We intuitively understand phrases such as “I don’t buy it” or “investing in the future” because of a pervasive neoliberal paradigm. An understanding of business can help us better understand how our own lives have been touched by neoliberalism. However, in order to understand how business functions in American society it is important to understand the role that business schools play in shaping business leaders. This is important not only in terms of performing tasks and mastering competencies, but in becoming a business professional (Bain, 1992; Birtch & Chiang, 2014; Haski-Leventhal et al., 2020; Mutch, 1997). As shown above, studying business education can help us understand our own personal lives. Further, business education shapes how future business leaders can cause, confront, and resolve existential social problems. For example, how ethics are modeled (or not) in a business school may be to blame for cases of corporate shortcoming, including the Enron scandal and 2008 financial crisis (Beggs, 2011; Ghoshal, 2005; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Take corporate action on climate change as another example. Business education can shape how business scholarship (or the lack thereof, per Patenaude, 2011) addresses climate change. Business schools’ formal curriculum may address environmental sustainability as a bottom line (Høgdal et al., 2021; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). However, business’s practical reliance on air travel for conferences (etc.) may be interpreted as disregard for the climate (Gill, 2021). In addition, 3 business schools are reckoning with how to develop leadership that responds appropriately to climate change, and business research is mixed in how to approach climate change as a matter of finance (Adams et al., 2011; Stroebel & Wurgler, 2021). As a result, some (e.g., Hoffman, 2021) have called for a fundamental reshaping of business education in light of the social and environmental failings of late capitalism. In sum, business education can have a lasting impact on graduates’ embodied professional practice, who in turn have a lasting impact on the business industry and our world at large (Birtch & Chiang, 2014). The urgency in studying business education as a function of social welfare emerged as another call to which I responded. Further, business education called to me as a teacher-scholar-practitioner in higher education. Business education comprises a collection of functional areas (e.g., accounting, finance, management, marketing) and aspires to develop “soft” skills such as leadership and critical thinking abilities (Bain, 1992). Business education tends to privilege the logic of the marketplace and a highly engaged pedagogy that privileges student experience and “real-life” exercises (Colby et al., 2011). Business education is also one of the most popular undergraduate majors in the United States (Colby et al., 2011). In the 2018–2019 school year, more undergraduate business degrees were conferred than any other undergraduate degree (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2020). Thus, studying business as an academic discipline can provide insights into how a large share of current college students experience their postsecondary education. Finally, the call to study business education fills a gap in my own continuing education. I have not studied business academically and have only spent two years of my 14-year professional career working at a for-profit firm. I am introverted by nature and feel uncomfortable in a setting where I am expected to introduce myself to a stranger and make 4 conversation. I have always been awful at sales and pay for help in filing my own taxes. In other words, the business world to which I have been exposed is strange to me. The business world is one in which I am not technically proficient (e.g., sales, marketing, finance, accounting), and a world in which I generally feel uncomfortable. My very feeling out of place in a business environment, in addition to the more broadly applicable rationale for studying business discussed briefly above, has facilitated my interest in the topic. In sum, this study responded to calls I heard in my own life to study business education. However, I was/am less interested in the technical skills that students must learn to pass their exams and demonstrate competence in their roles (i.e., the formal curriculum). I was/am much more interested in the beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, postures, and behaviors that business schools knowingly or unknowingly inculcate into their students (i.e., the hidden curriculum). Specifically, I was/am interested in how the hidden curriculum in a business education context operates as an affective object that shapes how students embody the business profession. The Calls to Study the Hidden Curriculum as an Affective Phenomenon Why study the hidden curriculum in business education when a robust formal curriculum already exists (Mutch, 1997)? Further, since the hidden curriculum in a business education context has already been studied, why was this study necessary? Despite the wealth of literature that already exists on the hidden curriculum in business education, I was still drawn to this area of inquiry by a number of calls to know more. Below, I first respond to the calls to study the hidden curriculum specifically in business education. Next, I elaborate on why my study deepens our understanding of how business students learn to embody their profession. 5 Why Study the Hidden Curriculum? The hidden curriculum has been widely explored since the 1960s, when Philip Jackson first introduced the term (Gordon, 1995; Jackson, 1990). Existing work throughout the decades has identified the hidden curriculum as a socializing mechanism and refers to the values, dispositions, and behaviors that are taught to students, knowingly or unknowingly, alongside the formal curriculum (Margolis et al., 2001; Martin, 1976). Despite such a sustained inquiry, however, the hidden curriculum remains a vast and ambiguous concept that often eludes a comprehensive definition (Gordon, 1995). As King (1986) asserted, leaving the hidden curriculum unexamined “would be unethical...When the hidden curriculum is studied, it is found to be elusive, always changing, existing both inside and outside of formal schooling, tied to the formal curriculum, and always in place in some setting” (p. 89). Though much of the research on the hidden curriculum in formal education has been done in a primary and secondary school context (Cotton et al., 2013; Margolis et al., 2001), I found postsecondary education to be a rich context for studying the hidden curriculum. Indeed, the influence of history and tradition on college campuses, as well as the faculty’s relative autonomy to teach what and how they find important, suggests that education is not confined to the formal curriculum (Semper & Blasco, 2018). By recognizing the hidden curriculum’s role in postsecondary education, my colleagues and I might recognize opportunities for a deeper understanding and improvement in our teaching and learning work. Specifically, the hidden curriculum represents a form of teaching and learning that eludes cognition but is still an important element of a postsecondary student’s education. By reflecting on how my own beliefs influence my teaching, I as a faculty member might better understand the hidden curriculum that I produce (Sharen & McGowan, 2019). Further, revealing a hidden curriculum might also reveal 6 barriers to my students’ success: “Documenting features of the hidden curriculum thus remains an essential task in helping to understand the learner’s experience of schooling and assists educators in challenging aspects of the hidden curriculum that may subvert the formal goals of higher education” (Cotton et al., 2013, p. 194). In short, the hidden curriculum calls out as an area of inquiry that promises to yield fruitful insights into how we understand “education.” Why Study the Hidden Curriculum in Business Education? The hidden curriculum has already been studied in a variety of postsecondary contexts, including business education. However, my study followed a specific call for further research into the hidden curriculum in business education. For example, Caza & Brower (2015) noted the prevalence and importance of the hidden curriculum in business management curriculum specifically, and how it has not been sufficiently addressed in the field. Several studies (e.g., Lämsä et al., 2007; McKeen et al., 2000; Sharen & McGowan, 2019; Treviño & Brown, 2004) have indeed identified specific instances of a hidden curriculum in business education. Still, Borges et al. (2017) and Hernández-López et al. (2020) insisted that a better understanding of how the hidden curriculum in business education shapes professional socialization is needed. As mentioned above, understanding business is important to understand my everyday life in the United States. Further, given the influential role that business schools play in professionally socializing business leaders (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2020), understanding the “hidden wholeness” behind business education was necessary and urgent. Why Study the Hidden Curriculum in Business Education as an Affective Phenomenon? Though others have studied the hidden curriculum in business education, I see the existing frameworks for understanding the hidden curriculum as limited in scope and in need of expansion. Existing work on the hidden curriculum in business education tends to identify the 7 hidden curriculum in isolated locations and as a presence that influences how students think about particular elements of business. For example, existing studies have neatly confined the hidden curriculum to particular topics, such as gender (e.g., Sharen & McGowan, 2019) and ethics (e.g., Treviño & Brown, 2004). Other studies have confined their work to particular artifacts such as textbooks (e.g., Dever & Mills, 2015) or personal interactions within the department (e.g., Borges et al., 2017). Further, despite noting the hidden curriculum’s socializing influence in business education, existing work does not acknowledge students’ embodiment or their embodied knowledge in discussing the hidden curriculum’s socializing potential. For example, Swiercz and Ross (2003) identified an overemphasis on a rational investigative frame that shaped how students thought about business case studies. However, their work did not explore how students live out the biases that the hidden curriculum teaches. Existing research presents the hidden curriculum in business education as an isolated and discursive phenomenon (i.e., one that is processed through reflective capacities). Further, I have been frustrated by existing studies’ tendency to present the hidden curriculum as an imposing force on a heterogenous student body. Some work does account for student subjectivity (e.g., Semper & Blasco, 2018; Treviño & Brown, 2004), but most studies focus on the hidden curriculum’s power over students. This unidirectional understanding of the hidden curriculum is lacking by not accounting for the ways that students encounter and mediate implicit messaging. My study addresses this shortcoming by accounting for, indeed foregrounding, student agency in their encounters with the hidden curriculum. I will explore my encounters with the literature further in Chapter 2. Yet, I insist here that understanding the hidden curriculum in business education as an affective phenomenon is an important contribution to existing literature. Exploring the hidden curriculum as an affective 8 phenomenon in business education answers many calls for better understanding, ranging from the personal to social to professional to academic. As will be explained in more detail in Chapter 3, an affective onto-epistemology and methodology privilege non-cognitive forms of knowing that developed through encounters between embodied people and their environments (objects, and other people) (Healy, 2016). This framework perceives the business school environment as more than the sum of its isolated pedagogies. My onto-epistemology also emphasizes the relational nature of the hidden curriculum as students encountered it in their social, material, and temporal environments. In short, my study widened the scope through which the hidden curriculum has been studied by answering different calls for new forms of understanding. By employing affect theory, I identified how students engaged with an affective hidden curriculum and how they emerged as a result. Guiding Research Questions To summarize the above, studying the hidden curriculum in business education as an affective phenomenon called out to me in many ways. For example, business is an important element of understanding everyday life and the academic experiences for a notable share of postsecondary students in the United States. As such, while it is important to understand what is explicitly taught in business schools, it is also important to understand how the hidden curriculum shapes the next generation of business leaders (Birtch & Chiang, 2014). However, existing research in business education has studied the hidden curriculum as a fragmented, cognitivized construct that shapes how students discursively think about particular elements of business. To contribute to our understanding of the hidden curriculum in a business environment, my study investigated the hidden curriculum in business education as an affective object. I employed an affective onto-epistemology and methodology and adapted ethnographic methods 9 to observe how a hidden curriculum emerged through students’ encounters with various people and objects in their learning environment. The guiding research questions that guided this study are as follows: ● How do students encounter the hidden curriculum as an affective object in an undergraduate business program at a comprehensive regional university in the Midwest United States? ● How does the hidden curriculum emerge through multiple people and objects (including faculty, language, physical objects, spaces, and events)? ● What knowledge about business education do students develop through their encounters with the hidden curriculum? A View from the Top Throughout this dissertation, I argue that the hidden curriculum emerged as a mutual encounter between students and the various spaces, objects, people, and temporalities with which students routinely engaged. The chapters in this dissertation support my argument by providing context and findings that demonstrate how students engaged with the hidden curriculum in various ways. In Chapter 2, I elucidate the forest of literature that contextualized my study. I outline how the hidden curriculum has been researched (a) historically and ideologically; (b) as a socializing mechanism to which students are generally subjected, and; (c) as the hidden curriculum has manifested specifically in business education and higher education more generally. In Chapter 3, I introduce affect theory as the guiding theoretical approach for my research. I provide a brief overview of affect theory, then translate affect theory into an affective onto-epistemology, which subsequently informed my affective methodology. I continue in 10 Chapter 3 by outlining the methods I used to operationalize my onto-epistemologically-informed methodology, and describing my data analysis methods and experience. I explore my findings in Chapters 4–7. Chapter 4 includes pictures and descriptions of the assemblage in which I conducted my research. This description is both a resource to make sense of subsequent chapters and a methodological act in describing the material, spatial, social, and temporal elements that comprised the pedagogic assemblage. In Chapter 5, I demonstrate how students responded to a hidden curriculum that appeared imposing by creating their own interpretations of a hidden curriculum that was otherwise unavoidable. In Chapter 6, I show how students continued to respond to the hidden curriculum by mediating how, and if, the hidden curriculum emerged. I contrast my findings in Chapter 6 against my findings in Chapter 5, where I suggested that the hidden curriculum mediated students’ experiences. In Chapter 7, I indicate that the hidden curriculum is not something that students encountered, but something that students co-created through their encounters with/in an assemblage. My findings across Chapters 5–7 show the hidden curriculum to be a mutual encounter between students and their assemblage rather than a unidirectional imposition of force. I discuss my findings at more length in Chapter ∞ in addition to articulating specific implications for future theory, research, and practice. As discussed in the Preface, the content that I present here is mediated by my own encounters. I make this explicit throughout the document by sharing stories of how I have made meaning of my encounters in my research and writing processes. One thread that is consistent throughout this dissertation is the impression that the On Being podcast, hosted by Krista Tippett, has made on me. Krista is an incredibly wise and insightful person, host, and conversation partner. The beauty of Krista’s wisdom, however, truly unfolds in the conversations she records on the podcast with a diverse slate of other wise and insightful people. I often make sense of my 11 academic (and social, and spiritual, and professional) life through the conversations that are featured in each podcast. As such, I will return to On Being conversations that have influenced me to help you, the reader, make sense of my findings and analysis. It is only fair, after all, since On Being conversations have helped me do the same! 12 CHAPTER 2: THE FOREST, THE TREES, AND CONVERSATIONS IN BETWEEN Suzanne Simard is a professor and forest ecologist in British Columbia, Canada. Suzanne’s best-known work explores the social nature of forests, affectionately described as the “wood wide web.” In conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, Suzanne explained how the trees in a forest are connected through rich networks of underground microorganisms. Through these networks, trees share “carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and chemicals and hormones” (Tippett, 2021, September 9). Suzanne’s research shows that what appeared to be individual trees in a forest must be re-conceptualized as a densely interconnected community where wisdom and survival literally flow beneath the surface. This “web of vitality” keeps forests healthy and alive (Tippett, 2021, September 9). I found similar networks connecting scholarly literature around business education and the hidden curriculum. I selected literature for this review first by identifying prominent primary sources (or, as Suzanne might say, the “mother trees” [Tippett, 2021, September 9]). I then facilitated multiple searches across various databases (including ERIC, Educational Abstracts, and Educational Full Texts) to identify where the hidden curriculum in undergraduate business education has been discussed. Chasing footnotes, or following the network made explicit between sources, also yielded new trees to investigate. I considered the forest of literature to have reached sufficient growth (i.e., saturation) when the same sources were being cited in each new article, when arguments and results became redundant, and when new sources explored fringe topics that were not central to my proposed study. Each article or book or chapter thus represented a “tree” in the bigger “forest” of the literature. Just as Suzanne and her colleagues mapped out the underground microorganisms that linked the trees in the forest, I too mapped out the common conversations that linked pieces of the literature together. Ideas like “architecture” 13 and “formal schooling” interacted with other concepts like “student autonomy” and “socialization” to create a network that sustained the broader conversation about the hidden curriculum. Though Suzanne might claim to have discovered the forest networks, I played a significant role in creating the networks that linked pieces of literature together. The cycle through which I discovered, read, and processed material shaped the connections I made between articles. Those connections further shaped the “forest” of literature on which my understanding of the hidden curriculum and business education are based. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the existing forest of literature analyzing the hidden curriculum in business education is limited in scope and interpretation. I will demonstrate how this literature isolates specific elements of the hidden curriculum implicitly shaping business students’ reflective understanding of formal curricular objectives. I will also demonstrate that few existing studies recognize students’ role in their encounters with the hidden curriculum. Finally, I will show how none of the existing work on the hidden curriculum in business education utilizes affect or affect theory as an epistemological or methodological lens. In short, the current forest of literature has large clearings where the hidden curriculum, specifically the hidden curriculum in business education, has been explored. These scholarly gaps limit how my colleagues and I can meaningfully engage with the hidden curriculum to produce more consistent and coherent teaching and learning environments. However, these clearings also offer space for my study to plant new ideas that contribute to the greater whole. I thus begin what might otherwise present as a “literature review” by inviting you to accompany me on a walk through the woods. Walk with me through this forest of literature, observing each unique tree, the bigger picture the trees create together, and the networks that connect everything together. 14 The Hidden Curriculum The term “hidden curriculum” was first used by Phillip Jackson in 1968, during a time when educational research was studying the values, dispositions, and behaviors that were taught alongside the formal curriculum (Gordon, 1995; Margolis et al., 2001). Much of the theoretical work on the hidden curriculum has been done in a K–12 setting (Margolis et al., 2001), including some literature that I explored but excluded from this chapter. However, the hidden curriculum can operate forcefully in postsecondary education. First, because strong traditions and histories carry influence in higher education as an institution, organizational culture is capable of influencing behaviors on college campuses (Costello, 2001; Eisner, 1985). Second, postsecondary education is not as structured as lower levels of education, which gives faculty more flexibility that could allow the hidden curriculum to play a more prominent role in the formal curriculum (Semper & Blasco, 2018; Robati & Tonkaboni, 2017). Consequently, I consider postsecondary education as fertile ground for investigating the hidden curriculum. I encountered the hidden curriculum in postsecondary education as a complicated concept with many definitions. Broadly defined, I understand the hidden curriculum as that which is taught and/or learned but not explicitly articulated as a learning goal, either in a school or more broadly in an organization or culture (Gair & Mullins, 2001; Hafferty, 1998; Mossop et al., 201). As an implicit pedagogy, I identify the hidden curriculum in the informal or implied rules, demands, expectations, and other secondary learning outcomes that are necessary to find success in a formal learning environment (Bergenhenegouwen, 1987; Robati & Tonkaboni, 2017). Further, the hidden curriculum does not necessarily operate as a discursive phenomenon. Rather, many agree that the hidden curriculum is unintentionally or unconsciously transmitted to students without their knowledge (Borges et al. 2017; Cotton et al., 2013; Elliot et al., 2016; 15 Otteweil et al., 2005). Literature specific to business education identifies the hidden curriculum again as implicit messaging that manifests in different contexts and as different topics. Caza and Brower (2015) and Borges et al. (2017) noted that any reference to “the curriculum” in business education has to go beyond curriculum development, transcripts, and formal studies. This broader understanding of “the curriculum” helps scholars and practitioners to consider the environment in which dynamic, holistic students learn. Indeed, much learning in business schools happens outside of the formal curriculum and in the everyday and sometimes covert socializing experiences (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2020; Margolis et al., 2001; Tierney, 1997; Treviño & McCabe, 1994). Perhaps because the hidden curriculum operates without being explicitly acknowledged, I regard the hidden curriculum as a powerful pedagogical tool. The formal curriculum is primarily a content-driven transmission of information. In comparison, the hidden curriculum teaches students through the “attitudes, policies, actions, non-actions, behaviors, practices, and objects that lurk beneath the surface of the day-to-day operation of higher education” (Jones & Young, 1997, p. 91). Students’ continuous exposure to the embodied and emotional lessons learned through the hidden curriculum is perhaps even more effective than those learned in formal curriculum (Gupta et al., 2020; Lai & Smith, 2018). I have identified outcomes of this hidden curriculum as sets of values, dispositions, norms, and beliefs (Barnett, 2000; Jones & Young, 1997; Otteweil et al., 2005). For example, Anderson (2002) suggested that online higher education could facilitate more individualistic attitudes in students, while Robati and Tonkaboni (2017) found that doctoral students developed increased self-control and a favorable orientation toward empirical studies. Thus, a hidden curriculum to which students are continuously exposed may result in more persistent outcomes 16 (e.g., attitudes and dispositions) than the cognitive functions learned through the formal curriculum. Importantly, the research that I encountered locates the hidden curriculum’s outcomes in the affective realm. However, I did not find any literature that refers to affect or related schools of thought (e.g., embodiment or emotion) to process the hidden curriculum. In sum, I encountered existing literature that portrays the hidden curriculum in postsecondary education as a set of processes and outcomes that operate behind reflective consciousness and have the potential to influence the way students understand professional concepts. However, and as I will explore below, existing literature in business education tends to keep a narrow focus on how particular elements of the hidden curriculum influence students’ thinking. This gap in the literature, and other gaps like it, represent clearings in the woods where new growth can further support the overall health of the forest. My study acts as new growth by utilizing a more inclusive onto-epistemological framework and a broader analytical scope. My study framed the hidden curriculum as an affective encounter between students and their environments with the potential to shape how students embody the business profession. Ideological and Historical Interpretations of the Hidden Curriculum I found that existing literature adopts a range of perspectives in reviewing the hidden curriculum, including functional, critical, and radical perspectives. The range of perspectives shows the myriad ways in which the hidden curriculum has been, and might still be, conceptualized. Functionalist Ideological Perspectives First, functionalist perspectives portray the hidden curriculum as merely the effect of the setting where instruction takes place. Though the hidden curriculum has largely been portrayed nefariously (King, 1986; Sambell & McDowell, 1998), not all of the hidden curriculum is 17 destructive or oppressive (Cotton et al., 2013). Indeed, “the notion of conspiracy is not always implied by the concept and...one does not need to defend a form of conspiracy theory in order to argue for the importance of the hidden curriculum” (Portelli, 1993, p. 344). Margolis et al. (2001) maintained that some form of social homogeneity is crucial to social survival, and schools meet this function by teaching the values and skills that are demanded by social life (Giroux, 1981). For example, Portelli (1993) suggested that ethics and morals are best learned through a hidden curriculum, since treating such subjects as academic subject areas would distort the learning process. Thus, “the hidden curriculum as a socialization of schooling” (Kentli, 2009, p. 88) is not categorically negative, but could serve productive, positive, and functional purposes. Critical Ideological Perspectives Despite the desirable traits that students learn from the hidden curriculum, I found that the case for the hidden curriculum as an ideological tool is made forcefully. Apple (1971) declared that “as an act of influence, education is also an inherently political act” (p. 38). As a result, critical perspectives identify how students are socialized into institutionalized routines, practices, and expectations. For example, Mossop et al. (2013) cautioned that some faculty members’ posture of superiority toward their students might encourage their graduated students to reproduce such a posture toward their future colleagues. The critical perspective emphasized that authority figures reproduce imperfect behavior simply by exhibiting it. Radical Ideological Perspectives Finally, I found radical perspectives to present the hidden curriculum as a mechanism for cultural reproduction and indoctrination into inequitable classist, capitalist ideologies (Margolis et al., 2001; Semper & Blasco, 2018). The radical perspective suggests that those researching the hidden curriculum have to look critically at both the overt and covert knowledge that is taught in 18 schools. This analysis will purportedly reveal how and why accepted knowledge was recognized as legitimate knowledge in the first place, and whose interests are consequently served (Apple & King, 1977; Eisner, 1985). For example, Mavin & Bryans (1999) suggested that some management theories in a business setting perpetuated a sexist status quo by claiming gender- neutrality rather than identifying their patriarchal prejudices. Klikauer (2015) further suggested that business schools present ideologies as neutral and objective truths rather than contested theories. In this way, business theories presented as morally neutral are “used to engineer complacency and compliance so that the victims of ideological socialization do not rebel but support the given ideology” (Klikauer, 2015, p. 1106). The radical perspective foregrounds a diabolical pattern of reproducing unjust political constructions under the guise of objectivity and by using language that implies delegated authority that masks concentration of epistemic power (Bourdieu, 1991). Historical Perspectives Though the hidden curriculum is often discussed as a contemporary phenomenon, operating in present-day social structures with modern interests at stake, the hidden curriculum has a rich history in formal American schooling. Apple and King (1977) argued that historically, even the formal curriculum was designed to engineer social control. Schooling was designed to build social consensus and sort the labor force in the face of increasing socioeconomic diversity and industrialization (Apple & King, 1977; Brown, 2005). Thus, what is considered a hidden curriculum today (specifically, a more radical interpretation that indicts the hidden curriculum on charges of social control and capitalist indoctrination) was very much intentional and visible in the past (Apple & King, 1977; King, 1986). The only reason such curricular aims are “hidden” at 19 present is because of schooling’s success in achieving its socializing goals that the goals are no longer explicit (Semper & Blasco, 2018; Vallance, 1973). Elizabeth Vallance (1973) offers readers a historical survey on the language used to justify public education in the 19th century United States. Vallence’s work demonstrates what was articulated above; the hidden curriculum of today was the formal curriculum of yesteryear. Vallence noted how schooling originally existed to socialize students into mainstream society by teaching students civic traits conducive to building American democracy. Early aims of American public education intended to unify a new country by teaching nationalistic goals such as “public morality” and “to reinforce the legitimacy of established authority” (Vallance, 1973, p. 10). Despite curricular shifts over the 19th century and into the 20th, public education was still intended to instill a particular set of morals and behaviors as a form of mass enculturation as well as social control. By the time public education shifted to focus on skills training, as opposed to character development, the latter had already been assumed as a primary function of American public education. Vallance argued that the hidden curriculum indicates earlier curricular functions’ success in socializing students into life outside of school. The formal curriculum of the past evolved into the hidden curriculum of the present. American schools’ success in achieving its initial socializing goals made room for new curricular goals. Even so, public schooling’s socializing purposes never truly disappeared as much as they simply went unarticulated. Vallence’s work thus represents functionalist, critical, and radical perspectives on how the hidden curriculum has historically emerged in American schooling. In summary, ideological and historical interpretations acknowledge that the hidden curriculum has great pedagogic potential (Martin, 1976), though the functionalist perspective is the most likely to acknowledge the hidden curriculum’s positive effects. The critical and radical 20 perspectives emphasize that the hidden curriculum is not as productive as it is reproductive, discreetly supporting behaviors or a status quo that critical or radical educational theorists agree is constructed, oppressive, and in need of change (Margolis & Romero, 2001). A historical perspective traces and legitimizes functionalist, critical, and radical perspectives on the hidden curriculum in American schooling. “Knowing and Becoming” Through the Hidden Curriculum Whether hidden or explicit, a curriculum is a political tool with ethical implications that are potentially transformative in students’ lives (Kovac & Coppola, 2000). In this way, I understand a curriculum to serve an ontological function—forming who students are—as well as an epistemological purpose, i.e., informing students. Barnett (2009) identified an “extraordinary and intimate relationship between knowing and becoming” (p.435), suggesting that epistemological functions have ontological significance. In other words, any curriculum is as formative as it is informative (Smith, 2009). Specifically in postsecondary education, the relative autonomy of the faculty and the traditions that shape campus life provide ample opportunity for developing students’ embodied ways of being in a postsecondary context (Semper & Blasco, 2018). In this way, I understand the hidden curriculum as an encounter that orients students within a particular community. In short, the hidden curriculum is a socializing mechanism. I encountered existing work that identified socialization in higher education as learning how knowledge is organized and what is valued in a community (Blasco, 2012). Further work described socialization as acquiring the attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviors, and the skills necessary to participate effectively in the organized profession (Dunn et al., 1994, as cited in Hernández-López et al., 2020; Herbert et al., 2021; Lämsä et al., 2007; Rhoads et al., 2017). In addition, literature on business education specifically suggested that socialization involves 21 learning “the correct way to think, feel, and behave” (Sharen & McGowan, 2019, p. 132). Ehrensal (2001) further identified socialization in business education in Bourdieusian terms, as the process of forming a habitus. I found support for an affective interpretation of socialization in a niche body of research that suggests that professional socialization goes beyond simply what students know to who they are becoming. In other words, professional socialization is an ontological process through which students embody and practice their knowledge (Dall’Alba, 2009; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007). As ontologically embodied beings, students become professionals not simply by demonstrating requisite knowledge and skills, but through encounters with their social and physical environments. As such, knowledge is inclusive of when, how, and why to use such skills and practices (Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2005). Specifically in business management education, Dall’Alba and Sandberg (2006) noted that “professional skill is not primarily constituted by a set of attributes that have been acquired through formal training or at work” (p. 390). Rather, professionalism is an embodied understanding developed through practice. In this way, the affective is implicated in learning insofar as knowledge is no longer a cognitive construct. Rather, learning becomes a skillful combination of understanding and doing that engages the world (Barnett, 2009; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007; Dall’Alba & Sandberg, 2006). By developing habits that prepare emerging professionals to navigate and react appropriately in their field, the educational environment must be understood as a physical, embodied context, developing both cognitive and affective knowledge, in preparing students for embodied practice (Gibbs, 2014). Although the literature I encountered identified socialization as developing embodied, performed knowledge, existing studies on the hidden curriculum in business education failed to conceptualize socialization as an embodied process. Rather, as I will discuss below, current 22 business literature constrains the hidden curriculum’s socializing potential to cognitive outcomes by emphasizing alignment between the formal curriculum with the hidden curriculum (Blasco, 2012; Boyle, 2007; Høgdal et al., 2021; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Cognitivizing the ways that the hidden curriculum socializes students comes at the expense of recognizing the informal, embodied nature of students’ encounters with the hidden curriculum. Further, I identified a need to utilize qualitative, interpretive methodologies to understand how students’ embodiment and behaviors are shaped by the hidden curriculum in an American postsecondary educational context. Though empirical studies that explore professional socialization in a business school context utilized different methodological approaches, they were rarely set in a United States context. For example, Herbert et al. (2021) used mixed methods to explore improvements to the guided professional socialization of accounting students in the UK, and Birtch and Chiang (2014) used mixed methods to explore the ethics socialization in business undergraduates in Hong Kong. Although Lopez et al. (2005) studied ethics socialization in undergraduates at an American doctoral/professional university, their study used quantitative methods. Lopez et al. also described what influences ethical formation, rather than interpreting how such influences operate. In contrast, I researched the hidden curriculum in an American context as a set of affective encounters through which students develop embodied knowledge about business education. My study thus represents new growth in a methodological clearing in the literature by utilizing a qualitative, interpretive methodology to foreground the hidden curriculum as an affective phenomenon. My encounters with existing literature portray education as ontological in nature: shaping who students become in addition to what students know. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that encounters with the hidden curriculum are a socializing process. Indeed, 23 because the hidden curriculum is more subtle and pervasive than the formal curriculum, it may play a more influential role in shaping students' attitudes and behaviors (Gupta et al., 2020). However, I did not encounter existing work on socialization in business education that makes a connection between the hidden curriculum and how students embody their profession. Existing studies portray the hidden curriculum as a discursive function of business education (e.g., Arieli et al., 2916; Haski-Leventhal et al., 2020; Hernández-López et al., 2020). In contrast, my study considered the hidden curriculum as a socializing function of business education that influenced how students embodied their professional education and became business professionals. Understanding the Student’s Role in Encounters with the Hidden Curriculum The literature I described above presents socialization as an almost indefensible force with which students consciously or unconsciously comply. For example, the hidden curriculum has historically been presented as: values that structure the formal curriculum; norms and beliefs that are communicated to students; content that is taught out of habit; and the unintentional lessons that are taught to students (Eisner, 1985; Gair & Mullins, 2001; King, 1986; Kentli, 2009; Martin, 1976). Specifically in business education literature, the hidden curriculum was presented as collateral learning, unstated lessons, and hidden demands students must meet (Borges et al., 2017; Boyle, 2007). These definitions present the hidden curriculum as an institutional force to which students are merely subjected. However, the hidden curriculum’s socializing potential is neither totalizing nor dismissible. Rather, socialization is the outcome of encounters between an implicitly curricular object and a student, both of which claim some form of affective capacity (Ahmed, 2014). Speaking theoretically about higher education in general, Tierney (1997, 1999) argued that socialization is an active, negotiated process into a culture that is dynamic and co-constructed. Tierney emphasized the active role that those “being socialized” 24 play in the process. Other theoretical work suggests that students are capable of resisting or negotiating the hidden curriculum. Cornbleth (1984) noted that “...schooling is only one of several influences on students and…these influences are mediated by students” (p. 33). This suggests that students filter and assess information in different ways. Similarly, Skelton (1997) rejected the idea of the hidden curriculum as deterministic in favor of considering students as exercising agency in their encounters. Indeed, students and teachers are complicated and active beings. Therefore, the schools in which such complicated actors interact must be considered arenas of “conflict, compromise, and struggle” (Margolis et al., 2001, p. 15) rather than uncontested enculturation. I amplify these calls to consider how students’ varying subjectivities will produce different outcomes in their encounters with both hidden and formal curricula (Semper & Blasco, 2018). Student subjectivity decenters pedagogic power from a single source (e.g., “the” hidden curriculum) and relocates the potential for developing knowledge between students, teachers, schools, and society (Skelton, 1997). In other words, students will engage with the hidden curriculum differently depending on the histories and personalities that they bring to the classroom (Margolis et al., 2001; Sambell & McDowell, 1998; Semper & Blasco, 2018). A preponderance of the literature I encountered on the hidden curriculum in business schools focuses on how students as a monolith are subjected to a hidden curriculum (e.g., Apple & King, 1977; Cotton et al., 2013; Elliot et al., 2016). However, some scholars considered how student agency and dispositions might affect student receptivity to a hidden curriculum. I found this to be emphasized particularly in business ethics education. For example, Treviño and Brown (2004) and Treviño and McCabe (1994) cited secondary evidence that business students are capable of developing and re-developing an ethical self well into adulthood. As such, students 25 will not respond to a developmental business ethics curriculum in the same way. Further, Beggs (2011) and Yoo and Donthu (2002) determined from quantitative studies at major American universities that business students’ own ethical development is dependent on a large range of external factors, including cultural background and age. This may enhance or impede their ability to reconcile their own behavior with the formal or hidden ethics curriculum (Giacolone & Promislo, 2013; Hernández-López et al., 2020). These findings were further supported by Birtch and Chiang (2014), using mixed methods in a Hong Kong business school to demonstrate that students’ receptivity to a curriculum around ethics will still vary according to the individual. I encountered some studies that explored student agency and resistance in other business contexts, outside of ethics. Ashforth and Mael (1989) wrote from a business management context to theoretically argue that socialization into a group does not necessarily entail adopting the group’s values and beliefs wholesale. In support of this position, Arieli et al. (2016) wrote from an Israeli context and used mixed methods to interpret survey results from undergraduate business students. Arieli and colleagues found that business students tended to self-select into different departments with different values profiles (e.g., a business department’s commitment to self-enhancement values attracted students with similar values). As such, the students were not subjected to a degree of socialization that would significantly alter their own beliefs. To the contrary, Barbarà Molinero and Cascón Pereira (2013) found that Spanish undergraduate students’ former role models, educational experiences, professional interests, and congruence with personal values informed their professional development alongside their formal instruction. These findings were supported by Haski-Leventhal et al. (2020), who used quantitative methods to analyze survey data from business students at different European business schools. Haski- Leventhal et al. found that students’ values and attitudes were changed over the course of their 26 business education. Thus, existing studies in a business education context both complicate and affirm the hidden curriculum’s socializing potential. Some emphasize the student’s role as an autonomous actor in their encounters, though others portray students as blank slates onto which the hidden curriculum inscribes itself. Some existing studies provide useful perspectives for identifying and understanding how students mediate the hidden curriculum in business education. However, students’ mediating role is not foregrounded by the literature as a whole. The hidden curriculum is presented as a message or process that affects students, rather than a mediated encounter between curriculum and student. Some existing work I encountered does recognize students’ roles in their encounters with the hidden curriculum. However, these studies isolated student subjectivity to one element of the hidden curriculum (e.g., ethics) or presented students as the sum of their histories rather than as dynamic, emergent beings. As such, the affective onto-epistemology that I utilized in this study acts as new growth in the forest and enriches our current understanding of students’ curricular encounters. An affect-driven methodology emphasizes observing and analyzing how students engage the hidden curriculum, and vice versa. Thus, the affect lens that I employed revealed how students oscillated between rejecting, complying with, and even co-creating the hidden curriculum as they navigated their surroundings. Understanding the hidden curriculum’s complexity by acknowledging students’ roles, as some existing literature does, is a helpful start. However, the affect lens such that my study further contributes to the forest of literature’s health by emphasizing the dynamic process of engagement between student and curriculum. Touring the Hidden Curriculum in Business Education Up until now I have presented the hidden curriculum as an abstraction: a complicated pedagogical force that has the potential to transform students’ knowing and being. Indeed, the 27 hidden curriculum is often observed as an ambiguity, located in the everyday, taken for granted structures of the educational environment (e.g., classroom, school governance structure, method of assessment, etc.). In the literature I encountered, the hidden curriculum is exhibited as a constant, unquantifiable presence that students encounter through various and changing media (Barnett, 2000; Robati & Tonkaboni, 2017). In this section, however, I will take you, an embodied reader, on a tour of the sites where the hidden curriculum has already been identified in business education. I will also identify the spaces that the hidden curriculum has been explored in a postsecondary context, but not in a business context. These sites were of particular value in my study, which provides a more integrated perspective of the hidden curriculum as an affective object that students encounter. Throughout this tour of the hidden curriculum in business education, I will show that the existing literature is lacking in where and how it analyzes the hidden curriculum. Though I will not make this argument sequentially, this tour will show that ● the hidden curriculum has been conceptualized as a means to a discursive end, i.e., something to be manipulated for curricular purposes; ● the sites in which the hidden curriculum has been studied are artificially isolated from each other despite existing in an integrated environment; ● literature on the hidden curriculum in business education has not yet explored sites that have been productively analyzed outside of business education; ● little attention is paid to how students interacted with the hidden curriculum, focusing more on the messages that are being sent; 28 ● no study has employed affect theory to account for the implicit pedagogic potential of the business school environment as a whole, and how such an immersive encounter shapes students as embodied learners. This tour allows us to see how the hidden curriculum exists beyond conceptual definition, and how its socializing potential plays out in a lived environment. By touring the hidden curriculum in business education, I will present the hidden curriculum as an affective object that physically manifests in actual business schools. I will also demonstrate that my study made substantial contributions to existing understandings of the hidden curriculum in business education. In contrast to existing work, my study conceptualized the hidden curriculum as an emergent set of encounters between students and an integrated social and material environment. The Formal Curriculum To begin the tour, I would like to begin in the classroom. Beyond the layout of the classroom itself (which has not yet been studied in a business context outside of my study, and played a significant role in my analysis), the classroom represents the heart of formal learning. The hidden curriculum in business education has been identified in the formal curriculum, or the educational materials and activities that are typically reviewed in a classroom setting (Høgdal et al., 2021). The formal curriculum in business education has never existed as value-free and has been critiqued for subtly reproducing ideology. Ehrensal (2016) forcefully argued that business schools socialize students into a professional culture that privileges protecting capital rather than students’ own self-interest. This message is also represented in business textbooks and faculty lectures, the format of which lends pedagogic authority to an otherwise constructed and ideological interpretation of professional culture (Klikauer, 2015). Through encounters with the formal curriculum, students developed perceptions of professionalism based on the professional 29 images projected through the faculty and textbooks. However, students remained unaware of the way that such pedagogies are ideologically shaped (Barbarà-I-Molinero et al., 2019). My study did not interrogate the ideological assumptions that the formal curriculum made and/or reproduced. However, that a formal curriculum hosts any ideology is important to understanding how the hidden curriculum has previously been studied in business education. Formal Curricular Artifacts Specifically within the formal curriculum, a hidden curriculum manifests in the texts and resources that are employed in business education. Case studies, for example, demonstrate problems in a business context but also model what solutions—and problem-solvers—look like (Ehrensal, 2001). Swiercz and Ross (2003) employed a narrative analysis on business case studies published by the Harvard Business School. They found that the rationalistic, hierarchical logic used by these case studies privileged a particular way of seeing and navigating the world. This focus on rationality and an ability to manipulate problems came at the expense of other logics that privileged human needs or cultural meaning-making in resolving cases. Constant exposure to one problem-solving logic may thus influence how students think about problem solving. Other curricular resources contain a hidden curriculum as well. Ehrensal (2001) noted that textbooks used in business programs perpetuated an objectivist worldview by writing from a third-person objective point of view and citing the work of experts as the final word, leaving little room for disagreement. Business textbooks in the United States also tended to settle for domestic examples in their content. Sebastianelli and Trussler (2006) conducted a mixed methods study that analyzed business statistics textbooks and interviewed undergraduate business statistics students. The authors sought to determine if and/or how students were exposed to international issues in their statistics class. Sebastianelli and Trussler found that business 30 textbooks contained marginally more international data than they did a decade prior, and that students’ knowledge of international affairs is extremely limited (Sebastianelli & Trussler, 2006). Though Sebastianelli (2018) has continued to insist that business statistics can accomplish multiple learning goals, the earlier study suggests that a hidden curriculum in business statistics privileges a domestic context at the expense of internationalizing the curriculum (Leask, 2013). I encountered studies that also analyzed textbooks to identify a hidden curriculum. Dever and Mills (2015) analyzed one textbook on business management from each decade between 1960 and 2010, all published in the United States. They analyzed the discourse in the textbooks, including words and pictures, to identify how women were represented. Dever and Mills concluded that women were either not represented in the textbooks at all, or that feminized traits typically associated with women were not represented. Women leaders were portrayed as exercising masculinized leadership traits (e.g., competition) while more feminized leadership traits (e.g., interpersonal skills) were absent. These conclusions resonated with Mills’ (1997) inquiry into five business textbooks popular in Canada in the 1990s, in which he concluded that “masculinity and maleness is the norm” (p. 27). Masculinity was partly evident in how characteristics such as competitiveness, aggression, and individualism were assumed to be positive qualities, as opposed to social, relational, and cooperative traits (Mills, 1997). Sharen and McGowan (2019) found support for these textbook analyses in subsequent research on case studies used in business education. Sharen and McGowan indicated that women’s leadership was represented in the case studies as less visionary and less creative. Further, women’s leadership successes tended to be attributed to the organization rather than the women as leaders themselves. However, these gendered depictions of leadership were presented as gender-neutral (Dever & Mills, 2015). Mavin and Bryans (1999) criticized this projected neutrality as both 31 masking and reproducing a gender hierarchy that exists in the formal business curriculum, informing students about who and what leaders look like and othering those who do not conform (Dever & Mills, 2015). Though these studies are important contributions to understanding the hidden curriculum in a business context, they are limited to the formal texts themselves. Because lectures, case studies, and texts do not exist independently from the rest of the business school environment, my study considered formal resources and pedagogies as a part of a greater business education environment. Exploring the hidden curriculum throughout the integrated social, material, and temporal environment added depth to how the hidden curriculum in the formal curriculum is understood. The hidden curriculum also manifests in the formal curriculum through formal assessments. However, formal assessments have not been explored in a business education context. Because assessments are an important site of the hidden curriculum, I incorporated assessments in my analysis to gain a better understanding of how the hidden curriculum operates in business education. For example, assessment tools such as tests, presentations, or projects may contain a hidden curriculum by identifying what content is truly important, and what skills are necessary for demonstrating such content. Writing from the perspective of a faculty member at a medical school, Hafferty (1998) suggested that assessments are “vehicles for conveying what is and is not important within the organization” (p. 405). In other words, formal assessments indicate what content is important and what can be ignored (Blasco, 2012; Kovac & Coppola, 2000; Sambell & McDowell, 1998). This encourages students to focus only on certain elements of what is taught and can induce surface-level approaches to studying and learning (Joughin, 2010; Sambell & McDowell, 1998). Thus, the hidden curriculum in assessments serves a 32 socializing role in that it affirms and punishes particular behaviors and knowledge, indicating what is desirable to know or do, and what is not. To neglect this in studying the hidden curriculum in business education leaves a considerable gap in understanding how the hidden curriculum operates. By incorporating the nature of assessments in a business education context, my study addressed that gap. Cognitivizing the Hidden Curriculum Regardless of which specific elements of the hidden curriculum have been studied in a business education context, such discussions tend to frame their analyses around how their findings might better support the formal curriculum. This focus on aligning a hidden curriculum with the formal curriculum exemplifies how existing studies treat the hidden curriculum as a manipulatable text accessible through reflection. This is perhaps best seen in how literature on the hidden curriculum in business education explores ethics. The literature that I explored insisted that students can learn about ethics from the hidden curriculum of how the formal curriculum is taught (Boyle, 2007; Hernández-López et al., 2020): “signals about appropriate conduct are communicated in many subtle ways beyond formal curricular content” (Blasco, 2012, p. 366). These communications can align or misalign with the formal curriculum (Blasco, 2012; Giacolone & Promislo, 2013). For example, students learn to devalue business ethics when it is seen as being non-compulsory, not measured by formal assessments, and missing from the formal curriculum in “harder” subjects such as economics, law, and functional practice (Høgdal et al., 2021; Macfarlane, 1995; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Though matching practice and rhetoric is no easy task (Boyle, 2007; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015), the literature emphasized aligning the formal and hidden curriculum to facilitate a consistent (i.e., controlled) socialization process (Caza & Brower, 2015; Høgdal et al., 2021; Otteweil et al., 2015). Speaking of the hidden 33 curriculum in business education as if it were a coherent text to be manipulated, Blasco (2012) and Caza and Brower (2015) suggested that reinforcing the formal curriculum with the hidden curriculum would strengthen business students’ education. Indeed, “students will be far more receptive to what they are being taught if this is not belied by what they see around them” (Otteweil et al., 2005). The above examples represent how the hidden curriculum has been explored as a function of the formal curriculum in business education. As of yet, existing studies have narrowed their analysis to aligning the content of the hidden curriculum with the content of the formal curriculum. This represents a cognitivized approach to the hidden curriculum, i.e., treating the hidden curriculum as a text to be taught rather than a knowledge that is embodied. Further, existing research simply describes the hidden curriculum within the formal curriculum as an autonomous, unidirectional phenomenon. However, my affective epistemological framework allowed me to consider the hidden curriculum in the formal curriculum as part of a more comprehensive curricular environment. In this way, the hidden curriculum extends outside the classroom into the rest of the business school’s social and material environments and is mediated by students in their encounters. Though Ehrensal (2001) did draw connections between textbooks, case studies, and the lecture itself, his work was conceptual and did not account for the hidden curriculum as a dynamic encounter. As such, my integrated methodology illuminated how students affectively encountered the hidden curriculum in a business environment, including but not limited to the formal curriculum. Organizational Culture The next stop on the tour takes a step outside of the classroom and witnesses the interactions in the rest of the business school: the hallways, offices, and meetings. Here I 34 encountered the hidden curriculum in business literature through the everyday, personal, non- curricular interactions that occur in a business school environment. As Strange and Banning (2015) stated, “environments are transmitted through people, and the dominant features of any given environment are partially a function of the collective characteristics of the individuals who inhabit it” (p. 51). In other words, a business school’s organizational climate can play host to a hidden curriculum (Birtch & Chiang, 2014; Gupta et al., 2020). The language used, stories and jokes told, and departmental events all contribute to business students’ perceptions of what a program values (Blasco, 2012; Borges et al., 2017; Ehrensal, 2016). As such, a business school can model values and habits (Hernández-López et al., 2020) and socialize members through casual interactions with other members of the organization (Rhoads et al., 2017). More formally, leaders in business education programs can perform a hidden curriculum by how they act in their professional roles (Hernández-López et al., 2020). For example, performing management duties ethically and leading by example can influence students to act similarly (Blasco, 2012). Further, professors in business classrooms might set the norms and values for their classes and have a meaningful influence on students’ developing perspectives (Hernández-López et al., 2020; Høgdal et al., 2021). Thus, both casual and formal encounters serve as a hidden curriculum with socializing potential. However, there is something missing about this stop. Based on the way that the business literature describes organizational culture, above, we might experience culture through our ears only! However, organizational culture can and should be perceived as existing outside of conscious dialogue with other people. Indeed, the entire environment should be considered pedagogic (Healy, 2016). Blasco’s (2012) theoretical work suggested the “feel” or “spirit” of a business school is an important element of the environment. However, Blasco’s work is an 35 exception. Other studies on the hidden curriculum in a business environment have failed to account for non-human environmental and cultural influences. Scholars studying the hidden curriculum outside of business education have used “visual ethnography” (Gair & Mullins, 2001) and a “cultural web” (Mossop et al., 2016) to explore the hidden curriculum in an organization’s culture. Their studies and others like them included analyses of college rituals, rules and regulations, language, building names, course titles, and course schedules (Hafferty, 1998; Jones & Young, 1997). These non-human elements of the organizational culture have not been implemented in researching the hidden curriculum in a business environment. Further, none of the studies that I encountered regarding the hidden curriculum in business education utilized affect to enrich their analytical lens. By exploring culture through an affect lens, culture becomes visible beyond human encounters with each other to include human encounters with their social, material, and temporal environment. My study addresses this gap in how organizational culture is conceptualized in the business literature by borrowing from studies outside of business and developing an affective lens to investigate culture more comprehensively. The Co-Curriculum The next stop on the tour is to explore the hidden curriculum in business education as an element of the co-curriculum, or the academic experiences in which students engage outside of the formal classroom. Examples of the co-curriculum include joining a student organization, but also include field trips, site visits, guest lecturers, internships, and presentations outside of class. These resources exist outside of the formal curriculum, but still present students with a hidden curriculum of desirable behaviors, character traits, and beliefs (Sharen & McGowan, 2019). 36 Though there are many shapes that co-curricular experiences take, Ehrensal (2001) identified the internship as “probably the most powerful form of pedagogic action outside of the classroom” (p. 108). Ehrensal described the internship as a hands-on experience in which students learn to behave and respond appropriately in a functional business environment. Internship experiences are pragmatic and not necessarily academic in nature. Therefore, internships are a rich pedagogic environment where students are forced to learn in a particular work environment where they are expected to keep up functionally and socially (Ehrensal, 2001). Jackson (2017) further affirmed the importance of work-integrated learning, defined as “the interweaving of practical work experience with classroom learning” (p. 835). Jackson’s analysis revealed that work-integrated learning had a positive impact on students' professional identity development. Her findings again suggested that the hidden curriculum operates in the co-curriculum by developing affective dispositions toward work and professionalism that are not explicitly taught. As another example of the hidden curriculum operating within the co-curriculum, Borges et al. (2017) explored Brazilian students’ rationale for joining student organizations. They found that student organizations provide a space for students to make sense of the implicit and explicit demands that are required to be successful in the program. Some of these demands included learning more about business practice in general, developing personal and professional skills, and getting real-world experience. In this way, extracurricular experiences could align with Bergenhenegouwen’s (1987) argument that elements of the hidden curriculum help students make sense of the practical demands of the ritualization of postsecondary education. Borges et al. (2017) was the only study I encountered that analyzed a hidden curriculum in on-campus co-curricular activities. Most work has been done on off-campus activities, which 37 is beyond the scope of this study. Therefore, I identified another “clearing” in understanding how department-sponsored or department-affiliated co-curricular activities produce a hidden curriculum. Productive inquiry into on-campus activities would include how student clubs are started and organized, when and which guest speakers visit classes, and what guidelines exist for formal presentations. An affective lens would emphasize how students interact within student organization and around guest speakers, how setting influences behavior and vice versa, and how students navigate the emotional process of developing a professional identity. Some of these questions are addressed in Chapter 5 of this study, which explores students’ engagement with student organizations in a business setting. The Physical Environment The last stop of the tour of the hidden curriculum in business education is not a stop to show what has been said in the literature, but to reveal what is conspicuously missing. And that is the physical expression of business education itself! The hidden curriculum is literally built into the material and cultural environment (Costello, 2001; Gair & Mullins, 2001; Mossop et al., 2013), and I was surprised to see it ignored in published studies on the hidden curriculum in business education. It is important in an affective methodology to acknowledge the body as an important mechanism for learning, and that students can develop emotional, sensory, and embodied knowledge through encounters with architecture, objects, signs, and symbols (Costello, 2001; Gair & Mullins, 2001; Healy, 2016). However, the existing research that I encountered neglected the built environment as a (hidden) curricular resource. This represents a significant gap that inhibits a comprehensive understanding of the hidden curriculum in a business school. 38 My study placed a substantial amount of emphasis on the physical environment. As such, my findings are contributing to this section of the forest’s health by exploring where and how the hidden curriculum can be located in a business school. Specifically, I focused my analysis on encounters with the built (e.g., architectural) and material (e.g., furniture) environment as a source of the hidden curriculum. Additionally, clothing has been primarily ignored as a site of the hidden curriculum in business education. Dress is mentioned in passing by Gair and Mullins’ (2001) interview accounts of the hidden curriculum in higher education and by Bass’s (2010) suggestions for incorporating etiquette into the formal curriculum in business schools. However, no other studies that I encountered mentioned clothing. As such, I have considered the “adorned environment” as an encounter with the hidden curriculum in business education. Because no work on the physical environment exists in a business context, the paragraphs below will introduce the concept of the physical environment as a hidden curriculum in postsecondary education in general. The role of space in higher education has recently emerged as a research topic and has shed important light on the different ways that knowledge is imparted. Beyond just influencing how a student studies, “[Learning] atmospheres arise from architecture, furnishing, signage and social convention” (Cox, 2018, p. 1088). As such, the built environment has the ability to make a person feel something (Gair & Mullins, 2001)—such as grandeur in front of a pillared, neoclassical library, or excitement in a massive athletic stadium. The combined feelings and messages that are accumulated through interacting with the built environment are significant. Costello (2001) noted that “Before students begin to know their professors and peers, they [get] important cues regarding their new professional roles from the architecture, decor, and level of maintenance of the facilities they entered” (p. 46). The physical spaces on campus can send 39 messages to students and faculty alike about the agendas that are important in shaping school structures (Gair & Mullins, 2001; Gordon, 1995). For example, buildings are designed to reflect efficiency and economy, polished woodwork is intended to impress visitors, labyrinthian hallways are meant to confuse new students, deferred maintenance can lower expectations for what particular students could encounter in their careers, and high-quality buildings might reflect the high-quality programs that are housed within (Costello, 2001; Eisner, 1985; Gair & Mullins, 2001). The tension between built and natural environments can also teach students about how academic concepts play out in the world; for example, sustainability can be taught in one way in the classroom and practiced in an entirely different way through the campus ecological infrastructure (Winter & Cotton, 2012). On a smaller scale, decorations and visual elements of the material and linguistic culture also have a pedagogical role. Costello (2001) analyzed visual texts posted on the walls of a law school and school of social work to identify the hidden curriculum at play. She found that the visible demographic identities of donors sent messages about who can be wealthy and successful, and which identities are not pictured. Costello also found that the material posted on the respective schools’ bulletin boards sent specific messages about which kinds of academic and extracurricular performances are desirable, and which are not. Further, Caza and Brower (2015) suggested that the periodicals or newspapers on display in an academic department could signal the types of knowledge and perspectives that the school or program values. Linguistically, studies such as Arieli et al.’s (2016) that analyzed the language used on a business department’s website could reveal important clues as to how the department sees itself and what it values. The same could be said about business schools’ mission statements (Hernández-López et al., 2020). In this way, nonhuman and linguistic objects contribute to the way that participants in a school 40 setting learn about what is valued there (Wozolek, 2020), affirming the presence of a hidden curriculum in the built and material environment. Nespor’s (1994) ethnographic study represents a possible exception to the lack of literature on space in business education. Nespor employed actor-network theory to demonstrate how undergraduate programs in business management and physics utilized space (e.g., classrooms, academic buildings) and time (e.g., preparing for professional practice) as pedagogical tools. Nespor’s analysis implies an affective hidden curriculum by exploring how space and time shaped students’ professional socialization. However, Nespor did not utilize an affect theoretical lens nor did he make claims about a hidden curriculum as such. Nespor’s work provides fertile ground for further research, which I address in Chapter 7 of this study. In short, though space and place remain understudied topics in postsecondary education (Beckers et al., 2015; Cox, 2018), it is clear that students encounter a hidden curriculum through the spaces, places, and materials that comprise different learning environments. An affective epistemology and methodology made this type of hidden curriculum visible by foregrounding knowledge gained through students’ encounters with their social, emotional, and physical environments. This type of analysis, heretofore neglected in work on the hidden curriculum in business education, provides valuable insights into how the hidden curriculum manifests in business education. Conclusion This walk through the woods represents how I have encountered the hidden curriculum in a business education context. Though existing studies are productive in defining a hidden curriculum and operationalizing their findings, I have also identified clearings, or gaps in how and where the hidden curriculum has yet to be studied in a business context. Finally, though 41 existing empirical studies on the hidden curriculum in business education are set in business schools across the globe, I did not find research that explored the hidden curriculum specifically in a comprehensive university’s business school in the United States. Thus, the existing literature is limited in its understanding of the hidden curriculum and how/where students engage with it. In contrast, my study was governed by an affective onto-epistemology and methodology. I analyzed the hidden curriculum as a complex encounter between agentic students and a rich curricular environment. I found that students’ encounters influenced students’ embodiment of their practice, their “becoming” and “being” as business students. This affective approach integrated the elements of the hidden curriculum as a functioning whole and used a novel ontology, epistemology, and methodology to explore the hidden curriculum as a dynamic encounter between agentic students and their pedagogic environments. In other words, my study has planted a new tree in a clearing, adding to the network of conversations that shape the forest of the literature. In the next chapter, I will introduce the affective frameworks that guided this study. I will translate an affective onto-epistemology into an affective methodology, and explain the methods I used to collect and analyze data. The next chapter will illuminate just how I investigated the hidden curriculum at a regional comprehensive university’s business school as an affective encounter between students and their various material, social, and temporal environments. 42 CHAPTER 3: UNDERSTANDING THE SENTIENCE OF OUR BEING One of the most frequent lessons I learn as I get older is that nothing is as simple as it appears. Everything is more complicated under the surface. There is always a “hidden wholeness” that takes more effort to understand, or a network of subterranean connections between seemingly independent objects (like trees, for example) just waiting to be explored. I am finding that this lesson—that nothing is as simple as it appears—is also true of my own being in the world. Everything around me, from my children to my hair, is more complicated than I expect it to be. I encountered another instance of this lesson listening to a conversation that Krista Tippett recorded with Robin Wall Kimmerer, an Indigenous scholar, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, botanist, writer, and professor (Tippett, 2022, May 12). As Robin recalled: I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings. (Tippett, 2022, May 12) Robin and Krista revealed the complexity behind my simple understanding of plants by reclaiming plants’ subjectivity from the inanimate objectivity that Western positivism attributes to plants. Yet while Robin and Krista’s conversation mostly revolved around the plant kingdom, I drew parallels to the study I conducted for this dissertation. Robin and Krista talked about “understanding the sentience of other beings,” but that begs the question of understanding the sentience of our beings. If we might consider plants sentient, would it not follow that our human bodies also possess an intelligence? Shouldn’t we consider our bodies to be more complicated 43 than the brain-container label that modern dualism ascribes to our bodies? The notion of embodied intelligence is what I will address in this chapter. In the sections below, I will provide a brief overview of affect theory and explain how my affective onto-epistemology informed my affective methodology. I will then review the methods and frameworks that I used to collect and analyze data. This chapter will foreground my subjectivity as a person and researcher, and the necessarily affective and embodied approaches I employed to facilitate my research. Affect as Being/Knowing I first encountered affect theory in the summer of 2020 in the context of an independent study with my advisor. I immersed myself in affect theory literature during a tumultuous summer on a personal, national, and global level. In this troubled context, I wrestled with big ideas like cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) and emotional surfaces (Ahmed, 2014) as they manifested in my own life. Affect theory continues to influence how I make meaning of myself and the world, and served as the theoretical foundation for my research that I present here. Affect theory itself is a cross-disciplinary endeavor that is often over-theorized and ambiguous in nature (Anderson, 2009; Boler & Zembylas, 2016). Affect has been theorized in a range of fields, from geography to philosophy and of course education (Massumi, 1995; Probyn, 2004; Thrift, 2004). Affect theory describes a plane of existence in which embodied people continuously emerge in a world defined by physical encounters, social rhythms, and interpersonal intensities (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Affect thus emphasizes the embodied process of developing non-cognitive knowledge through encounters with one’s surroundings. In this way, affect blurs the lines between embodiment and knowledge, and describes a space where embodiment is knowledge. (Per the title of this dissertation, affect describes bodies-of-knowledge as bodies-as-knowledge!) Consider the term affection as an example. I show affection to (or rather, with) my daughters 44 when we read books together: we snuggle our bodies close together and we share an experience that is shaped by our bedtime routine. In this experience we emerge as physically and emotionally close to each other, a form of being (snuggling) and knowing (sharing love for each other) where each informs the other. Seen through this example of affection, affect theory conflates being and knowing and complicates any clear distinction between ontology and epistemology. My affective onto-epistemology and methodology may resonate with other theories of embodiment, but affect is unique in its focus on emergence through encounters between objects. For example, experiential learning emphasizes learning by doing, and emotional intelligence emphasizes monitoring and managing one’s personally felt emotions. Other sociocultural theories such as new materialism and posthumanism also resonate with affect theory. Affect converges with these theories in their decentering rational human action as the sole determining force in material encounters. Affect theory is distinctive, however, in its emphasis on the inter- and intra-personal intensities that emerge as a result of physical and emotional encounters between people and their surroundings (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Finally, affect and emotion bear notable resemblance to each other. Some have cautioned against creating rigid boundaries between affect and emotion in the first place (e.g., Schmitz, 2014; Zembylas, 2016, 2022). For example, Beard et al. (2007) referred to students’ emotional experiences in higher education as “the affective” and Moriña (2022) used affect and emotion interchangeably in describing inclusive pedagogical strategies. However, distinctions between affect and emotion persist. Affect and emotion are primarily differentiated against each other ontologically. Massumi (1995) argued that emotions are recognizable and discursive, a capture of affect that is otherwise indeterminate and incipient. Zhao & Ford (2018) further noted a “rush 45 to signification [that] violently ossifies the affects actually in circulation into emotions” (p. 114). In short, affect and emotion complement each other, and both have been theorized together and individually. I use affect in this project, however, to emphasize people’s indeterminate and emergent state of being in a physical world. In this way, affect theory offers the ontological tools that I had not encountered through theories of emotion. Below, I explain three core tenets of affect theory that informed my affective onto- epistemology and methodology. These core tenets of encounter, indeterminacy, and emergence also served as the theoretical framework through which I developed my deductive analysis, as explored further below. Encounter Affect theory literature draws from Spinozan (and later, Deleuzian) philosophy that foregrounds the body’s ability to affect and be affected (Anderson, 2006; Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010; Healy & Mulcahy, 2020; Seyfert, 2012). To affect and be affected thus implies an inherent relationality in affective encounters. An embodied person cannot produce affect on their own, but must encounter another person or object to affect or be affected (Ahmed, 2014). This conceptualization of an encounter, in which affect is mutually exchanged as opposed to merely given or received, is important in understanding the rhythms and intensities that animate affective existence (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Healy and Mulcahy (2020) foregrounded the micro-power exchanged between people or objects in an affective encounter. Since affect is exchanged in an encounter, an encounter leaves mutual impressions on those people and objects involved (Ahmed, 2010). Subsequently, Healy and Mulcahy (2020) amplified the notion that encounters should seek to recognize respective abilities to affect and be affected. In an educational setting, Healy and Mulcahy suggested that 46 recognizing the mutual exchange of affect in an encounter should “disrupt narrow, instrumentalist approaches to ‘developing’ knowledge (and knowing subjects) while creating conditions of possibility…” (Healy & Mulcahy, 2020, p. 15). Rather than perceiving students as blank slates in a pedagogic environment, students should be seen as engaging with a heterogeneous environment inclusive of people, knowledge, space, and objects. The mutual exchange of affect in affective encounters disrupts notions of power in which one is merely subjected to the will of another. In my study, perceiving encounters as the mutual capacity to affect and be affected empowers students to respond to their surroundings and the hidden curriculum. As noted in Chapter 2, much of the existing work on the hidden curriculum homogenizes students into a powerless monolith, subjected to the whims of a hidden curriculum (cf. Birtch & Chiang, 2014; Cotton et al., 2013). The affective tenet of encounter is thus a valuable theoretical tool to foreground encounters’ mutually-affective nature. Figure 1 illustrates objects' mutual capacity to affect and be affected. Figure 1 Affective Encounters In Figure 1, above, two objects are represented by two circles. The equilibrium arrow represents each object’s ability to affect the other, while also being affected by the other. The equilibrium arrow’s unequal widths represent disequilibrium in the encounter. In this particular figure, Object 47 B is exerting a greater force in an encounter with Object A, though Object A is still responding to the encounter. Indeterminacy By indeterminacy, I allude to what affect theorists, primarily Brian Massumi (1995, 2002), refer to as the virtual. The virtual represents the infinite potential behind any given encounter that eventually materializes into a singular actual. Because of the infinite potential behind every encounter, encounters are indeterminate. Though a single outcome always actualizes in an encounter, the virtual possibilities reject any one outcome’s imminent actualization. For example, imagine a first-year college student encountering their faculty advisor for the first time. The student will draw from their past experiences, future goals, present expectations, and an infinite range of physical and emotional possibilities to (figuratively and literally) take their next step. Despite the infinite number of possibilities that are simultaneously possible, the student moves forward in a particular direction, thus actualizing a single action from the virtual, a slate of infinite possibilities. Bertelsen and Murphie (2010) admit that affect can indeed present itself in the actual (such as feelings or emotions). However, affect always carries with it the potentiality of the virtual, or, the “un-actualized capacities to affect and be affected” (DeLanda, 2002, p. 62, as cited in Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010, p. 145). Each affective encounter’s outcome, defined by mutual capacities to affect and be affected, is but one actualization from a virtual universe of possibilities (Thrift, 2004). Because infinite possibilities underlie each encounter, affective encounters produce indeterminate outcomes. However, this does not mean that everything is always possible. Thrift observed that institutions can shape people, and Papacharissi (2016) described “habituated interpretations” that establish a certain rhythm in how affect is performed (p. 311). In more sinister forms, Whitney 48 (2018) argued that “the circulation of affective forces among people is not homogeneous” (p. 495), and Allouche (2015) claimed that affective capabilities are often linked to power structures that constrain the virtual. Nonetheless, affect theory does not equate limitations around the virtual with determinacy. In every encounter, the spark of the virtual persists to limit predictability and creates room for an unexpected outcome, i.e., indeterminacy. The indeterminacy lurking behind every encounter disrupts the expectation that similar encounters will unfold similarly. In my study, analyzing student routines and decisions as indeterminate meant that students may or may not encounter the same people and objects, much less encounter them in the same way. A “hidden curriculum” was identified through empirical research in Chapter 2 (e.g., Dever & Mills, 2015; Ehrensal, 2001; Sharen & McGowan, 2019). However, affective encounters’ indeterminate nature questions how (or whether) students will encounter the hidden curriculum. The affective notion of indeterminacy thus provides a theoretical tool for analyzing not only how encounters unfold, but for analyzing how encounters could have unfolded, and what could have unfolded differently (Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010, p. 145). Figure 2, below, illustrates the affective notion of indeterminacy by alluding to the virtuality behind a single actualized encounter. 49 Figure 2 Affective Indeterminacy In Figure 2, a funnel of equilibrium arrows presupposes the arrow that represents the actualized encounter. Each arrow in the funnel has differing widths to represent one object’s ability to affect the other to a greater degree, and vice versa. The encounter’s virtual possible outcomes represented by the arrows in the funnel represent the indeterminacy that underscores each actualized encounter. Emergence In reference to human neurobiology, Papoulias and Callard (2010) suggested that “neurons, cells and signals have emergent qualities; that is, their scope and connections are not simply there at birth, but emerge as elements of a developing and unpredictable geography” (p. 36). In other words, a person or object continuously emerges in relation to its encounters with other people or objects in a fluid, dynamic socio-material environment. This concept of emergence, an ontology defined by mutually-affecting and indeterminate encounters, represents the third affective tenet that I will highlight in this chapter. 50 Seigworth and Gregg (2010) summarized the affective notion of emergence by describing affect itself as a relation, rather than a position. Drawing again from Spinozan philosophy, Seigworth and Gregg maintained that an object is always …becoming…pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself—webbed in its relations—until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter. (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 3, emphasis theirs) This is to say that people and objects are never solely self-contained, but contingent upon the encounters through which people and objects emerge. Actor-network theory offers support for the affective notion of emergence by insisting that an object’s meaning is not essential or inherent but only produced in relation to encounters with other objects (Fenwick & Tennant, 2004). According to Fenwick et al. (2011), objects such as education are a “distributed effect, something that continually emerges through negotiations and struggles at myriad nodes of possible connections between human and non-human elements” (p. 117). For example, a whiteboard in a classroom only takes on the status of a whiteboard when it is mobilized into an academic network for a familiar purpose (to take notes, illustrate a point, etc.). Thus, a “whiteboard” is as much a function of its encounters as its materiality. In this way, people and objects are continuously emerging since their meanings and identities are defined and redefined through indeterminate encounters with other people and objects. Few others have hinted at the possibility of students creating a hidden curriculum. Giroux & Penna (1979) theorized that students and teachers could make meaning of their experiences together. Sambell & McDowell (1998) suggested that students create a hidden curriculum by interpreting their assessments to bear particular meanings about what is important. However, 51 recognizing people and objects as ontologically emergent, or always emerging relative to their encounters with others, destabilizes an essential identity that exists outside of time and space. Emergence reveals the ontological performativity of meaning and identity. Since people and objects emerge through mutually-affecting encounters that unfold indeterminately, roles or identities are always performed through encounters. Further, meaning is never ossified but always changes depending on the context of the encounter. Perceiving objects such as “business education” and “the hidden curriculum” as emergent opens new doors for theoretical exploration. The affective notion of emergence asks not just what “business education” and “the hidden curriculum” are, but how “business education” and “the hidden curriculum” come to be. Figure 3 illustrates the affective notion of emergence. Figure 3 Affective Emergence Rather than representing the object as a circle with a solid line in Figure 3, the object (circle) is delineated as the outcome of several simultaneous encounters. The porous boundary still reflects a circular shape but represents an object’s continuous state of becoming, being “pulled beyond 52 its seeming surface-boundedness” as the result of myriad encounters (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 3). The affective tenets of encounter, indeterminacy, and emergence are prominent ideas in the affect theory literature. These ideas also shaped how I analyzed my findings, which I describe further below. The affective notion of mutually-affecting, indeterminate encounters that define how an object emerges also describe a way of being/knowing that governed my research. In the sections below, I explain in greater detail how affective being/knowing shaped the way I perceived and immersed myself in the research assemblage. Embodied Being/Knowing as an Affective Research Paradigm The three affective tenets explained above stood out to me as important concepts for understanding affect theory. Now equipped with a better understanding of affect and affect theory itself, I will operationalize the study of affect specifically toward a qualitative research context. I will first describe affective being and knowing (an onto-epistemology). I will then show how this affective onto-epistemology directly influenced how I designed my data collection and analysis (methodology) and how I collected data (methods). These sections represent how I translated affect theory—often articulated through dense, theoretical language— into a research paradigm that centers “the sentience of our being,” or an embodied form of being/knowing. Being/Knowing Through Embodied Encounters: An Affective Onto-Epistemology Affect foregrounds non-cognitive knowledge such as emotion and feelings as ways of knowing commensurate with cognition (Anderson, 2009; Boler & Davis, 2018; Seyfert, 2012). In other words, we come to know certain things (e.g., other people or the objects around us) not necessarily through conscious reflection, but by experiencing them through encounters (van 53 Manen, 2016; Ward, 2018). Take me, for example. I am Paul. As mentioned earlier, I stand over six feet tall and grow a red beard. I claim and present a White male identity, and my experience has been shaped by the privileges that my positionality tends to carry. My family income and lifestyle resonate with American middle-class culture. My accent betrays the fact that I have lived in the American Midwest almost my entire life. My teeth are straight due to orthodontic work as a kid (thanks, Mom and Dad!) but I have never had to, and do not, wear eyeglasses. Knowing this little bit about my embodied positionality in the world is important to understand how I encounter other people and objects and how they encounter me. My body does not just facilitate my experience, my body is my experience. Similarly, others experience me first by experiencing my embodiment. Through my ontological embodiment, I also develop an embodied epistemology; a “practical consciousness” (Williams, 2015, p. 22) or “performance knowledge” (Thrift, 2004, p. 66) that shapes (and is shaped by) how I navigate my environments. In other words, what I know is profoundly influenced by how I know, which is by experiencing others through embodied encounters. This “performance knowledge” often evades conscious reflection, but should not be compared to cognitive awareness as a lesser form of knowing. Indeed, affective knowledge is a way of thinking, an intelligence of its own, despite the tendency to associate “thinking” with “brain” at the expense of the body (Gunew, 2009; Thrift, 2004). Embodiment is thus more than a container for knowing: embodiment is knowing. My embodied “I” does not simply know by myself, however. Rather, an affective onto- epistemology insists that knowledge is developed through encounters (as described above) between people and objects. Though people have been conceptualized as individual entities that mediate unique experiences, those experiences always unfold in process with other people and 54 objects (Anderson, 2006; Seyfert, 2012). As such, the capacity to develop knowledge is distributed across human and non-human, physical and ethereal objects (Healy, 2016). Objects, in this case, might be considered material items like buildings or chairs, or more fleeting things like emotions or memories. Thus, I develop knowledge socially, through encounters with other people and objects (Blackman & Venn, 2010; Seyfert, 2012; Williams, 2015). To “develop” knowledge is perhaps better conceptualized as “co-creating” knowledge together with the people and objects who we encounter. Returning to the end of Chapter 1 as an example, I noted that Krista’s wisdom unfolds best through her conversations with others. Krista co-creates wisdom through her encounters with guests on the show. An affective onto-epistemology similarly emphasizes co-creating knowledge through encounters between embodied people and other affective objects. Affective knowledge thus presupposes an encounter, since knowledge cannot be developed in complete isolation. In short, I co-create affective knowledge, mediated by my own embodiment, through embodied encounters with other people and objects. This affective onto-epistemology resonates closely with the affective tenet of encounter as described above, but appears to neglect the other tenets of indeterminacy and emergence. I respond to this by considering embodied encounters as the site of knowledge production (or, co- creation). Affective knowledge itself would certainly be considered in terms of knowledge’s indeterminate and emergent nature, but these adjectives describe the knowledge that finds its source in the gerund “encounter.” Thus, an affective onto-epistemology privileges the notion of encounter to describe how knowledge is (co-)created, but suspends the notions of indeterminacy and emergence until the structure of knowledge is under consideration. In other words, “indeterminate” and “emergent” serve a more strictly epistemological function, whereas “encounter” necessarily implies an ontological and epistemological claim. 55 Figure 4, below, depicts an affective onto-epistemology. Figure 4 Affective Onto-Epistemology The two objects in Figure 4, represented by circles, are shaded differently which represents each object’s unique embodiment. The encounter is again represented by an equilibrium arrow, and the knowledge gained through the encounter is represented by the shading between the lines of the arrow. The different shades representing knowledge gained in the encounter represent how knowledge is mediated by each object’s unique embodiment. Important to recall is that the “knowledge” represented in Figure 4 refers to the non-cognitive, pre-conscious “performance knowledge” (Thrift, 2004, p. 66) or “practical consciousness” (Williams, 2015, p. 22) that is of interest to affect theory. Further, as established through Figure 2, the knowledge represented between the equilibrium arrow is but one of a virtual slate of outcomes of the encounter. As established through Figure 3, the solid line in Figure 4 misrepresents objects’ emergent nature. For the sake of simplicity, however, a single actualized encounter and solid lines are used in Figures 4 and 6. Identifying Embodied Encounters: An Affective Methodology As articulated above, an affective epistemology recognizes knowledge that is co-created through encounters between embodied people and other people and objects. In this section, I will translate my affective onto-epistemology into the affective methodology that guided my data 56 collection and analysis. My methodology first foregrounded the environment of which my students were a part, and the encounters that were facilitated with/in that environment. My affective onto-epistemology perceived the research environment, which I refer to as an “assemblage,” as pedagogic insofar as knowledge emerges through mutually-affective encounters. My methodology also foregrounded my role as the researcher. Since knowledge is co-created through encounters, the knowledge I developed as a function of my research was also co-created through my encounters as a researcher. Both the assemblage and my role as the researcher are further discussed below. The Affective Assemblage Affective knowledge is developed through encounters with human and non-human others. Therefore, my affective methodology perceived an affective hidden curriculum as students’ encounters with that which was present, but often taken for granted. That which was present comprised an intense consolidation of time, space, people, objects, and relationships; in short, a web of objects that affected and were affected by each other. To describe such a consolidation, Bøhling (2015, borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, 1998) used the term assemblage to identify the “dynamic sociomaterial constellation consisting of a range of disparate elements continually entering into relations with one another in ordered but unstable ways” (p. 164). I am drawn to this term because it implies a singularity—a unit with parameters that includes and excludes particular elements—that is made up of a dynamic plurality. In other words, an assemblage is a gestalt that is made up of individual parts but is not reducible to any one of them. Perceiving the research field as an assemblage is imperative to understand how different elements existed in relation to each other in a state of continuous emergence (Blackman & Venn, 2010), as articulated in an affective onto-epistemology. 57 Students’ business education was situated within the assemblage of physical, social, and temporal environments as described above. However, my affective onto-epistemology claims that the assemblage was more than a context. My methodology thus emphasized embodied students’ encounters with/in the assemblage as pedagogic, an engagement with an affective hidden curriculum. My affective methodology thus magnified the routine encounters between students and the physicality, sociality, and temporality in which students and I were immersed. Though the elements of interest in an affective environment passed as “typical,” my affective methodology foregrounded these elements’ pedagogic potential exactly because they were ordinary. Figure 5 illustrates how the routine physical, social, and temporal environments combined to create the assemblage that framed my research. Figure 5 Affective Assemblage The assemblage, represented by the intersection of the physical, social, and temporal labeled “A,” is indeed an intersection but irreducible to any of its component parts. Physical elements of the assemblage included the built and natural environment (i.e., buildings and green space) and the decorations and artwork that were displayed within a space (such as furniture and paintings). The taken for granted social environment was also of importance. Social elements of the 58 assemblage included those who were present in the assemblage, either in body or image, including those who “fit” into the assemblage and those who did not (Ahmed, 2014). Of course, students themselves were part of the assemblage, which I will return to in Chapter 4. Social interactions within physical spaces, indicated by the area labeled “B,” created affective atmospheres, or the mutually-affecting encounters between multiple objects in a particular space (Zembylas, 2020). Affective atmospheres represented the collective knowledge that people and objects develop in relation to each other in a particular space, which created an affective “feel” to the environment (Anderson, 2009). Finally, despite focusing on the “present-ness” of ordinary routines, my affective methodology also recognized the temporal textures that animated the present. I accounted for how the present was shaped by the past and how the present was shaping the future. Temporal elements of the assemblage included the time of day, point in the semester, the semester itself, the spring season, and time defined by Covid-19. Social interactions were set in a temporal context, represented by the area labeled “C.” Time shaped how relationships emerged, for example, through class projects or connecting with friends over Zoom when social- distancing was in place. Similarly, space emerged as a temporal function, represented in the area labeled “D.” For example, some spaces in the assemblage were utilized in completely different ways when students returned to campus after Covid-19 forced classes online for a year. Figure 5 illustrates the intense consolidation of space, material, people, and time that comprised the assemblage that framed my research. Through My Own “I”s My affective onto-epistemology does not exempt me, the researcher, from the paradigm of co-creating knowledge through encounters. As such, my methodology re-affirms my invitation to you in the Preface to see this story through my own “I”s. I am an important piece of 59 my methodology, since the knowledge I present in the following chapters is the knowledge I co- created through my encounters in the assemblage. Consequently, the way that I present knowledge in the following chapters is a methodological act. Specifically, the language that I use is methodological. I liberally employ the first- and second-person perspective and share personal stories to remind you, the reader, that my findings are mediated by my embodied knowing. In short, my methodology insists that I represent data and findings as the knowledge I co-created with/in my own encounters. An Affective Methodology In summary, Figure 6 illustrates how I translated my affective onto-epistemology into my affective methodology. Figure 6 Affective Methodology As in Figure 4, the equilibrium arrows represent the encounter between student and assemblage and the shading represents knowledge co-created through the encounter. I consider this 60 knowledge to be the affective hidden curriculum. The equilibrium arrow connecting me to students’ encounters with the assemblage represents my encounters as a researcher. I consider the knowledge I developed through my encounters to be the data I collected. Recall from Figure 4 that the different shades representing knowledge gained in the encounter also represent how that knowledge is mediated by each object’s unique embodiment. Figure 6 helps to illustrate my methodology by foregrounding my own subjectivity’s importance, and students’ embodied encounters with/in the assemblage that they encountered and were indeed a part. My affective methodology thus focused on how I encountered the “performance knowledge” that I observed students developing because of their immersion in the business school assemblage. Below, I describe the methods I used to encounter students’ encounters with/in the assemblage. Recording Embodied Encounters: Affective Methods To operationalize my affective methodology, as described in the section above, I borrowed from ethnographic research methods. Ethnography uses in-depth interviews, participant analysis, and artifact analysis to study a people or cultural group, specifically cultural patterns and perspectives and the everyday experiences of individuals in a particular culture (Fraenkel et al., 2012; Glesne, 2011; Mills & Gay, 2019). However, my research questions and methodology were focused on the affective encounters through which students developed knowledge, not understanding a culture based on what is most explicitly important to its members (Howell, 2018). I did not use these methods to record students’ cognitive encounters with the formal curriculum, where learning objectives were made explicit. Instead, I employed ethnographic methods to study students’ embodied encounters with the routine physical, social, and temporal elements that comprised the business school assemblage. Encounters with the 61 routine elements in the business school assemblage were less likely to have formal learning objectives ascribed to them. However, because an affective onto-epistemology reveals all encounters as pedagogic, students could still develop knowledge in their routine encounters, thus encountering an affective hidden curriculum. As such, though my research is not a proper ethnographic study, I still adapted ethnographic methods to better understand the ordinary encounters through which students engaged a hidden curriculum. Further, just as an assemblage is not reducible to any of its individual elements, my data collection is not reducible to any individual method. These methods informed each other. Data collected from each method informed my data analysis as a whole and revealed the convergent and divergent ways that students engaged with an affective hidden curriculum. Below, I will explain how I employed participant-observation (social immersion), mobile informational interviews (socio-material immersion), and content analysis (material immersion) as methods in my study. I will explain how I utilized these methods to identify, observe, and analyze how a hidden curriculum emerged through students’ routine and embodied encounters with/in the affective assemblage. Social Immersion: Participant-Observation The first phase of my data collection utilized participant-observation. I separated my observations schedule into two general categories: general observations and classroom observations. I began my general observations immediately after receiving IRB approval from both my research university and the university at which I observed. In all, I made a total of 14 general observations throughout the business school between March 14 and April 8, 2022. I also reached out to different professors at the university where I observed to gain access to a section of one of their courses—Management 499 (MGT499), Administrative Policy. This course was a 62 senior capstone course mandatory for all business majors and studied the “functions and responsibilities of general management in terms of analyzing problems that affect the performance, character, and success of the total business enterprise.” In all, I observed nine class sessions between March 15 and April 19, 2022. Both types of observations were governed by an observation protocol that I submitted to the IRB. This protocol (see Appendix A) included seven prompts that inquired into how students, professors, and other staff engaged with space, time, and power in the business school. To document my observations and respond to the prompts posed in the protocol, I utilized field notes and photographs. Ethnographic methods are never comprehensive (Fraenkel et al., 2012; Mills & Gay, 2019) and obtaining consent to video-record from myriad collection sites posed a barrier to gaining access to the field. As such, I relied on written and visual notes to provide consistent and sufficient documentation of how I observed students engaging with the hidden curriculum. General observations. I organized my general observation schedule to include morning (8–11 a.m.), mid-day (11 a.m.–1 p.m.), afternoon (1–3:30 p.m.), and evening (4–6 p.m.) windows. I began my observations in what I observed to be high-traffic areas in the business school. In these spaces, I observed and took notes on the routine encounters between people, objects, and spaces within the business school at large as students, faculty, staff, and visitors navigated the building and each other. I eventually incorporated walks throughout the building into my general observation routine, specifically during passing periods, to observe encounters outside of the high-traffic areas where I initially started. Classroom observations. Once I obtained consent from a professor to observe one of his sections of MGT499, we met to discuss which class sessions I would be observing. Together, we 63 arranged for me to observe classes with different activities, including lectures, case studies, presentation workshops, exam review, and student presentations. The professor sent a letter introducing me to the class before my first observation (see Appendix B). I began my classroom observations the day after MGT499’s spring break and concluded observations after observing students’ final presentations at the end of the term. Though I intended to structure classroom observations between major assessments to offset the arbitrariness of my observations, this observation window worked just as well since students’ return from spring break was a natural entry point for me to join the class and final presentations marked the end of the semester. It was important for me to observe in a classroom in addition to making general observations for two primary reasons. First, classrooms might be most immediately identified as a “learning space” within the broader environment. Though I was not as interested in the cognitive knowledge that was presented to students, I was quite interested in how students encountered the presentation of such information. Formal curricular resources and assessments have been identified in existing literature as sources of a hidden curriculum (e.g., Sebastianelli, 2018; Dever & Mills, 2015), but have not yet been explored as affective objects. In short, a classroom is the best place to encounter the presentation of the formal curriculum. Second, the classroom was an enclosed space in which I encountered and developed relationships with members of the class. I was able to recruit students with whom I had already shared encounters to participate in informational interviews. Student input was necessary to answer my research questions, and valuable insofar as it both complemented and complicated the general observations that I made about spaces and routines in the business school. The four weeks that I spent as a participant-observer in the business school (including the classroom and the school at large) is an admittedly small window. However, encounters unfold 64 during every second of every day; such is the nature of “ongoing immersion” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1). Therefore, a short window of time was necessary to develop a succinct and coherent analysis. Socio-Material Immersion: Mobile Interviews Once I had established an observation routine in the business school in general and the classroom specifically, I began to recruit students from the class I observed to participate in semi-structured interviews. The students I recruited were students I had already interacted with in class, students with whom I had shared encounters and who knew me beyond the tall bearded man sitting in their capstone course. I began my recruitment with a team of students that I observed giving an informal presentation to the professor as a part of MGT499. To recruit others, I sent an email to the entire class (see Appendix C) and was given a moment during one class session to explain my research and recruit interview participants. I also talked to other student teams that I observed in the classroom. Students responded using a Google Form that asked them for their contact information, demographic information, and for any questions that they had prior to the interview (see Appendix D). I had proposed to interview between five and seven students, and I conducted a total of six interviews ranging from 10 minutes to 45 minutes. I will introduce my interview participants in Chapter 4. My interview sample was both convenient (interviewing those who responded to my solicitations) and purposive, in that I specifically asked students whose affective encounters could be mediated by their embodied presentations of gender and race. Learning that two of my participants were a transfer and adult learner, respectively, was helpful to the analysis but not an intentional research decision. In order to recognize how students encountered their material and social environments, I asked them to give me a “tour” of the business school, including the spaces that they consider 65 most meaningful to their business education and experience. I used a mobile interview method, modeled by Cox (2018) in his study on informal learning spaces in higher education. As with Cox’s methods, my mobile interviews comprised an interviewer and participant walking through different physical and social spaces and asking about the participant's associations and experiences in that space. This method is also similar to Bloom’s (1953) method of stimulated recall, in which showing visual cues to interviewees prompted a more vivid recollection of an experience and an enhanced response. Because an affective epistemology defines knowledge as developed within encounters between people and objects, interviews were held at the site of the encounter rather than disembodying the questions from the objects. In short, mobile interviews about embodied encounters were conducted as embodied encounters, led by students who articulated why particular elements of social and material spaces were important to them. Thus, each interview was an in-depth conversation that yielded valuable data about how students develop knowledge and orientations through their encounters in the business school. The students I interviewed gave me a personalized tour of the business school which yielded important insights into my data analysis. Even so, the students I interviewed encountered me as a researcher rather than a confidante, advocate, advisor, or friend. Consequently, despite offering a personalized tour of the building, students enacted a stoic, professional persona during their tours. Even when students recalled emotion-laden experiences, such as stressful exams or painful meetings with professors, students did so with an objective or even detached disposition. Students did not recount their experiences with the passion and emotionality of a subject whose education was entangled in a university business school’s complex social and academic power structure. I might speculate that students’ stoicism resulted from their professional socialization, presenting their experiences in the business school to me as they would present data from their 66 business ventures to shareholders. As such, students’ interviews explicated their encounters in the business school as a static entity. This is opposed to students revealing their encounters with the business school as a dynamic site of power, influence, and mutual impression. Because students did not reveal the tensions between conflicting forces in the business school, my findings present the appearance of social and organizational consensus. A critical paradigm might examine more closely the flows of power and influence that shapes students’ experiences. However, I present my findings through a constructivist paradigm that builds from students’ experiences as I encountered them. I recorded audio from the mobile interviews using my smartphone and transcribed the interviews myself. I did not seek funding to send the interviews out for transcription, and the time spent transcribing was valuable in immersing myself in the unfiltered data and noting the nuances of our conversation. As such, my transcripts not only included what was said, but how it was said, for example noting when an interview participant stopped to say hello to a friend or lowered their voice in a certain space. Material Immersion: Content Analysis The first two stages of my data collection included observing the general rhythm of encounters in the business school and in MGT499, and exploring some of the spaces and experiences that students identified as significant during our mobile interviews. In addition to these methods, I also included analyses on the built (i.e., architecture) and material (e.g., furniture) environment that I observed and that students identified in their interviews. I partly modeled these analyses from Gair and Mullins’ (2001) work comparing the physical spaces in a law school and school of social work. Costello’s (2001) work, analyzing posters, bulletin boards, and photographs in a higher education space was also influential. My analyses combined my 67 own encounters with such spaces and objects with students’ accounts of their encounters, resulting in analyses informed by multiple perspectives. Further, I had planned to conduct discourse analyses on the written language encountered in student-identified spaces and/or used by the business management program in their public-facing documents. However, I did not follow through with this for two reasons. First, there was not much written language in the business school in terms of signage or public literature. Second, any analysis that I could have done on the available written discourse would not have added depth to the conclusions I developed from the data I had already collected. Despite a lack of discourse analysis, however, I did find that observations about spoken language in different spaces yielded interesting insights that contributed to the themes explored in subsequent chapters. Personal Circumstances Consistent with an affective methodology, it is impossible to separate my methods from myself. In this way, I am a method in my own research design. My embodiment, as depicted in Figure 6, mediated how I conceptualized, collected, and analyzed my data. All of the data I collected and the decisions I made were extensions of myself, since “data” and “decisions” are simply other names to describe particular encounters that I experienced. The students I interviewed did not simply talk to an interviewer, they talked to me. There was more than a silhouette observing in the business school and the classroom, it was me. My own positionality asserted itself as a method to implement my affective methodology. Therefore, it is important for me to describe my own personal circumstances in conducting research for this dissertation. Academically, I collected all of my data within a single semester. I had set an academic plan to graduate at a particular time and wanted to ensure that my study would allow me to meet my graduation goal. Professionally, I was teaching two different classes in a different college at 68 the same university where I made my observations. My teaching schedule brought me to campus at least one night per week to teach. I also had a graduate assistantship at my research institution and an adjunct position at another local university. These other responsibilities involved me observing a total of nine student-teachers in secondary classrooms around the city and teaching a seminar class at each institution every week. My partner and I both worked from home and were raising two children, aged four and one year old at the time. I would drop off my older child at preschool three to four afternoons out of the week, and would work remotely from a local library until it was time to pick her up. As a result, I would schedule my data collection around the time that the class I observed was meeting, my daughter’s school schedule, and the student-teacher observations I had to make throughout the week. My personal circumstances are relevant because they shaped me and my research. My body was often tired from working on so many tasks, my emotions were often strained from working from home with two children, and my time felt stretched between so many institutions and responsibilities. On the other hand, I genuinely enjoyed all of my work and love my family. For all the weariness that such responsibilities brought I also felt a sense of accomplishment and encouragement living a life that I loved. In short, all of my personal circumstances shaped what data I collected and analyzed, and how I collected and analyzed the data for my study. In the following section, I describe my data analysis. Like my data collection, my analysis took different forms. I show below how my data analysis itself was an affective process, organizing and interpreting data about affect. Moving Toward Understanding: Affective Immersion as Data Analysis I value orderliness. When I have a car repair I need to make, I go online to find videos of people modeling, step-by-step, exactly what has to be done, in what order, and how to do it. The 69 video mechanics always make it look so easy! Whenever I get under the hood, however, whatever orderliness I anticipated from the videos instantly disappears. There are always unforeseen hurdles I have to clear in order to make any progress. Even though the video mechanics’ step-by-step instructions provide structure for what I need to do, I usually need to spend some time just familiarizing myself with my car’s specific situation before moving ahead. So it was with my data analysis. I have read hundreds of journal articles that describe a straight-forward process for data analysis which almost always results in a clean, compelling argument. As with my work in the garage, however, my work analyzing data also required me spending some (well, a lot of) time just familiarizing myself with the specific data I discerned and collected. Consequently, my data analysis was not a step-by-step process that could be packaged and replicated. Rather, the affective experience of immersing myself in the data and walking through the steps was part of the analysis itself. I will outline the steps I took to analyze my data below. However, the physical act of writing, the temporal act of re-considering and re- writing, and the social act of discussing ideas with others were analytical in and of themselves. First, Probyn (2010) suggested that writing is an embodied act through which the writer affects others’ bodies. In my experience, my writing affected my own body not only through re-reads and revisions but also through the very act of representing my thoughts through my body and a keyboard. In this way, the physical act of writing became a way of knowing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005): my written thoughts represented a progression of meaning-making that ultimately led to a final analysis. My analysis was also temporal. I complicated and problematized my initial analyses, which led to more thought and discussion and ultimately substantial re-writes. Developing an understanding of what my data were telling me was a process that took a long time. Further, I am under no impression that I have reached an objective “Understanding” of my 70 data. As time progresses and as I develop new theoretical understandings and performance knowledge (Thrift, 2004), I am almost certain that my understanding of how students engaged with the hidden curriculum will continue to change. Finally, my analysis was social. Discussing ideas with friends, family, and especially my advisor, Dr. Shahjahan, was key to developing the analysis that is represented in subsequent chapters. In sum, my data analysis was at once a technical process—working step by step to organize and consider vast and heterogenous data, as described below—and an affective process. In this way, I was a central piece of the data and analysis. The data I collected and the embodied, temporal, and social rhythms of my analysis were all undertaken through my own affective being/knowing. The embodied, temporal, and social elements as described above contextualized and gave meaning to each of the technical steps I took to analyze my data, which I describe here. As soon as I closed my data collection window, I began my data analysis. Upon compiling all my observation data into consolidated documents, I read through each note line by line. I grouped similar notes into common topics on a different document, which Saldaña (2014) referred to as prioritizing and analyzing. Corbin and Strauss (2007, as cited in Maxwell, 2013) refer to this process as “open coding,” or reading data and developing categories that appear to be important. Despite any technical naming convention, I emphasize that the topics under which I grouped my data were determined by me, and what stood out to me. Similarly, after transcribing and re-immersing myself in my interviews, I sorted my interview data according to the topics I developed from my observation notes. Though I was attentive to pieces of the interviews that supported the topics I was already working with, I was equally attentive to data that complicated or contested my own observations about a particular topic. In this way, I monitored my own immersion in the assemblage by using student interview 71 data to affirm and contradict my own observations. Though each topic became more complicated (e.g., students reported using classrooms in different ways than I had observed), the topics also became more textured and conducive to a more nuanced analysis. Once I had developed topics by organizing field notes and interview transcripts, I began to develop themes by identifying overlap and redundancy between the topics. Saldaña (2014) referred to this process as categorizing (p. 12). I returned to the field notes within each consolidated theme to narrow the themes with more specificity and direction. For example, the descriptive theme of “space” evolved to the more narrowly defined values theme of “how space is organized” (Saldaña, 2014, p. 25). Data analysis was thus a progressive process, a hermeneutic exercise in which ongoing analysis built upon and was shaped by previous notes and existing topics. By developing themes from related topics that I derived from my raw data, I utilized an inductive framework. Working from nothing but the data (and the residual impressions, orientations, and memories from my data-collection experience), I developed topical concentrations that would eventually lead to my final analysis. Once I had written analysis chapters around the themes I built, I re-analyzed my chapters by employing the affective tenets of encounter, indeterminacy, and emergence as theoretical lenses in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively. By re-analyzing inductive findings through a deductive framework, I was able to conduct a “higher level analysis” (Creswell, 1994, p. 154) to interpret my findings. An Affective Theoretical Framework The affective tenets of encounter, indeterminacy, and emergence combined to develop the theoretical framework I used to deductively analyze my findings. Figure 7 shows these three tenets in combination as a unified affective theoretical framework. 72 Figure 7 Affective Theoretical Framework Figure 7 represents how mutually-affecting encounters are but one actualization from a virtual slate of possible outcomes. This actualized, mutually-affecting encounter plays a role in pulling each object into being, shaping each object’s emergence as the result of the encounter. This theoretical framework helps depict how the hidden curriculum emerged as a mutual encounter between students and the various spaces, objects, people, and temporalities with which students routinely engaged. Validity Affective data analysis is affective in nature in two ways. First, employing affect theory offers a productive framework to describe and interpret the ways that embodied people develop knowledge through their encounters with other people and objects. Second, my affective role in the process was central. Affective research and analysis is itself an affective act insofar as the 73 decisions and observations made are mediated by the affective “I,” or, me. Though affect theory can help describe and interpret findings, my findings are also an extension of myself. Therefore, affect assumes two simultaneous roles. The first role is providing an interpretive theoretical lens to build a methodology and interpret findings. The second role is foregrounding the lived experience that does not just frame the research process, but that very much is the research process. Though my findings are thus a result of my positionality and subjectivity, it is important to maintain that my findings are more than simply my projections. I thus discuss the measures I took to ensure validity below. According to Lather (1986), all research is ideological and scientific neutrality or empirical objectivism is “‘a nostalgic longing for a world that never was’” (Cronbach, 1980, p. 105, as cited in Lather, 1986, p. 77). However, even though “generalization should not be emphasized in all research” (Stake, 2000, p. 448), it is important to sustain some form of trustworthiness and reliability. To sustain credibility, I interrogated my own subjectivity in my role as the researcher and interpreter of encounters. This unfolded in three ways. The first was by staying attentive to student accounts that both affirmed and disrupted my own perceptions and observations. In other words, I “[sought] counterpatterns as well as convergences” in the data (Lather, 1986, p. 67). Recognizing the fluidity and indeterminacy of emergence and knowledge development in the encounters I observed was to maintain my data’s authenticity and credibility. The second form of validity was to routinely engage in critical self-reflexivity. This was a process by which I documented how my own embodiment in the encounters I observed could change the encounter (or how I perceived the encounter) in the first place. Critical reflexivity was primarily done through the processes of writing and conversation as described above. 74 The last form of validity was by recognizing my role in separating the assemblage into what I determined were its constitutive elements. In this way, I likened my research activity to the actions I take when I (or my partner Nora) braid our daughters’ hair. We first separate a single cascade of hair into three distinct strands that we then rearrange to create another single, but different pattern. Similarly, my interpretive actions as a researcher separated what was otherwise a complex, consolidated assemblage (i.e., a month in a business college) into its discernable parts (e.g., the pieces of the assemblage described in the next chapter and the different elements of the hidden curriculum described in subsequent chapters). I then combined the discernible parts into this dissertation, which represents a consolidated analysis. Borrowing from Tesch (1990, as cited in Creswell, 1994), I de-contextualized and re-contextualized to produce a new whole. To maintain validity in this study, it is imperative that my analysis is understood not as the imminent interpretation of the assemblage, but my separation and re- membering the parts of the whole. In short, through embracing my data’s complexity and my own subjectivity as the researcher, I engaged the above “self-corrective mechanisms” to facilitate a generative openness to divergence, ambiguity, and my own material involvement in that which I observed (Lather, 1986). In the next chapter, I will speak at more length to what I have described above as separating the assemblage into its constitutive elements. Students’ ordinary encounters with/in their material, social, and temporal environments were critical in developing embodied knowledge about business education. As such, a more thorough account of the material, social, and temporal environments follows. 75 CHAPTER 4: “THE MUSIC AND THE AUDIENCE HAVE MERGED” Music is important to me. I make music, I listen to music, and I am emotionally attached to music. I am also entertained by music—not just by listening, but by learning more about it. I recently encountered a conversation between Krista Tippett and the folk-rock duo the Indigo Girls on the On Being podcast (Tippett, 2019, June 27). Describing music as a transcendent experience, band member Amy Ray observed that there are times in a concert when “the music and the audience and everything has merged, and there’s no separation between performer and audience…No separation” (Tippett, 2019, June 27). The Indigo Girls described creating a new singularity out of a plurality of parts: in other words, an assemblage. As described in Chapter 3, an assemblage is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and irreducible to any single component. An Indigo Girls concert is thus misunderstood by describing the band members or the makeup of the audience. Rather, an Indigo Girls concert might be described as the mutually affecting encounters that create something greater than the sum of its parts. However, it is essential to separate the band members from the audience and even each other in order to truly understand the Indigo Girls’ music. In short, we must understand the assemblage’s component parts before understanding how the parts combine. In this chapter, I will separate the singularity of the assemblage in which I conducted my research to identify (with pseudonyms) and analyze the component parts. An affective onto- epistemology holds that students’ educational experiences are inclusive of their affective encounters with their material, social, and temporal environments. Subsequently, the material, social, and temporal elements that informed my observations and interviews are of utmost importance to make sense out of any data I collected. The data I collected and analyzed would have unfolded very differently in a different assemblage. As such, I begin my analysis with a 76 chapter to “dis/assemble” the assemblage. Although each component below is discussed individually, I note here that each component influences the others and vice versa, as is the nature of an assemblage. As such, I am both assembling (integrating different parts) and disassembling (creating distinctions between the parts) the assemblage. Figure 8 depicts how the integrated assemblage is suspended when the component parts are described. Figure 8 Suspending the Assemblage to Identify the Parts Space and the Material Environment To best describe the physical environment in which my observations took place, I will introduce the Shulman College of Business (SCB) as a part of Great River State University (GRSU). Healy (2016) noted that the social and material are woven together in a way that distributes affective agency across human and non-human actors. As such, a discussion of the spaces that I observed is necessary to understand how and what students encountered in their material environment. Each space discussed below is relevant to analysis in subsequent chapters. The Shulman College of Business The SCB is a part of GRSU’s downtown campus, set in the second largest city in the state and on the west bank of the Great River which runs through the region. GRSU’s other campus is 77 Adenville, a small suburb about 12 miles outside of the city’s downtown. The Adenville campus is the “original” campus, built in 1960 when the university (at that time, college) was founded. I sensed that GRSU was firmly grounded in its regional community on the west side of the state. For example, buildings across both campuses are named after local philanthropists (donors) as well as bodies of water that factor predominantly into the state geography. Further, GRSU draws mostly in-state students, with a very low percentage of non-resident international students. Formal connections with the local community are also a point of pride for GRSU, with each college in the university maintaining formal offices and programs that work with community partners. GRSU is officially categorized as a public doctoral/professional university with very high undergraduate enrollment. Though research activity is expected for GRSU faculty, an emphasis on teaching is prominent at the university. GRSU as a whole felt to me like a typical regional comprehensive university that is rooted in local culture and caters primarily to its home state. Figure 9 shows where the SCB is geographically located on GRSU’s campus. Figure 10 shows the component parts of the SCB building, which are described in more detail below. The figures show how the SCB is a later addition to the downtown campus, opened in 2013 while the other buildings in the downtown campus opened in 2000. The SCB’s location perhaps betrays its status as a more recent addition. The SCB is tucked behind a residence hall and accessible only through small, winding back roads that snake between existing campus buildings to the west or an old industrial corridor to the south. As a function of the backroads that lead to the SCB and the large parking lots that surround it, the SCB sits almost as an island along the Great River, separated from the rest of campus by its geographic location and its specific purpose in serving only business students. 78 Figure 9 Map of the SCB’s Geographic Location Figure 10 Identification of the SCB’s Component Parts 79 In the following sections, I describe the rooms and spaces that comprised the different floors in the SCB. Pictures are also provided. Table 1 provides a consolidated description of which rooms and spaces were on each floor. Table 1 Rooms and Spaces in the SCB Floor of the SCB Rooms and Spaces First Floor Bunting Gallery Collegiate Entrepreneurial Organization (student organization office) Heusmann Exchange Lobby Small Business Development Centers Student Academic Advising Offices Tilles Forum Various conference rooms Vondel Global Trade Center Second Floor Academic Classrooms (n=3) Case Classrooms (n=6) Cluster Classrooms (n= 3) Computer labs (n=3) Team rooms (n=15) Various copy rooms Fourth Floor Board Room Lobby Board Room The First Floor The first floor of the SCB is composed of various student- and community-oriented spaces. Students enter the building to the first floor via a cavernous lobby and can either take a grand staircase to the second floor or proceed through sliding glass doors to enter the Heusmann Exchange (described further below). The Heusmann Exchange is in the center of the building and marks a nexus between two wings that extend to the north and south of the building. The north wing features the student academic advising office, a number of small conference rooms, GRSU’s chapter of the Collegiate Entrepreneurial Organization (“CEO”), and the Small 80 Business Development Center. The hallway ends with an exit to an outdoor promenade and a staircase leading to the upper floors. The south wing runs past a small cafe and through the named Bunting Gallery, a hallway with windows to the outdoor courtyard on one side and doors to the Tilles Forum on the other. The Tilles Forum is an enormous multipurpose room that is used for everything from career fairs to banquets with movable walls that create smaller, distinct spaces. Past the Gallery and the Forum, the south wing opens up to the Vondel Global Trade Center office, another office for the Small Business Development Center, a conference room, the Metzger Study Lounge (described further below), and a staircase to the upper floors. Overall, my impression of the first floor of the SCB was that it felt like a hotel. Words fail to describe exactly why I felt that way, which is consistent with the notion that affect eludes conscious reflection and registers on a non-discursive level. However, my experience on the first floor felt as though I were a guest, and that the space was designed to treat me as a guest. I was always temporarily comfortable on the first floor of the SCB, but never felt that I should stay for too long. Below I offer more details about the Heusmann Exchange and Metzger Study Lounge. I observed these two spaces to be significant to students' routines, and my interview participants all mentioned them. I provide, in affective terms, how I encountered each space and provide a photograph identifying each space’s prominent components. The Heusmann Exchange. The Exchange is a large, open space that sits in the center of the SCB, and is where I began each of my general observations. The Exchange is a prominent space in the SCB. Beyond its cavernous size, the Exchange is the first thing a visitor would see after walking through the lobby and serves as a hub between the two wings on the first floor. Figure 11 below captures a view of the Exchange from the rear. I personally observed the Exchange to be a noisy space. Though I never observed shouting or yelling in the Exchange, the 81 tall ceiling and stone floors amplified any sound that was made. A casual conversation, an elevator dinging, a chair scraping against the floor, or even the sound of a metal spoon scraping overnight-oats out of a glass jar (an unnaturally loud sound that I often heard during my observations which left an impression on me) all echoed throughout the space. The Exchange also was noisy in the sense that there was always some kind of white noise. For example, even if the Exchange was totally empty, a playlist of yesterday’s hits was constantly playing through the sound system. I recognized songs that were popular over the decades, music from Jay Giles, Tom Petty, Lenny Kravitz, Cheryl Crow, and Taylor Swift, to name a few. Along with the echoes of routine movements, the music contributed to a lazy din that I observed as a constant in the Exchange. This white noise represented a dull but consistent audial drumming that was both caused and anonymized by different sources. I perceived an ambiguous atmosphere in the Exchange. In my field notes, I described the Exchange as a “...tired space. Maybe an oasis, maybe a stopover, I’m not exactly sure. The vastness of the space hardly makes it cozy, and even though people are eating here it doesn’t really feel like home.” Between the nondescript music, the echoes of anonymous conversations and movements, and the conflicting messages sent by living room furniture in a non-residential space, the Exchange felt tired. Almost like a respite, but not a place to relax; an oasis, but not exactly refreshing; a tired space, but not a space for rest. Figure 11 offers a pictorial description of the Heusmann Exchange as I experienced it. 82 Figure 11 Heusmann Exchange The Metzger Study Lounge. Though I spent very little time observing in the Metzger Study Lounge, nearly every student who I interviewed mentioned it or walked me through it. Figure 12 shows a picture of the Metzger Study Lounge. I never observed the study lounge to be very busy, with only a couple of students utilizing the space at a time. Additionally, or perhaps as a result, the space was very quiet. The atmosphere in the lounge felt more academic than the other rooms in the building, influenced by the room’s form and function. In form, the wood paneling and fireplace in the contained space alluded to a private study or library. In function, the relative silence and small number of students gave an air of aloofness or eliteness. The atmosphere was less than inviting but not exclusive, so long as potential occupants adhered to the unwritten rule (that I observed, at least) that silence and study were the norm. Figure 12 provides a pictorial description of the Metzger Study Lounge as I experienced it. 83 Figure 12 Metzger Study Lounge The Second Floor I observed the second floor of the SCB to be the academic heartbeat of the college, home to all of the classrooms in the building. Students primarily accessed the second floor by ascending the staircase in the Lobby, which ushered them onto a landing that overlooked the Lobby. From the landing, students were at eye-level with an enormous mural that featured a collage depicting produce moving from the agricultural stage to the global market. From the landing, the second floor was divided up into two wings, both named. The Shulman Family Foundation Wing extended toward the north side of the building while the John Miner Wing stretched toward the south. Apart from copy rooms and computer labs, the second floor primarily housed classrooms and team rooms, both of which are described below. 84 Team Rooms. There was a total of 15 team rooms across the second floor. Figure 13 provides a photograph of a team room. The team rooms were mentioned by all of my interview participants, though they used the team rooms for different purposes. Figure 13 View of a Team Room from the Hallway Classroom Styles. There were three main types of classrooms on the second floor: academic classrooms, case classrooms, and cluster classrooms. Figure 14 provides a photograph of an academic classroom, of which there were three total in the SCB. Figure 15 provides a photograph of a case classroom, of which there were six total in the SCB. Not pictured in Figure 15 are the two retractable screens that would descend to the top of the whiteboard, ensuring that the whiteboard was accessible while the screens were in use. Further, though microphones were mounted on the tables in front of each chair, I never observed the microphones in use. Finally, there were three cluster classrooms in the SCB. Figure 16 provides a picture of a cluster classroom that several students identified during our mobile interviews. 85 I only observed courses that were held in a case classroom. However, students mentioned vastly different experiences in their courses held in different styles of classroom. Though I lacked a firsthand experience of how different courses were run in different classrooms, students’ accounts of different classroom atmospheres factor heavily into my analysis. Figure 14 Academic Classroom 86 Figure 15 Case Classroom Figure 16 Cluster Classroom 87 The Fourth Floor (Board Room) The fourth floor of the SCB is a smaller space, only a fraction of the square footage of the floors below it, that houses a board room and little else. Figure 17 shows the board room and its contents. The fourth floor is accessible by a single, narrow stairway accessible near the faculty/staff room on the third floor or through an elevator. In other words, access to the fourth floor is limited. The stairwell and elevator open up to opposite ends of a small waiting room with restrooms to one side and the entrance to the board room on the other. I only visited the fourth floor twice during my observation window. Once was after hours, escorted by a staff member. The other time, I timidly climbed the stairs and took a long look through the cracks in the doors to ensure that no one was meeting. The students I interviewed generally corroborated my experience with the fourth floor as an uninviting space that an ordinary student (or researcher) in the SCB had no particular reason to visit. Figure 17 Fourth Floor Board Room 88 People and Their Unique Encounters My own observations yielded a great deal of insight into how students engaged with an affective hidden curriculum in the SCB. However, interviews with students produced rich and complicated perspectives that both affirmed and problematized what I observed. Each student that I interviewed was a complex person who navigated the SCB in a unique way. As a result, the tours that each student gave me illuminated unique routines, decisions, and encounters through which a hidden curriculum might emerge. The students I interviewed shaped my data and analysis in a particular way. Had different people agreed to participate in mobile interviews, my data and analysis may have taken a completely different shape! Consequently, introducing my interview participants in this section is of paramount importance. As a group, my interview participants comprised four women and two men, including five self-identified White students, one self-identified Black student, one transfer student, and one self-identified nontraditional student (former military, adult learner). All of the student interview participants were in their fourth year of the business program. Though all of the students I interviewed were eligible to walk for graduation at the end of the semester, one student had to take two more courses in the fall semester to officially graduate. Below, I will offer a snapshot of the student demographics for those studying in the SCB. Understanding the general student population in the SCB is an important context for who (alongside what and when) I was observing. Though I did not meet many students other than those who agreed to an interview, I observed dozens, if not hundreds of students as they navigated their business education in the SCB. I will then introduce each interview participant in the order that I conducted my interviews. 89 SCB Student Population The vast majority—if not all—of the students enrolled in the SCB were business majors. Students typically had third- or fourth-year standing, having completed the necessary coursework over their first two years in Adenville to register for business courses in the SCB. Demographically, according to the SCB’s website (with most recent data describing the Fall 2020 undergraduate students in the SCB), undergraduate students’ mean age range was 20-21 years old, 84% of students identified as White, 6% identified as Hispanic or Latinx, 3% identified as Asian or Pacific Islander, 3% identified as African American or Black, and 3% identified as multi-ethnic. Male-identified students made up 60% of the student body and female- identified students made up 40%, though no other gender options were presented. Only 7% of undergraduate students attended classes part-time, whereas 93% attended full-time. Female- identified students were underrepresented in the SCB compared to GRSU’s general student demographics, where females made up 60% of the student population. The racial/ethnic diversity in the SCB was similar to the undergraduate student population at GRSU as a whole. In short, the majority of the students at the SCB could be considered “traditional” college students and generally reflective of student demographics across GRSU. I will introduce my interview participants below. Each participant was a student in the section of MGT499 that I observed, and each provided valuable stories about their time in the SCB that shaped my analyses in the following chapters. As mentioned previously, each interview participant filled out an online interest form, which included their demographic information as I describe it below. 90 Jerome Jerome self-identified as a cisgender Black man. I first met Jerome when I observed his team give their mid-semester update to the professor of the class over Zoom. I emailed the entire group shortly after their presentation to thank them for allowing me to observe, and asked if they might be willing to participate in a mobile interview. Jerome responded quickly and was genuinely happy to participate. During our tour together, Jerome talked about how Covid influenced his collegiate career and his time in SCB. Jerome also spent much of the tour talking about his academic experience in the building, despite prompts to talk about social experiences as well. Jack Jack identified as a cisgender White man. The day that the professor allowed me to explain my research and solicit interview participants, Jack approached me immediately after class and volunteered to interview on the spot. Jack acknowledged that sometimes people do not like to help, but he had time and might as well tour me through the building right then and there. Jack’s tour was very short—not quite 11 minutes long—but helpful all the same. I noted how Jack navigated the building affectively during his interview. Since his tour took place during the 15-minute break between classes, we encountered a lot of student traffic and the way that Jack navigated both the physical and social environment was revealing of the unwritten rules or expectations that students routinely follow in different spaces. For example, Jack lowered his voice to speak when we entered certain lounge spaces or opted not to take me into a space where students were quietly studying. 91 Elise Elise identified as a cisgender White woman. After observing Elise and her group during class one day, I asked Elise if she would consider volunteering for an interview. She responded via email and we worked out an interview time for the next day. Elise was very outgoing and had been very involved in the SCB. Because of her heavy extracurricular involvement as part of the certified financial planning program and president of the Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity, I learned a lot from her tour about her experiences; Elise has given a lot of time and energy to the program, and has certainly gained a lot from it. Elise was charismatic—she was approachable and easy to talk to, and very comfortable in the SCB. From what I learned during our interview, Elise made a lot of friends in and outside of class, which enriched her experience in the SCB and is part of why our (45 minute) tour took so long. Anne Anne identified as a cisgender White woman, an adult learner, former military, commuting about 40 minutes each way to and from campus, and mother to three children. Anne was one of the first people I met while observing the class. The first day I came to observe in MGT499 she pointed out a seat in the classroom that would always be open, which ended up being the seat I occupied for each observation. Anne and I also conversed as we walked out of that first class I observed. Anne was friendly, kind, and chatty. Anne turned 30 years old the year that we met, and despite looking youthful and blending in with the undergraduates Anne expressed feeling a bit out of place in an undergraduate program. She got involved with the campus veterans club, and spent a lot of time in the veterans’ lounge at another building on the downtown campus. During her interview, Anne seemed unsure of herself and at one point 92 mentioned that she did not think what she had to offer would be useful for my research. Regardless, Anne’s experience as a “nontraditional” student yielded valuable insights. Rebecca Rebecca identified as a cisgender White woman. I asked Rebecca to do an interview after recognizing her in the Exchange while I made regularly scheduled general observations. Rebecca looked like she was not really interested in talking to me, but agreed to set up an interview anyway. I made it very clear that she was under no obligation to say yes, and she could fill out the form and still say no there, since declining an in-person request is more difficult. Even so, Rebecca filled out the interview form and we set up a time for the interview the following week. Despite touring me through fewer distinct spaces than some of the other interview participants, Rebecca’s tour was informative. Rebecca spoke at length about where she spent time and how she likes to spend time while she is in the SCB. Rebecca was talkative and generous with her time and explanations, and the unique way that she spent time in the SCB yielded beneficial insights into how she navigated the various spaces in the SCB. Faith Faith identified as a cisgender White woman. Faith sat next to Elise in the section of MGT499 that I observed, and I asked her for an interview at the same time that I asked Elise. However, Faith seemed hesitant to commit, asking me how long an interview would take. Regardless, after the last day of class when I handed a note to my interview participants thanking her for their time, Faith asked if I had time right after class to conduct a mobile interview. I gratefully obliged and learned a lot about Faith’s experience as a student who transferred in from a regional community college during the Covid pandemic. During the tour, Faith revealed how transferring to GRSU shaped her perception of the SCB, and all that she believed she missed out 93 on due to transferring during the pandemic. However, a lot of what Faith said during her interview resonated with what others had said, which suggested that even though Faith followed a different path into the SCB, her experiences were similar to others’. Time and the Temporal Layers There is a complicated temporality to affect. Though encounters occur in a particular time and space, the forces that interact in any given encounter transcend the immediate time and space of the encounter. For example, a student’s pre-existent orientations and impressions will shape how they emerge through an encounter. Thus, what occurs in a particular space and time is in some ways defined by what has occurred in a different space and time. Though it is impossible for me to provide a complete history of each space and person with which I interacted, time emerged as a salient factor to how students engaged with the hidden curriculum in the SCB. Time also influenced my observations and analysis, as described in Chapter 4, so unfolding the temporal layers of my experiences observing and analyzing data is relevant here. Different temporal layers converged to locate the assemblage I investigated in a particular place in time, particularly the global and academic timescapes in which I observed. Global Time. First, I facilitated my observations and interviews in March and April of 2022, which globally felt like an emergence from the long fog of Covid. Though the virus was still a threat in North America, GRSU and the surrounding region were entering a downswing in cases which led to requiring masks only in smaller, enclosed spaces (such as classrooms or offices). However, Covid’s recent dominance still influenced students’ use of the SCB, and Covid often came up in interviews. For example, Jerome and Rebecca both commented about how much harder their courses were when Covid forced classes online. Rebecca mentioned being a “better learner in person” and Jerome mentioned that his in-person senior-level courses 94 seem easier than his lower-level courses which were moved online: “[My other classes] felt like it was two to three times more the load than what we get now, like even with me taking capstones, I feel like my capstones are easier than my junior classes and those are like 300-level classes.” A year of online courses also impeded students’ ability to create relationships with their classmates. Jerome noted, “I think I would have built a lot better relationships with a lot of these people junior year if I would have been more in person, but since a lot of classes were delegated to strictly online…I’m recognizing people but I’m not recognizing as much as I should.” Though temporality will be discussed at more length in Chapter 8, these comments make clear that the early post-Covid temporal location shaped students’ encounters. Academic Time. Second, all of my observations and interviews took place between spring break and the end of the spring semester, and all of my interviews were with students who were finishing their undergraduate careers. Seasonally, this meant that students were starting to adjust their dress and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the SCB during the days that were particularly mild or sunny. Academically, this meant that students were thinking about wrapping up the semester and transitioning to summer break or entering the job market. This often manifested in students talking about the stress of preparing for end-of-term projects and readying themselves for the job market. Further, the students I interviewed were all in their last full semester of undergraduate classes. This academic temporal location, having spent a number of years already in postsecondary education with the end in sight, gave students a lot to talk about in terms of their academic experience. As a result, my interview participants were able to give me tours of the SCB that were influenced by years of encounters, as opposed to younger students who may be less familiar or have weaker attachments to the SCB. 95 Temporality also influenced how I made my observations. Classes in the SCB always met for 75 minutes, with some exceptions for night classes or labs, with 15-minute breaks between classes. Further, a 45-minute break in the early afternoon (perhaps a lunch break) on Mondays and Wednesdays resulted in a different afternoon class schedule than Tuesdays and Thursdays. I tried to observe more in the early afternoon on Mondays and Wednesdays to see how students made use of that extra time, if at all. In short, the assemblage that I observed and of which I was a part was a moment in time, unfolding in particular ways because of its temporal context. The assemblage was physically contained to the SCB and socially animated by the students I observed and interviewed. Yet, the temporal context played a role in students’ engagement with the hidden curriculum in the SCB. Dis/Assembling the Assemblage To separate the parts from the whole, as I have just done, is both reductive and necessary. Separating is reductive because none of the component parts on their own represent the whole of the assemblage of which they are a part. Yet, separating is necessary to better understand the makeup of the assemblage, which Bøhling (2015) suggested as the primary unit of affective analysis. Figure 18 is intended to shift your focus, as the reader, back to the whole that is greater than the sum of each part. 96 Figure 18 The Affective Assemblage of the SCB This assemblage, the singular intersection of multiple spaces, objects, people, and time shaped an affective hidden curriculum that students encountered on a daily basis. Each space and room on the four floors in the SCB, as noted in Table 1, comprised the physical environment of the assemblage. The students I observed and the students I interviewed made up the social environment. Finally, the global and academic temporal rhythms I described made up the temporal environment in the assemblage. The spaces labeled “B,” “C,” and “D” represent the sociomaterial dimensions of space, people, and time that are created by overlapping two of those environments together. Most importantly for this chapter, the space labeled “A” represents the comprehensive assemblage where all three environments converged. This assemblage provided the context and data (if such a distinction is possible) for my research and analysis. Conclusion In this chapter, I dis/assembled the assemblage in which my research took place. Because my methodology perceived students’ encounters with their routine environments as pedagogic, a close look at the routine environments was necessary. The physical spaces that students encountered, the students who toured me through the building, and the temporal rhythms that animated students’ time in the SCB were all pedagogic. As mentioned at the beginning of the 97 chapter, different spaces, people, and time would have certainly changed students’ experiences and my own data and analysis. Dis/assembling the assemblage, as I have done in this chapter, is necessary to understand the hidden curriculum that I will analyze in the next chapters. The hidden curricula that I observed in the SCB were poised to affectively teach students how to be in business as a student and professional. Students encountered hidden curricula through encounters with myriad spaces, objects, people, and time in the SCB as described above. However, the way that students and hidden curricula emerged in relation to each other varied. Throughout my observations, I found that students were sometimes subjected to a hidden curriculum that appeared imposing, but also exercised great autonomy by mediating and responding to the hidden curriculum in different ways. In some cases, students even co-created a hidden curriculum that emerged through and as their encounters with/in the SCB. In the following chapters, I will argue that the hidden curriculum emerged as a mutual encounter between students and the various spaces, objects, people, and temporalities with which students routinely engaged. 98 CHAPTER 5: WINTER/ING I was first introduced to Katherine May’s work through her conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast (Tippett, 2021, December 9). Katherine and Krista discussed how “winters” emerge as both natural and emotional seasons that affect life on earth. The natural season of winter, defined by the cold and the dark, is an imposing force on the animal kingdom. Winter forces animals to hibernate and rely on stored fat or food, but winter also provides a season of rest. Similarly, humans experience emotional “winters” in times of grief, sorrow, or (for example) a global pandemic. Difficult emotional winters force us to come to terms with pressing issues in our lives, but often open doors for deeper connections with ourselves and others. Thus, Katherine described the act of wintering as savoring challenging circumstances for the good that they can precipitate, rather than wishing the harsh circumstances away. Wintering, in other words, is a response to a forceful encounter. A season of winter may have been thrust upon us and there may be nothing we can do about that. However, Katherine insisted that wintering is responding to the forceful winter conditions by making them our own. In this chapter, I will describe how I discerned a hidden curriculum that was foisted upon the business students that I observed. This hidden curriculum subjected students to a specific presentation of business education. However, I found that students individually and collectively responded to their encounters with the hidden curriculum, making the conditions that were foisted upon them their own. This particular hidden curriculum taught students that business education was a distinct experience, separated from other academic disciplines and separate from students’ professional practice. Below, I will demonstrate how an affective hidden curriculum emerged through forceful encounters in two ways. First, the hidden curriculum presented business education as academically distinct by constraining students’ encounters to the SCB, a 99 geographically isolated building. Because students took their upper-level business classes only in the SCB, students were prevented from encountering other students and content from other academic programs. Second, the hidden curriculum distinguished business education as separate from professional business practice by emphasizing academic preparation rather than professional experience. Students encountered this hidden curriculum through encounters with the SCB’s formal and co-curriculum that separated students’ business education from professional practice. Students tended to align their behavior with the hidden curriculum’s presentation of business education as a distinctive, pre-professional discipline. However, I observed that students responded to their encounters with the hidden curriculum by uniquely interpreting the hidden curriculum’s presentation of business education. Students’ interpreting the hidden curriculum demonstrates their capacity to push back even against an imposing curricular force. In a way, students were wintering insofar as they were responding to a forceful encounter. The notion of affective encounters (as discussed in Chapter 3) helps us understand the reciprocal impressions that students and the hidden curriculum made upon each other. Business Education as a Distinct Academic Discipline I used to work in a university’s advancement and development division. The work was fine, but the office building that my division occupied was located a good half mile away from campus. I felt disconnected from the rest of campus, like my work was something separate from the otherwise vibrant student life that animated campus. My observations and interviews in the SCB reminded me of this separation. The geographically isolated SCB prevented students from encountering students and courses from other academic programs at GRSU. As such, the hidden curriculum presented business education as a distinct discipline, detached from other academic programs at GRSU and distinct from the students enrolled in the other programs. As a 100 geographic space, the SCB was tucked behind a residence hall and parking lot and only accessible through narrow backroads. As a social and academic space, upper-level business students were sequestered away from students pursuing other majors, since business students' upper-level courses were all offered in the SCB. Students’ lack of alternative business spaces and limited encounters with people outside of the SCB made imagining business education as interdisciplinary much more difficult. Business education’s geographic, academic, and social isolation became evident through my observations and was supported through student interviews. In Chapter 4, I showed how the SCB was a geographically isolated building that specifically served business students. As such, I interpreted the SCB as the geographic space on campus specifically dedicated to business education. First, the upper-level business classes (with few exceptions) were offered only in the SCB. I confirmed this information by consulting the GRSU online course schedule and with several of my interview participants. Business students were thus sequestered together in the SCB, which was physically distant from other academic buildings and programs at GRSU. Second, business-oriented student organizations (such as the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization) and other community-related business offices (such as the State Small Business Development Center) were housed exclusively in the SCB. In short, the SCB was the place for business education. This demonstrated to students that business education was a distinct discipline, separate from other academic programs. Because students’ class schedules located students in the SCB, students’ business-related encounters and interactions were largely constrained to the SCB with few, if any, exceptions. The way that students spoke about their business education during our interviews supported my observations that business education at GRSU was a distinct academic program, 101 separated from other students and programs. The students I interviewed often described their business education in relation to the SCB and in contrast to other spaces and people at GRSU. Students’ testimony demonstrates behavioral alignment with the hidden curriculum I observed. Jack mentioned that he did not have an option as to where he could take courses, since the classes he needed to take were only located in the SCB. Jerome also acknowledged that his business classes were concentrated in the SCB, noting that “...when I’m in here, in this building, it gives me more of a concrete function. Like OK, let me step in the building, change my mindset, get things going.” For Jerome, simply entering the SCB was a cue for him to enter a business mindset, separate from his other responsibilities. Elise’s experience in the SCB was more nuanced than the rest of my interviewees’ in that she was highly involved within the SCB outside of class. Elise spent a lot of time in the SCB for a lot of different reasons, though all still related to her business education. Elise described how each floor in the building had different and specific purposes, all related to her business education: “So, to me, the downstairs is like a different side of Shulman. Like when I’m upstairs, I’m at school, in class, but when I’m down here [in the Forum], it’s like I’m at an event, almost.” In Elise’s experience, the SCB still housed all business education-related activities, though different floors in the SCB implied different activities. Jack, Jerome, and Elise’s experiences with/in the SCB suggested that the SCB was the singular destination on campus for business education and business-related activities. Business students’ encounters were limited to a particular space, which also limited the objects (e.g., classrooms, courses, academic services) and people (e.g., students and professors) that students encountered. By describing their business education in relation to the isolated SCB, students revealed their alignment with a hidden curriculum that presented business education as an academic program separated from other people and programs. Identifying and describing 102 business education as an isolated experience resonates with how existing studies have characterized the hidden curriculum in business education—learning how to think and behave (Sharen & McGowan, 2019). In this case, students carried out their routines as if business was a distinct academic discipline, performing their business duties in the geographically-, academically-, and socially-distinct SCB. Responding to Business Education’s Geographic, Social, and Academic Distinctiveness Students appeared to align their embodied business education with the way the hidden curriculum presented it by sequestering their business activity to the isolated SCB. However, students also revealed in interviews that they responded to their encounters with the hidden curriculum by interpreting it as a positive or negative experience. The hidden curriculum imposed itself upon students like the winter season forcefully imposes itself every year. Yet, just as we respond to our forceful encounter with the seasons, the students I interviewed affected their encounters by interpreting them as positive or negative. For example, Rebecca enjoyed only taking classes in the SCB. Rebecca told me that she “really connect[s] with the new…[the SCB is] new, it’s clean, you can tell it’s not worn down which I appreciate, and it’s just, to me it’s just very well thought out.” Part of Rebecca’s rationale for enjoying classes in the SCB was because she was happy to be back in person after Covid pushed classes online. Even so, Rebecca was pleased that all of her classes were offered in a space she enjoyed. In contrast to Rebecca’s positive interpretation of business education’s separateness, Jerome felt that his isolation in the SCB came with social costs. Jerome mentioned that he had not “had an Adenville class since sophomore year actually. So yeah, I’m strictly just in this building.” Jerome found that having all of his classes exclusively in the SCB segregates you from the other majors and everything, because I know like, of course art 103 majors and everything aren’t going to come out to the business school…I do have friends I’ve had since like freshman year that are down here, but it’s a whole other group of people, probably with a good majority I’m not seeing, or won’t interact with just because I’m literally stuck in this building. Rebecca and Jerome both understood their business education as distinct from other spaces, disciplines, and people. However, they interpreted their understanding differently. Rebecca did not seem to mind her classes sequestered away in a relatively new and clean building. Rebecca articulated a positive interpretation of business education’s isolation. In contrast, Jerome articulated that same separation negatively, as isolation: “I’m literally stuck in this building.” Business students’ encounters were confined to a distinct assemblage of space, objects, and people in the isolated SCB. As such, a hidden curriculum emerged as a forceful encounter by shaping students’ perceptions of their business education as geographically, academically, and socially separate. However, students demonstrated a capacity to respond to their encounters with the hidden curriculum by interpreting the hidden curriculum uniquely. I therefore suggest that the hidden curriculum is an affective encounter, one in which both students and the hidden curriculum made impressions on each other. Identifying the hidden curriculum as an outcome of an affective encounter tempers the strength that existing literature otherwise ascribes to an imposing hidden curriculum (e.g., Eisner, 1985; Jackson, 1990; Semper & Blasco, 2018). Business Education as Distinct from Professional Practice I studied secondary education during my undergraduate. It was a busy major—three out of my four years in the program were marked by significant fieldwork, ranging from tutoring, teacher aiding, and student teaching in real classrooms. Even my academic classroom content was geared toward practical application. I was surprised when I observed a curriculum in the 104 SCB that seemed to be inwardly focused, ensuring that students were prepared for practice but not requiring much in terms of off-campus experiences. During my time in the SCB, I observed an affective hidden curriculum that created a distinction between business education and professional practice by emphasizing academic preparation instead of hands-on experience. This hidden curriculum emerged through formal curricular and co-curricular experiences and appeared as imposing. The hidden curriculum emerged through students’ encounters with the business management program’s formal curriculum, a curriculum over which students could exercise little control. Finding a consistent hidden curriculum across an entire curricular structure builds on and complements previous studies. Existing work has analyzed the hidden curriculum as it emerges from fragments of the formal curriculum such as case studies (Ehrensal, 2001; Swiercz & Ross, 2003), textbooks (Dever & Mills, 2015; Sebastianelli, 2018), or pedagogy (Ehrensal, 2016). Rather than focusing on curricular artifacts, I analyzed the SCB’s formal curricular structure: course planning, required courses and experiences, and common pedagogies. My findings below thus add to current literature by analyzing how a hidden curriculum can also emerge through a formal curricular program. Further, the students I interviewed perceived their co-curricular activity as taking on a distinctly pre-professional role, which distinguished their co- curricular activity from professional practice. The future value that my interview participants attributed to their involvement in student organizations thus contrasts against Borges et al.’s (2017) findings that Brazilian business students join student organizations to orient students within their current program. I inferred through my interviews that students adopted the temporal distinction between their education and professional practice, aligning their perceptions of business education with the hidden curriculum’s presentation. However, students also positioned their preparatory 105 experiences as academic or professional capital to be exchanged during their future careers. In this way, students developed a hopeful orientation toward their business education, an anticipation “that something indeterminate has not-yet-become” (Anderson, 2006, p. 733). In affective terms, the hidden curriculum forcefully impressed upon students by influencing their perception of business education as distinguishable from professional practice. However, students impressed their own hopeful orientation upon the hidden curriculum, considering their business education as a valuable, if differentiable, experience. The Formal Curriculum: Preparing for Experience I noticed that the formal business curriculum at GRSU created distinct separations between business students’ first four semesters in Adenville from their latter four semesters in the SCB. The formal curriculum also presented students’ business education as a whole as separate from their professional business careers. Jerome explained these distinctions during our interview, describing a shift in his business curriculum when he “finally got into [the SCB] my junior year.” This shift marked the time “where you step into the first beginning classes of a career choice and the degree that you want.” Elise made a similar distinction, noting that by their fourth or fifth semester at GRSU, students begin to take classes in the SCB, “Because that’s when you start taking your business core classes most times, so a lot of those are [in the SCB]… Not a lot of them are taken in Adenville.” Jerome and Elise’s comments suggested that students’ first two years at GRSU were spent preparing for the latter two years in the business program in the SCB. Similarly, business students’ latter two years in the SCB were spent progressing toward a future degree and career in business. In Jerome’s case, the first two years of his experience were distinct from his third and fourth years in the SCB. Jerome’s third and fourth years in the SCB—where he was immersed in his business education—were then distinct from the “career 106 choice and the degree” he expected. Though Jerome articulated the distinctions in his business education, he never questioned his progression from one step to the next. Jerome “finally” got into the SCB during his junior year, and the latter half of his business education seemed to inevitably lead to the “career…and degree” that he desired. The forceful hidden curriculum made an impression upon Jerome, which was reflected in the temporal distinctions he used to differentiate his business education from his business career. However, Jerome responded to his encounters with the hidden curriculum by maintaining a hopeful orientation that that which had “not-yet-become” would eventually materialize (Anderson, 2006, p. 733). In the sections below, I will describe how a hidden curriculum emerged through specific elements of the formal and co-curriculum in the SCB that differentiated business education from professional business practice. Coursework Mandatory, Internships Optional Other structural features of the SCB’s formal business curriculum further differentiated students’ business education from their professional careers. For example, internships were required for only one of the business majors. Embodied encounters outside of an academic setting were not required for most business students. Though students could pursue internships, the lack of an internship requirement distinguished academic preparation from professional practice by prioritizing coursework rather than immersion in a professional environment. Ehrensal (2001) and Jackson (2017) identified internships in business education as a powerful form of education that synthesizes classroom learning with practical experience. However, according to an interview with Trevor, an academic advisor in the SCB, only the General Business program required an internship. No other program—such as Accounting, Management, or Marketing—had such a requirement. Students’ business education thus required classroom 107 encounters with their fellow students, professors, and various pedagogical tools and resources, but not encounters with supervisors or professional mentors in an internship setting. Students from all of the business programs could seek out an internship. However, this process was initiated by students and facilitated through the career center rather than business students’ professors or advisors. Further, business students who did an internship could receive elective credit, but their internship was not explicitly connected to their other academic coursework and typically completed during the summer. Thus, though students could gain practical experience during their business education, such experience was not facilitated through their business education and was not required for business students to graduate. The hidden curriculum thus emerged as a structural feature of the formal business curriculum. Although internships were possible, the formal curriculum suggested that they were not required, and as such, not a necessary element of a sufficient business education. In affective terms, students’ embodied encounters were constrained to the people and objects within the SCB, not a professional pedagogical environment that would afford different types of encounters (Healy, 2016). The distance between academic and practical experience suggested both an academic and affective separation that distinguished academic preparation from professional practice. This supported the hidden curriculum that presented business education as temporally distinct from professional practice. Simulating Professional Experience Students also encountered a hidden curriculum in the classroom that temporally distinguished their future professional careers against their present business education. I observed several instances in MGT499 that appeared to differentiate students’ undergraduate business education against their future practice. These observations included simulated 108 experiential learning, reminders from the professor that students lacked practical experience, and assurances from the professor that students would better understand content in their future practice. For example, the professor who taught the section of MGT499 I observed valued experiential learning. This commitment was featured in his faculty profile on the university website and “active engagement” was inscribed into the MGT499 course syllabus. However, students’ experiential learning in MGT499 unfolded through an online business simulation in which student teams would compete against each other for revenue and market share. Nespor (1994) also considered a simulated business competition’s influence on students’ business education. Nespor found that the “B-game” (as his students referred to the simulation) created an unrealistic practice environment. While I do not dispute Nespor’s conclusions, my own findings instead foreground the temporal distance that the online simulation I observed created between academic preparation and professional practice. For example, according to an introductory document given to the class, students were intended to develop the “mindset” of a CEO or entrepreneur through the simulation. Nothing was said about developing embodied practices or assuming the real responsibilities that would suit a professional CEO or entrepreneur. Other elements of the business simulation signaled that it was distinct from lived professional experience. For one, the name “simulation” indicated that this exercise was only intended to mimic a real-life business endeavor. Other than their course grade and the possibility of 2% extra credit for the top-performing team, students had no real capital (financial, social, or professional) at stake. Additionally, students were given templates for the memos and reports that they were responsible for producing and presenting. The professor developed these templates and gave them to the students in class so that they could produce and format the appropriate information. Further, specific elements of the simulation were explicitly described as 109 practicing for the future. For example, the professor gave recommendations for how students could complete their peer evaluations by downgrading their teammates who underperformed and giving bonuses to teammates who did good work. The professor called this “practicing being an executive.” The “simulated” experience that students encountered in MGT499 thus constrained students’ experiences as guided and preparatory, rather than autonomous and professional. The simulation was indeed a valuable pedagogical exercise, but lacked the physical and emotional immersion in a professional environment that defines an internship or service-learning project (Edwards et al., 2001; Ehrensal, 2001; Jackson, 2017; Kezar & Rhoads, 2001). Learning (But Not) Through Experience MGT499’s lecture-heavy format also positioned students as inexperienced “learners,” as opposed to knowledgeable “doers” in their business education. Lectures iterated the professor’s authority and experience in the classroom (Ehrensal, 2016). The classroom itself physically positioned the students in a more passive role where they consumed information, making up for their lack of experience and preparing students academically for their profession. The professor often highlighted students’ lack of experience in his lectures, and contrasted the knowledge gained in the classroom against how content is applied in the field. For example, a student team presented a case study recommendation after an in-class case analysis. The professor acknowledged that their recommendation was academically sound, but said that the students lacked the practical experience to see how their recommendation would fall short. The professor cited his many years of professional experience as a reason why a different recommendation would make more sense than what the students offered. In another example, during a lecture on corporate governance and ethical leadership, the professor differentiated between students’ academic preparation and professional experience on 110 several occasions. The first time, the professor told students (the majority of whom would graduate at the end of the term) that “In one month from now, you’ll be moving into your careers and climbing the corporate ladder.” Shortly after, while discussing the painful process of lay- offs, the professor mentioned that “In 10 years from now, you may be in this situation, and you have to keep your interest in mind, your business’s interest in mind, and your employees’ interest in mind.” Finally, on the same topic, the professor mentioned that “You may not realize this now, but you will encounter this fine line in decision making.” Examples like this, in which the professor reminded students that classroom content would make more sense with professional experience, differentiated students’ business education against their professional careers. In short, the classroom provided solid academic preparation but was made distinct from the practical experience that students would seek to gain in their future professional careers. Responding to Business Education’s Temporal Distinctiveness The SCB’s focus on classroom learning and students’ general lack of professional experience could be interpreted as a liability. Students’ simulated experiential learning and the nurturing support they received from their professor might emphasize students’ lack of experience, as opposed to a seasoned job candidate ready to draw on professional experience. However, students interpreted their educational experiences as valuable preparation for their future careers. Faith noted her other courses would employ “real-world situations” that would be “applicable” to future careers in business. In reference to another class she was taking, Faith explained how her in-class activities could be relevant to the future: And like my real estate class right now…we’re doing evaluation of houses, and so it’s practical things that we would have to know how to do if we went into real estate, or even like buying our first house or something like that. 111 Faith acknowledged that she was not encountering people or objects outside of an academic classroom, but she was still able to make connections to her future career and other future milestones. Faith interpreted the distinction between her academic preparation and professional experience positively. This shows alignment with the hidden curriculum that distinguished students’ academic preparation from their professional practice. Faith acknowledged and adopted a distinction between preparation and practice, but responded to the hidden curriculum by maintaining a hopeful orientation toward the future value of her present work. Similarly, Trevor (the academic advisor I spoke with) reported that many students still completed internships, even though interning was not required for most business programs. Though many students’ practical experiences were disconnected from their classroom experience, students still responded to the hidden curriculum with a hopeful disposition by gaining internship experience to prepare for a future career. Students’ capacity to respond even to forceful encounters is similar to the process of wintering that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter (Tippett, 2021, December 9). Students were not simply subjected to the whims of the hidden curriculum that emerged through forceful encounters. Rather, students responded to the hidden curriculum and to some extent made their conditions their own. Students’ capacity to respond to the forceful encounters through which the hidden curriculum emerged is indicative of the notion of affective encounters. One is not simply acted upon by the other, but both leave impressions on each other. Student Organizations as Preparation for Practice I also observed a hidden curriculum emerge from students’ co-curricular encounters. This hidden curriculum also differentiated educational preparation from practical experience. Some of the students I interviewed mentioned how student organizations were a valuable use of time 112 insofar as they prepared students for their professional practice. Students thus created a distinction between their educational experience and professional careers by distinguishing their present involvement with student organizations from the future value students would gain. Even so, students spoke favorably of their co-curricular activity insofar as they recognized it as valuable preparation for their future practice. For example, Jerome mentioned that membership in clubs such as the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO) was beneficial for the future insofar as “you might meet some of these people in the future and they might remember you and that will work out for you better in the long run to have existing relationships with people.” Jerome acknowledged club membership’s immediate benefits, such as getting input on students’ current projects. Even so, Jerome emphasized clubs’ instrumental value toward future endeavors. For Jerome, the real benefit to membership in a club like CEO was the networking connections that could prove beneficial in his future professional practice. As president of a well-known business fraternity, Elise also noted her student organization’s future value. Elise described an intense interview process to even get admitted into the fraternity. Interviewing in front of about 20 existing members was “supposed to be like this scary thing, but their goal is to make it your hardest interview that you’ve ever done, so that you can go and interview [elsewhere].” Elise felt that her drawn-out initiation into the fraternity—several weeks of orientations with quizzes and presentations—was good preparation for when she would be interviewing for jobs in the future. Though there were several immediate benefits to Elise’s membership in the fraternity, she described her experience this way: It’s really good like for someone coming into college to like go through that, because it 113 teaches you, kind of like bridges the gap between what you would learn in a college curriculum, academically-wise, and then the professional development skills that you need to take with you when you graduate. Elise’s description of her fraternity experience created an interesting distinction between “college curriculum” and “professional development skills.” Elise appeared to suggest that her classes were important to developing content knowledge while the student organization developed professional experience. Similarly, the “professional development skills that you need to take with you when you graduate” that Elise learned in the business fraternity were most valuable in the future. In this case, graduation represented a temporal marker between undergraduate business education and professional practice. This differentiation echoes the above analysis which suggested the formal curriculum emphasized preparation over experience. This also illuminates Elise’s hopeful orientation toward the future. The hidden curriculum appeared to impose on Elise by distinguishing her education from her profession. Still, Elise responded to the hidden curriculum by anticipating the professional benefits of her participation in the fraternity. Both Jerome and Elise’s accounts of their co-curricular experiences revealed the hidden curriculum that students encountered in the SCB. This hidden curriculum presented business education as a distinct experience relative to students’ future professional practice. Students appeared to recognize this hidden curriculum and interpreted it positively by developing a hopeful orientation toward the future. According to Anderson (2006), hope “anticipates that something indeterminate has not-yet-become” (p. 733). Students engaged in their academic preparation and developed knowledge that they could utilize later in their professional careers— anticipating the value that their business education did not-yet-have. By developing a hopeful 114 orientation toward the future, students accepted that their business education was preparatory and distinct from their professional practice, but still valuable. This demonstrates the mutual capacity to affect and be affected that defines affective encounters. In some ways, this demonstrates the process of wintering. The hidden curriculum emerged forcefully through students’ routines and perceptions of their business education. However, students maintained the capacity to interpret and respond to the hidden curriculum. This limited the hidden curriculum’s uncontested influence and demonstrates the reciprocal nature of affective encounters. Visualizing Affective Encounters I depict how students affectively encountered the hidden curriculum in Figure 19, below. Figure 19 Responding to Forceful Encounters The equilibrium arrow connecting the two circles represents students’ various encounters with/in the SCB. The comparatively thicker line moving from the SCB to the student represents the SCB’s stronger force upon the student. Students’ routines were indeed constricted to the SCB, and their academic preparation was structurally privileged over experiential practice. There was little that students could do to change those conditions. However, the equilibrium arrow is always composed of two lines, representing both object’s mutual capacity to affect and be affected. The comparatively thinner line moving from the student to the SCB represents the students lesser force upon the SCB. Even so, the line is there, which indicates that students were 115 not helplessly subjected to a totalizing force even if their behavior aligned with the hidden curriculum. Conclusion An imposing hidden curriculum emerged through students’ encounters with the isolated SCB, various elements of the formal curriculum, and co-curricular activity. This hidden curriculum presented business education as separated from other academic programs and from students’ professional business practice. Students encountered this hidden curriculum affectively. In their constrained educational environment, students' bodies were limited in their capacity to encounter other spaces, subjects, and people. Further, the formal curriculum and co-curriculum presented students’ educational experiences as distinct from their professional practice. This separation created a temporal differentiation between the present and future. Students aligned their behaviors and perceptions of business education with the imposing hidden curriculum. However, students also interpreted the hidden curriculum, demonstrating their capacity to respond even to forceful encounters. In the next chapter, I will describe how students did not only respond to a hidden curriculum that emerged through forceful encounters. Rather, my analysis will demonstrate how students shape how and if the hidden curriculum influences students’ behavior at all. 116 CHAPTER 6: “LOOK HOW SPECTACULAR IT IS THAT WE’RE HERE” Every once in a while I will experience a tremendous coincidence. I hear a song on the radio that was just in my head, for example. Or I get a great parking space just because someone else happened to be pulling out as I arrived. “What are the odds,” I’m tempted to think, because the probability of that event happening is probably pretty low. But I recently listened to a conversation between Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast, and physicist Brian Greene (Tippett, 2021, July 15). After hearing that conversation, my take on the little coincidences in my life began to change. Krista and Brian’s conversation oscillated between the absolute chaos that (Brian insisted) defines the universe, and the absolute wonder that despite such chaos, nature and culture persist. In spite of the fundamental chaos that governs the universe, Brian observed that we can create poetry and music, lean into love and relationships, and ponder our own existence. Considering the near impossibility of everything from the stars to the molecules aligning to support life on earth, Brian reminded listeners of the beauty that emerged from the chaos: “look how spectacular it is that we’re here” (Tippett, 2021, July 15). I was struck by the underlying theory behind Brian’s assertions: nothing is imminent. It is still a funny coincidence to hear a song on the radio when it was just in my head, but it is a spectacular coincidence that all that is, is. Indeed, this whole galaxy did not have to form the way it formed or even form at all, according to Brian’s interpretation of the laws of physics. Although all that is beautiful is perhaps even more so because it is not imminent, I was struck by the gravity of Brian’s idea that time, space, and matter are ultimately indeterminate. I found that the hidden curriculum’s emergence echoed Brian’s emphasis on indeterminacy. In this chapter, I will explore how students mediated the hidden curriculum through their indeterminate encounters and decisions in the SCB. I contrast this emergence 117 against the hidden curriculum mediating students’ experiences, as was explored in Chapter 5. This student-mediated hidden curriculum presented business education as community-oriented, i.e., an experience undertaken with others and within a global, national, and local business community. I personally observed this hidden curriculum through my encounters in the SCB, but students mediated the hidden curriculum’s emergence in different ways. First, students’ indeterminate routines mediated whether the hidden curriculum would emerge at all, since students did not encounter the same spaces and objects that I did. Second, even when students encountered the hidden curriculum, their decision to reject or comply with the hidden curriculum mediated if and how the hidden curriculum would influence students’ business education. Like Brian Greene, I suggest in this chapter that the hidden curriculum is not imminent, but the result of indeterminate forces that mediate if and how the hidden curriculum emerges. In this chapter, I employ the affective notions of indeterminacy and virtuality to illuminate how the hidden curriculum might have, did, and did not emerge relative to students’ encounters. Mediating the Hidden Curriculum Through Indeterminate Routines I can have a totally different experience than someone else at the same event. For example, I will laugh at something that my partner Nora will not. Nora will ask me why I thought whatever prompted my laughter was funny, and I will tell her. But the fact remains that two people, in the same place, looking at the same thing, can have totally different experiences. I found this to be true in my observations in the SCB as well. As an outside researcher in the SCB, I discerned a hidden curriculum in the SCB that suggested business education was community- oriented, an experience taken on with others in a larger business community. This hidden curriculum partially emerged through my encounters with offices in the SCB that hosted operations for local, national, and global business organizations. The hidden curriculum also 118 emerged through my encounters with plaques and awards from nation-wide business fraternities and competitions, and the SCB’s accreditation from a national business accrediting agency. These objects suggested membership in communities that were bigger than the SCB itself. However, students’ daily routines did not necessarily facilitate encounters with these community-oriented offices and objects in the same way that my routine did. As such, students’ daily routines mediated their potential encounters with the hidden curriculum that I otherwise discerned. Below, I will discuss the two ways that I observed students’ indeterminate routines mediating the hidden curriculum’s emergence. The first explores how students shaped their daily routines in the SCB in ways that bypassed the hidden curriculum entirely, essentially negating encounters with whatever hidden curriculum I observed. The second demonstrates how students’ routines facilitated encounters with the hidden curriculum by chance. Both instances foreground the indeterminate nature of affective encounters, insofar as the hidden curriculum only emerged (or not) relative to a specific intersection of students’ encounters within the SCB. Given the virtuality behind students’ indeterminate routines, it is rather spectacular that students encountered the hidden curriculum at all! Bypassing the Hidden Curriculum The hidden curriculum that I observed emerged from community-oriented spaces and offices within the SCB. This hidden curriculum presented business education as a communal experience taken on with partnering organizations and operations around the globe. However, students did not encounter those offices during their everyday routines. In this way, students' indeterminate routines within the SCB mediated the hidden curriculum by bypassing potential encounters with objects and spaces through which the hidden curriculum might emerge. In the absence of actual encounters, the hidden curriculum could not emerge relative to students’ 119 experiences, much less influence students’ behaviors, beliefs, and perception of their business education (cf. Mossop et al., 2013). The boardroom that occupied the entire fourth floor of the SCB serves as an example of how students bypassed an otherwise observable hidden curriculum. The boardroom was a beautiful space that overlooked the heart of the city’s downtown, and the SCB made the boardroom available for outside parties to rent. The relative flexibility in who was allowed to use the space—not limited to parties within the GRSU community—reflected a network of professional connections in the local community and business world. Inviting others into the SCB to use the boardroom thus suggested to me, and could potentially suggest to students, that business education in the SCB was oriented toward a wider community. However, students rarely experienced encounters in the boardroom because they rarely had a reason to visit. Only one student I interviewed even mentioned the fourth floor. Because Elise served in an official capacity as the student representative for the Shulman Alumni Board, she got “to go up [to the fourth floor], there’s a big boardroom up there, and sit in on their meetings, which was really cool.” Other than Elise, no other students mentioned the fourth floor, even when prompted during our interviews. Further supporting the point, during a general observation in the Exchange I overheard one student talking to someone on the phone about practicing a presentation in the fourth-floor boardroom. He asked the other person, “Have you ever been to the fourth floor?” as if being up there was a rare or special experience (apparently, it was). Additionally, the community members who would have utilized the boardroom were not noticeably present in the SCB. The elevator—the easiest avenue to access the boardroom—was located immediately adjacent to the main entrance. As such, community members could enter the building and ascend to the fourth floor without anyone noticing them. Students’ encounters with visitors would be 120 limited and incidental, if students encountered visitors (and knowingly identified them as such) at all. Thus, despite the SCB’s visible connections to the community through the shared boardroom space, students rarely encountered this aspect of the hidden curriculum in the same way that I did. In this way, students mediated the hidden curriculum since their indeterminate daily routines were more salient in shaping their encounters than the hidden curriculum I observed. The fourth-floor boardroom may have been physically removed from students’ everyday routines in the SCB. However, students still did not seem to notice the community-oriented offices that were more integrated into spaces in the building that students frequented. This demonstrates another instance of students mediating the hidden curriculum that I observed as a function of their indeterminate daily routines. For example, the Small Business Development Center’s state headquarters and a separate regional center were housed in the SCB. Their offices were unassuming, but occupied space on the first floor in both the north and south wings of the building. Similarly, the university-affiliated Vondel Global Trade Center had an office on the first floor in the south wing of the SCB. The Trade Center advertised their services as helping businesses in the community facilitate global success through consulting, training, and business development. These offices’ messaging and mere existence in the SCB contributed to the hidden curriculum that presented business education as community-oriented, on both a national and global scale. Students spent a lot of time on the first floor, but no students mentioned either Center during their mobile interviews. Jack had never even been down the first-floor south wing (where the Global Trade Center was housed) until our interview. “I’ve never been down here,” he reported, “but I’ll walk with you.” Shortly after that comment, as Jack was deciding where to 121 walk next, someone approached us and asked if we were lost. In short, Jack’s routines in the SCB never facilitated encounters with the community-oriented offices. Similarly, Grace led me directly past the Small Business Development Center’s office in the north wing, but completely ignored the Center in favor of mentioning the outdoor patio accessible through a door nearby. These anecdotes indicate that students’ indeterminate routines mediated whether students would encounter the hidden curriculum. As a researcher, I would walk through each hallway on every floor to observe activity and discern encounters with a hidden curriculum. However, students appeared to walk with a different purpose and bypassed or overlooked many of the encounters with the hidden curriculum that I experienced. This again demonstrates that the indeterminacy behind students’ daily routines mediated the hidden curriculum, rather than the hidden curriculum determining students’ routines. Exploring the built environment as a source of the hidden curriculum remains absent from literature on the hidden curriculum in business education. However, some (e.g., Blasco, 2012; Caza and Brower, 2015) have noted the importance of aligning the formal curriculum with the hidden curriculum. In this case, architectural representations of business education’s community orientation, such as the Small Business Development Center and the Global Trade Center, did align with a formal curriculum that included courses on international business and diverse workforces. However, students’ indeterminate routines mediated students’ exposure to the hidden curriculum, even though it was well-aligned with the formal curriculum. My findings thus shift the focus from whether or not the hidden curriculum is aligned with the formal curriculum (as has been explored in a business education setting) to whether or not students would even encounter such a hidden curriculum at all. 122 Encountering the Hidden Curriculum by Chance As explored above, students developed routines in the SCB that differed from my routine as a researcher. As such, students mediated the hidden curriculum that I otherwise observed through my encounters with the community-oriented spaces in the SCB. However, students’ routines also differed from each other’s. Consequently, a hidden curriculum emerged through some students’ encounters with spaces and objects in the SCB, but not all students. Thus, students’ indeterminate routines and interactions in the SCB mediated the hidden curriculum by limiting which students encountered the hidden curriculum and how those students encountered it. Mediating Meaning in the Tilles Forum The Tilles Forum was located on the first floor and near the entrance to the SCB, occupying a prominent space in the building. The Forum had the look and feel of a conference center: cavernous spaces, lecterns, round tables and chairs at the ready. Based on my observations, the Forum appeared to be a room designated for large group events, organized gatherings with a specific purpose. Some students I interviewed likewise perceived the Tilles Forum as a space for organized, professional events: “a lot of people have stepped out of here with new opportunities,” Jerome mentioned in his mobile interview. Jerome noted Professional Sales Association meetings that he attended there, as well as career fairs and events hosted by GRSU’s chapter of the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization. Elise also mentioned attending professional networking breakfasts hosted by the Shulman Alumni Association. Additionally, as the president of a well-known business fraternity, Elise spent a lot of time in the Forum with her student organization. Elise would hold all of the fraternity’s meetings in the Forum as well as the special professional events such as hosting guest speakers. For Elise, “This room to me feels less 123 like school, and more like a social thing, because that’s like…oh it’s a professional development, networking event…” Jerome and Elise thus identified the Forum as a space where they could make connections with community members, whether they were potential employers, networking connections, or guest speakers. Identifying the Forum as a community-oriented space both aligns with the hidden curriculum that I observed, and is a product of Jerome and Elise’s actualized routines. In other words, Jerome and Elise’s alignment with the hidden curriculum represents one outcome out of the virtual possibilities that may have emerged from Jerome and Elise’s respective routines. Jerome and Elise’s routines actualized alignment with the hidden curriculum, but this outcome was anything but imminent. In contrast to Jerome and Elise, some students’ routines facilitated encounters in the Tilles Forum through which the hidden curriculum did not emerge. Other students’ routines did not facilitate encounters in the Forum at all. Students’ indeterminate routines thus led them to encounter the hidden curriculum, or not, by chance. Rebecca had never been inside the Forum, although she had attended professional events in a different building on GRSU’s downtown campus. “A lot of the time the [Forum’s] doors are closed,” Rebecca told me, suggesting limited exposure to the Forum and the events hosted there. Further, Faith and Jack both reported having class in the Forum once, during Covid, because it was big enough to host the whole section while keeping students socially-distanced. Despite encounters with/in the Forum, Faith and Jack’s experiences were completely different from those of Jerome or Elise. Thus, though some students encountered the Forum as a community-focused space, others had very different experiences. As such, students as a whole mediated any hidden curriculum that emerged through encounters with/in the Forum based on their heterogeneous experiences, depending on what drew them into, or away from, the space. 124 Finding and Committing to Student Organizations Another way that students could happen upon the hidden curriculum was through involvement with nation-wide student organizations. However, students’ unique schedules did not allow every student to learn about or participate in student organizations. Students could encounter information about national organizations if their routines allowed. Plaques and trophies exhibited in glass display cases on the first floor of the SCB boasted of GRSU students’ success in various business competitions sponsored by different college campuses, corporations, and professional organizations (e.g., American Marketing Association). Similarly, framed certificates memorialized GRSU’s fraternal chapters (such as Delta Sigma Pi and Phi Chi Theta, two well-known national business fraternities) and the SCB’s accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. All of these objects suggested that business education could be a community-oriented experience, situated within different business communities around the country. However, students’ indeterminate schedules and routines again mediated if and how the hidden curriculum could emerge. For example, Anne mentioned joining the email list for the Society of Human Resource Managers. Anne enjoyed “following that, getting access to the resources, but the meetings always seem to be during my night classes, like every time, and it’s like, well, maybe next semester.” Jerome mentioned on a few occasions during our interview that he was involved with the Professional Sales Association. However, Jerome’s schedule often prevented him from investing further in the organization: “Whenever I get the time, I’ll [attend]…I haven’t been in there in quite a while just because I’m kind of busy.” Jerome and Anne’s routines thus facilitated encounters with organizations through which a hidden curriculum might emerge, but the same routines prevented Jerome and Anne from seriously engaging with those organizations and any subsequent hidden curriculum. 125 In contrast to Anne and Jerome’s experiences, Elise had just finished a term as president of GRSU’s chapter of a national business fraternity. Elise indicated that participation in this fraternity was a formative part of her experience in SCB. Elise’s routine thus facilitated sustained encounters with the fraternity, which subsequently facilitated community-oriented encounters with others in the SCB and in chapters at other universities. Elise’s routines facilitated encounters with the hidden curriculum that presented business as community oriented, and Elise aligned her behavior by heavily investing in her fraternal communities. However, Elise only encountered the organization by chance. Elise said that she “...was lucky enough to get involved in student organizations, I was just naturally exposed to more opportunities. Not really because of specifically anything I did, just because I had to be standing there when they were talking about them.” Elise essentially attributed her participation in student organizations to chance, just as Anne and Jerome attributed their lack of participation in a student organization to the misfortune of lacking time. Students’ indeterminate routines mediated their potential encounters with a hidden curriculum rather than the hidden curriculum mediating students’ routines. In some ways, my findings above corroborate existing literature that discusses how students are capable of resisting the hidden curriculum (e.g., Margolis et al., 2001; Skelton, 1997). However, the affective notion of indeterminacy foregrounds how students’ embodied routines undercut the hidden curriculum’s pedagogic potential. Though I observed a hidden curriculum through encounters with/in the SCB, students' varying routines influenced how students encountered the hidden curriculum if they encountered it at all. As such, the virtuality (i.e., infinitely possible outcomes) behind students’ actualized encounters mediated the hidden curriculum’s alleged determinate nature (e.g., Bergenhenegouwen, 1987; Cotton et al., 2013; Robati and Tonkaboni, 2017). 126 Mediating the Hidden Curriculum Through Decision-Making As a professor, I take pride in how I design my classes. The structure and timing of my assignments, the activities I plan for class, and the order of topics on the syllabus all represent intentional decisions toward a coherent semester together. However, students can choose the extent to which they engage with my careful planning. As adults with lives outside of class, and an understanding that grades do not really matter, I will have students miss class, turn in assignments late (or not at all), and skip out on the readings. In short, I can put an organized structure in place but students ultimately mediate how they are impacted by my planning. Similarly, in this section I will analyze how students mediated the hidden curriculum that they encountered in the SCB. This hidden curriculum still presented business education as community-oriented, insofar as business education was to be undertaken with others in the SCB business community. Students acknowledged the hidden curriculum they encountered and mediated its emergence by making decisions about how the students would respond. Some students complied with the hidden curriculum by aligning their behavior with what the hidden curriculum suggested, i.e., working with others. Others rejected the hidden curriculum by acknowledging it and shaping their behavior contrary to what the hidden curriculum suggested, i.e., working alone. In this way, students mediated the hidden curriculum by acknowledging it, then deciding if and how they would respond to their encounters with the hidden curriculum. Students’ agency in deciding if and how the hidden curriculum emerged further illustrates the affective tenet of indeterminacy. Rather than emerging predictably, consistently, and continuously, the hidden curriculum emerged as a function of students' preferences, expectations, and decisions. By deciding whether or not to comply with the hidden curriculum students encountered, students mediated the hidden curriculum in indeterminate ways. Below, I will 127 analyze how students’ decision-making mediated the hidden curriculum in students’ encounters with the social and material environments in the SCB. Encounters With People The hidden curriculum that I observed in the SCB emerged through encounters with other people in the SCB. Specifically, encounters with academic advisors and classmates grouped together for team projects suggested that business education was an experience undertaken with others; a community endeavor. Students recognized the inherent community orientation in these elements of their education and made decisions about whether to align their routines with the hidden curriculum or not. Below, I will first analyze how students mediated a hidden curriculum as it emerged through their potential encounters with academic advising. I will then present how students mediated the hidden curriculum that emerged through their group projects. These two examples show how students mediated the hidden curriculum’s different emergences in different ways. Academic Advising The academic advising office was located on the first floor of the SCB, adjacent to the Heusmann Exchange. Students acknowledged in interviews that advising services were available to them, thus recognizing another community-oriented element of their business education. However, students mediated how this hidden curriculum would influence their behavior by deciding if and how they would utilize the academic advising services. Anne, Elise, Jerome, and Rebecca mentioned their experiences with academic advising during our mobile interviews. Anne made a point of stopping by the advising office and described her advisor as “great…she’s upbeat, she’s always like, let’s go, what can I do, how can I help, let’s get things figured out for you.” Students’ routine interactions with others in a support role contributed to a hidden 128 curriculum that presented business education as community-oriented, an academic activity that was undertaken with others. By utilizing the academic advising services available to them, students demonstrated alignment with a hidden curriculum by engaging their education in community with others. However, not all students visited their academic advisors frequently or at all. For example, Jerome mentioned that he spoke to an academic advisor earlier in his business education, but added that “Usually I just plan kind of plan on my own…the advisor I had spoken to had kind of structured it earlier on, so like, even with me changing up a couple things, I’m still pretty much on track.” Further, despite Anne’s glowing review of her advisor, Anne also admitted that she did not spend as much time in the academic advising office as she wanted to. Jerome and Anne both acknowledged that academic support was an option in their business education, which shows recognition of the hidden curriculum that presented business education as community-oriented. However, Jerome and Anne mediated the hidden curriculum by minimizing their academic advisor’s influence on their business education. The hidden curriculum thus emerged relative to students’ decisions, an indeterminate element that influenced students’ business education. Team Projects Students reported that team projects were common in their business classes, and teams played a notable role in how students developed social and academic relationships with each other. Building on Joughin (2010) and Sambell & McDowell’s (1998) notion that assessments teach students what content is important, I suggest that team projects as assessments taught students what behavior is important in business education. A hidden curriculum thus emerged through students’ embodied proximity to each other in a group setting, which suggested to students that business education was a community-oriented experience. 129 In the section of MGT499 that I observed, encounters between students were primarily facilitated through team interactions and working with student teams made up a significant part of the academic experience. For example, teammates sat next to each other during every class meeting, they were given time to work together during almost every class that I observed, and different team-related assignments comprised a notable share (35%) of students’ final grade in the course. Teamwork thus accounted for a significant part of students’ experience in MGT499, as well as other business classes in the SCB. The college-wide emphasis on teamwork that my students reported in their interviews presented students’ business education as community- oriented. Students mediated this hidden curriculum primarily through eager compliance. Students acknowledged their projects’ community orientation and embraced relationships with teammates even outside of an academic context. In addition to working with other students in an academic context, several of the students I interviewed also reported developing social relationships through team projects. For example, Jerome noted that he tended to build friendships through group projects, and Faith went so far as to report going to a gun range with someone from her team who shared the same hobby. Faith also mentioned that her whole team was planning on going out to brunch to celebrate the end of the term. Faith speculated that “the people that I met and talked to the most now would be from like, people from those groups, that I still keep in contact with.” A hidden curriculum that presented business education as community-oriented thus emerged through students’ embodied proximity to each other in an academic context. Students complied with this hidden curriculum by embracing their team-based relationships and even extending those relationships outside of an academic context. Despite teams creating community amongst students, the team project in MGT499 also modeled to students that a community orientation could facilitate competition. In this way, 130 students could have encountered the hidden curriculum as presenting business education within a competitive, rather than cooperative, community context. In MGT499, competition between teams was explicitly built into the team project. The class syllabus described the team project as: [challenging students] to make strategic decisions under uncertainty and competition for competitive advantage…As you compete with other students in your class, in a virtual, highly competitive world…Your application of solutions and competitive response will further expose you to the uncertainty of [the] market environment. (emphases mine) Student teams were thus competing directly against each other in a market simulation, and were faced with a paradoxical presentation of business’s community-orientation as both cooperative and competitive. However, the students I interviewed only mentioned the bonds that they created with their teammates, and never the competition with other teams. This demonstrates that students mediated how the hidden curriculum emerged by embracing relationships with teammates that transcended the academic sphere rather than perceiving their peers as competitors or threats. Students’ mediation represents a form of indeterminacy inasmuch as students’ decisions shaped the hidden curriculum, rather than the hidden curriculum shaping students’ decisions. Encounters With Spaces and Objects In this section, I will analyze students’ encounters with the spaces and objects (i.e., rooms and furniture) in the SCB through which the hidden curriculum emerged. Though organizational culture has been explored through its material manifestations outside of a business education context (e.g., Costello, 2001; Gair & Mullins, 2001), I encountered no studies that explored the built and material environment in a business setting. Indeed, Beckers et al. (2015) and Cox (2018) note the need for further study of how space impacts higher education. This section thus 131 contributes to conversations in business education by analyzing how a hidden curriculum emerged through students’ encounters with/in their business school’s built environment. This hidden curriculum suggested that business education was a community-oriented experience by using furniture and spaces that attempted to consolidate students’ bodies in close proximity to each other. An affective onto-epistemology privileges body-knowledge and developing knowledge through encounters with other people and objects. Consequently, students’ material immersion in the SCB is an important consideration in how students learned to embody their business practice. However, students’ material immersion was not tacit submission to the tutelage of an established, determinate hidden curriculum. Rather, students made decisions about how they would interact with their material environment, shaping how the hidden curriculum emerged relative to students’ encounters with/in the material environment. Below, I will demonstrate that students mediated the hidden curriculum through their decisions to reject or comply with the hidden curriculum upon encountering it. Because the hidden curriculum was mediated by students’ unique decision making, I draw attention to the indeterminacy through which the hidden curriculum could emerge through students’ encounters with their environment. The Heusmann Exchange: Table for One I observed an affective hidden curriculum emerge from different elements in the Heusmann Exchange that suggested the space was for students to congregate together. This contributed to the hidden curriculum that presented business education as a community-oriented experience. The Exchange appeared to be designated for community-oriented business activity through its name and intended function. The space’s given title—Exchange—was representative of its function as a space where goods, ideas, conversation, etc. could move between people, or be “exchanged.” This was supported by the vending machines and cafe stationed on the outskirts 132 of the space, where students would exchange money for goods, and the furniture which appeared to facilitate conversational exchanges. The vast majority of the seating in the Exchange was oriented toward groups of two or more. Even when individual seating was available (e.g., armchairs), those seats faced each other in the way that living room furniture is set up to facilitate conversation in a home. Otherwise, rectangular tables with four chairs and tall circular tables with two chairs invited more than one person to share the tabletop surface. The benches underneath the windows sat opposite chairs around a common tabletop. The conference table in the Exchange could clearly be used to “conference,” a verb that implies at least two people. Additionally, the Exchange’s noisiness invited students to talk to each other while anonymizing their conversations in the general din that audibly filled the space. Providing conversational privacy in an otherwise large and public space may have encouraged students to speak to each other despite occupying a public space. I contrast this against how the silence of a library discourages large group interactions. In short, students could encounter the seating, tables, and the general atmosphere in the Exchange—resembling a public square—in a way that presented business education as fundamentally community-oriented. Students described behavior that acknowledged and aligned with the hidden curriculum that emerged through their encounters with/in the Exchange. For example, Elise spent time in the Exchange as a distinctly social space before Covid, hanging out with larger groups of friends and eating lunch. Elise mentioned: ...this was always more of a social space pre-Covid, it seems quiet, seems to be a lot quieter this year. Obviously last year it was [because classes were moved online], but my sophomore year it was very much like this was an acceptable space to be talking, and to be a bit loud in here. 133 My observations partially confirmed Elise’s report about the Exchange as a social space. I would often see small groups of students working together, and once slid in with a student team who were preparing for their presentation in MGT499. Similarly, Anne talked about hanging out with a classmate between classes at the conference table in the Exchange. Anne and her friend would sit and study, chat, and eat leftovers they heated up in the microwaves provided. I would also observe one particular group of students who regularly met in the Exchange during my morning observations. Based on Elise and Anne’s experience, as well as my own observations, it appeared that some students acknowledged the Exchange as a social space. Students sometimes aligned their behavior with the hidden curriculum by occupying the Exchange in community with others. Though some students aligned their behavior with the hidden curriculum in the Exchange, others mediated the hidden curriculum differently by occupying the Exchange alone. I observed many students in the Exchange sitting by themselves, reading or eating or working individually. Anne described sitting alone in the Exchange after sitting with her friend: “after our second class we’d go our separate ways and I’d come sit in the corner down here and just watch people and study.” Similarly, when I approached Rebecca to ask if she would be willing to participate in an interview, she was sitting alone in an armchair. In general, I observed many students occupying the Exchange alone, a ratio that appeared to be at least equal to those who utilized the Exchange in groups. Yet despite using the Exchange as individuals, students appeared to acknowledge the hidden curriculum that presented the Exchange as a community space. Specifically, I observed that students would occupy the smallest tables in the Exchange first. It appeared as if individual students felt less obligated to honor the smaller tables for group work than the larger tables in the middle of the Exchange. This interesting pattern of behavior 134 suggested to me that students recognized the hidden curriculum, and that the hidden curriculum influenced students’ behavior as individuals (i.e., avoiding the larger tables that were more clearly designated for multiple occupants). However, students still mediated the hidden curriculum by rejecting it in favor of using the space in ways that they saw fit. Overall, students appeared to acknowledge that the Exchange was intended to facilitate business in community because of how the space and furniture oriented bodies toward each other. However, students’ decisions to sometimes comply with the hidden curriculum and sometimes not represent the indeterminate nature of affective encounters, actualizing one of a virtual slate of possibilities. Putting the “I” in “Team Rooms” Students’ varied uses of team rooms presented a similar, yet more explicit, mediation of the hidden curriculum as compared to the Heusmann Exchange. Students readily acknowledged team rooms’ intended purpose, yet rarely elected to use team rooms accordingly. Students thus acknowledged the hidden curriculum but mediated it in a way that prevented the hidden curriculum from determining their behavior. As noted in the name, the team rooms in the SCB were designated for student groups to work together in a private, enclosed space. Having designated spaces for “teams” to work together contributed to a hidden curriculum that emphasized business’s community orientation. Team rooms’ community orientation was also evident in the objects present in each team room. Large screens at the front of a table with several chairs had many different cords for students to connect their laptops and share their screens with their teammates. A webcam was also installed in each team room which enabled team members to connect remotely with each other. Elise noted that professors would sometimes reserve team rooms during class time, so that student teams could use the rooms for their intended purposes when given time to work together. Elise also mentioned how she would use 135 the team room as a casual social space: “Like if someone had the same break in class, and they would come in here, I would like always be coming and bothering people and being like ‘Let me sit in your room with you.’” Thus, a hidden curriculum that emphasized business education as community-oriented emerged through encounters with the team rooms’ name and objects within. Despite acknowledging the rooms’ intended purposes, students overwhelmingly rejected the hidden curriculum by using the team rooms as individuals. I primarily observed students engaging in individual work in the team rooms, and my interview participants supported this observation. Jack primarily used the team rooms to do his homework alone during the day because he enjoyed team rooms’ privacy. Jack showed me how he would reserve a team room the day before using it because they could book up quickly. Faith mentioned passing time alone in the team rooms between classes, and Jerome noted that he would use the team room by himself to get work done. Jerome thought that more students should use the rooms individually, observing during our mobile interview that Of course you can have like a group meeting in there, but a lot of people are typically in there by themselves…[team rooms] really work out well if you just need some space, because even in between our classes and things like that, it’s just peacefully quiet and you can get in there and get work done. (emphases mine) Students thus acknowledged the hidden curriculum that emerged from their encounters with the team rooms: the rooms were intended to facilitate group interactions where groups of business students could work on shared projects. As in the Exchange, however, students also mediated this hidden curriculum by choosing to occupy the space in ways that better suited their needs. Despite acknowledging team rooms’ intended community-oriented purpose, students sometimes rejected and sometimes complied with the notion that business education was a 136 community-oriented experience. As such, students once again mediated the hidden curriculum’s emergence through their encounters with different spaces in the SCB. This again demonstrates that the hidden curriculum was not a consistent and continuous force, but emerged as a function of students’ encounters and decisions. The hidden curriculum was not a determinant factor in students’ business education but was instead mediated by students’ indeterminate behaviors. Mediating Study Lounges’ “Room Signals to My Brain” Study lounges presented a complicated case of how students mediated the hidden curriculum in their encounters with/in the space. Though similar in appearance, different students used different study lounges for different purposes, thus mediating the hidden curriculum in different ways. First, the name and furniture in the Metzger Study Lounge suggested two separate activities: studying and lounging. Two individual study carrels were built into the wall, though three large conference tables were prominently featured in the room. This implied the potential for individual studying with generous accommodations for group studying, respectively. Meanwhile, the armchairs and couches in the study lounge suggested a less rigid space designed for lounging. Aesthetically and functionally similar to the Metzger Study Lounge, the Graduate Study Lounge featured two large conference tables and a handful of armchairs staggered against the walls. Both study lounges were spaces that could facilitate group interactions, informing students that business work can (or perhaps should) be done in a community setting. Students appeared to use the study lounges for both studying and lounging, but students mediated the hidden curriculum differently in the different study lounges. There was more consensus about how the Metzger Study Lounge was utilized, and more variation in how the Graduate Study Lounge was utilized. Students’ unique uses for the study lounges demonstrates 137 both their collective and individual capacity to mediate the hidden curriculum. Jerome specifically noted that the Metzger Study Lounge “gives you a different, more chill vibe, you just want to come here, sit and relax for a second, just like browse on your phone. But also just like do a lax project or some busy work, or note-taking…” However, the other students I interviewed tended to see the Metzger Study Lounge specifically as a quiet space where they would go to buckle down and study hard. My mobile interviews with Jack, Anne, Faith, and Elise confirmed that they used the Metzger Study Lounge for quiet, serious work. Jack opted not to walk me through the lounge because there were students studying inside (alone). Faith reported visiting the Study Lounge every Tuesday and Thursday “in between classes. I would sit in here, read, it was always quiet, no one’s in meetings.” Anne warned that “it’s such a quiet space, so if anyone is in there I’ll probably just like peek in…” Elise intentionally sought out the study lounge “in a time of more like panic, or stress…this is where I come when I seriously need to do work.” Other rooms were too distracting, but when Elise got to the Metzger Study Lounge, she said that “I’ll come in here, and this is like, almost a room signal to my brain that like, you need to do something.” Despite the room’s capacity for hosting group or community interactions, the students I observed and interviewed exclusively occupied the Metzger Study Lounge quietly and alone. Students thus collectively mediated the hidden curriculum that presented business education as community-oriented by rejecting the hidden curriculum and studying or lounging in the Metzger Study Lounge alone. Relative to students’ homogenous interpretation of the Metzger Study Lounge as a space for quiet, individual study, students utilized the Graduate Study Lounge differently from each other. This demonstrates students’ individual ability to mediate the hidden curriculum according to students’ own preferences. When team rooms were unavailable, Jack used the Graduate Study 138 Lounge to study comfortably by himself. The Graduate Study Lounge provided Jack the space he needed to spread out the pen and notebooks that he preferred to use in addition to his laptop. To the contrary, Elise mentioned that she and her friends would use the Graduate Study Lounge to try to recreate the social function that the Exchange served them prior to Covid. Elise and her friends would invite others to eat lunch and socialize before attending class in the classroom next door. In comparison to the Metzger Study Lounge, students used the Graduate Study Lounge upstairs more flexibly. My observations and Jack’s account of studying alone contrasted against Elise’s account of utilizing the space’s social function. This demonstrates that students uniquely mediated a hidden curriculum that emerged through their encounters with different spaces. Sometimes students rejected and sometimes students complied with the hidden curriculum’s presentation of business education as communal, revealing the indeterminacy in if and how the hidden curriculum would emerge. Visualizing Affective Indeterminacy Figure 20, below, represents affective indeterminacy mediating the hidden curriculum. 139 Figure 20 Indeterminacy Mediating the Hidden Curriculum Figure 20 builds on Figure 2, first introduced in Chapter 3. Figure 2 depicted the virtual possibilities, and thus indeterminate outcomes, behind any given encounter. What this chapter’s analysis adds to that depiction is that even encounters between objects are indeterminate. Thus, Figure 20 introduces another layer of virtual outcomes between the student and a third object. Though virtual outcomes underlie a potential encounter between all three objects, encounters between all three objects may never actualize. Thus, as my findings above indicate, each encounter bears the potential for indeterminate outcomes, and indeterminate circumstances may not actualize in an encounter at all. Conclusion The way that I observed a hidden curriculum was different from how students encountered the hidden curriculum in the same building. I discerned a hidden curriculum through my encounters with different people, spaces, and objects that presented business education as 140 community-oriented. However, students’ indeterminate routines mediated which objects they would encounter, limiting if and how the hidden curriculum would emerge. Further, even when students encountered the hidden curriculum, students’ indeterminate decision-making processes mediated if and how students would respond to the hidden curriculum. Some students chose to comply with the hidden curriculum by aligning their behavior accordingly. This was evident when students chose to extend their team relationships outside of the academic realm. Other times, students chose to reject the hidden curriculum by contrasting their behavior against the hidden curriculum’s presentation. This was evident when students chose to occupy group spaces as individuals. A hidden curriculum has heretofore been described as an imposing object that exists independently of students’ experiences (e.g., Jones & Young, 1997; Kentli, 2009; King, 1986; Portelli, 1993). However, this analysis illuminates how the indeterminacy behind students’ routines and decisions mediated the hidden curriculum’s emergence. In short, this analysis sheds light on how the hidden curriculum emerges as an affective phenomenon, relative to students’ indeterminate routines and dependent on how students mediate the hidden curriculum that they otherwise encounter. In the next chapter, I analyze how the hidden curriculum did not merely emerge as an object that students encountered. Rather, I analyze how the hidden curriculum emerged as the product of student encounters in a fluid and dynamic assemblage of space, people, and time. 141 CHAPTER 7: “YOU NEVER WRITE THE SAME POEM TWICE” I savor tradition. I like some things to unfold the same way year after year, if they can. I find that when traditions are carried out similarly every year, traditions create a bridge of continuity from the past to the present. The traditions are varied: spending Christmas with my family, working in my yard on summer Saturdays, and starting a new school year in the fall all represent continuity from past to present. However, traditions are never replicas of years past, they are reminders of years past. The late Irish poet John O’Donohue, in a conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, maintained that “...you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.” (Tippett, 2022, February 10). Old traditions, by virtue of bridging the past to the present, are made up of new events. Events change and so traditions change with them, whether that means different people are involved, the landscape changes, or chronological time simply progresses. A tradition might represent continuity between past and present, but, as John claimed later in the conversation, everything changes when present becomes past: “We just take it that [yesterday] goes into nothingness…The other thing, of course, is that we have no idea what will land on the shoreline of morning tomorrow, so that we are always actively involved in receiving and shaping” (Tippett, 2022, February 10). John’s point is that nothing can be replicated because everything is a product of the circumstances that produced it. Reflecting on my observations and interviews, I realized that John O’Donohue may as well have been talking about education when he talked about poetry. We can never learn the same thing twice, since what we learn is a product of the circumstances (e.g., spatial, social, temporal) that produced it. As such, in this chapter I will demonstrate that students co-created a hidden curriculum that presented business education as something that was performed, rather 142 than something that was acquired. Further, since students played a fundamental role in performing the hidden curriculum, students were implicated in co-creating the hidden curriculum simply by performing it. Using John O’Donohue’s language, the “poem” of business education was never written twice. Instead, an assemblage of space, people, and time enacted business education uniquely according to the unique combination of space, people, and time through which business education was performed. In this chapter, I foreground the affective notion of emergence (as defined in Chapter 3) to demonstrate how business education was performed, rather than acquired. Emergence helps us understand how business education was pulled into being through the encounters between space, people, and time, emerging as a performance and through students’ performing it. The Role of Space: Business Classrooms as Sociomaterial Assemblages In my experience, space often elicits a particular affective response. I can watch a baseball game in my living room and not move a muscle. When I am at the ballpark, however, my behavior changes even though the game remains the same. This socio-spatial dialect emerged through my observations in the SCB as well (Soja, 1980). I quickly noticed that cluster classrooms and case classrooms in the SCB bore distinct configurations relative to each other. Business education subsequently emerged as different performances with/in different spaces, since students and professors encountered each other and the classrooms in radically different ways. In this way, students co-created a hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative by performing their business education differently in different classroom spaces. I have not encountered any studies that explore business classrooms as pedagogic spaces. This section thus addresses an important gap in business education literature and higher education literature in general, insofar as space and place remain understudied in both fields (Beckers et al., 143 2015; Cox, 2018). Below I will compare how business education emerged as unique performances in cluster classrooms and case classrooms, two distinct spaces in the SCB. Cluster Classrooms’ “Emotional Feel” Business education as it unfolded in cluster classrooms emerged as a unique performance relative to other classrooms in the SCB. A hidden curriculum thus revealed business education as performative since students’ encounters with/in cluster classrooms influenced the way that students performed their business education in that space. Students testified that cluster classrooms’ spatial and material configurations encouraged movement and collaboration and were conducive to more active learning strategies. Materially, cluster classrooms’ furniture was mostly smaller tables and chairs with wheels, which allowed students to work in small groups and encouraged students to move freely about the space. The technology in the cluster classrooms also promoted group work. Cluster classrooms had multiple screens around the perimeter of the room that individual groups could use. Cluster classrooms also utilized a collaborative technology that allowed students and professors to view and share each other’s screens. Anne described the technology and software in cluster classrooms as: like a digital canvas…And then, the screens have this feature where you can send your workspace to the wall so your whole group can watch what’s going on…so when the teacher is presenting on her larger screen in the front of the room, she can lead the workspaces, so our screens will move with hers, and we can see where she’s at. Thus, students’ encounters with/in the cluster classrooms’ space, furniture, and technology influenced how business education emerged as a particular performance. Students’ business education was enacted through movement and collaboration, a performance encouraged by “the 144 material and materializing forces” that students encountered in cluster classrooms (Fenwick et al, 2011, p. 95). While the cluster classrooms’ material environment played an active role in how students performed their business education, so too did the professors’ mobilization of the material and the space. In this way, students’ business education was enacted as the “distributed effect” of students’ encounters with/in a sociomaterial environment (Fenwick et al., 2011, p. 117). Jack and Anne mentioned that their professors encouraged them to move about the cluster classroom and sit in a different spot during each class. Beyond simply moving bodies around the classroom, however, many students I interviewed reported participating in distinct pedagogical practices that utilized the cluster classrooms’ unique spatial and material configurations. For example, students primarily described courses taken in cluster classrooms as more fluid, relational, and communicative relative to courses taken in other classrooms. Jerome noted that the cluster classroom space allowed professors to “walk around and relay information to everyone…[and] also gives everybody pretty much a chance…like with the case classrooms, you can have all the people in the front interact and the people in the back…might not be into it.” Jerome continued, saying that he thought cluster classrooms were “the best for communicating. Because they are very close and personal…your professor is easily able to intermingle between all of the seat locations, but as well, it’s easier for you to have communication between the students.” Jerome thus described his performance of business education in cluster classrooms as interactional and communicative. Elise described pedagogical trends similar to what Jerome explained, noting that she was not sure “if they purposely put classes in here that are more interactive, just because of the way it’s set up, but I haven’t had a class in there that was very lecture-heavy.” Elise described how in her consumer behavior class, “we would literally be given a topic, and it was 145 like, everyone was talking about it in a big group setting.” For example, Elise’s entire sales class would engage in a large group conversation about interviewing and getting a job. In this way, students’ business education in cluster classrooms emerged as a communicative and collaborative performance. A hidden curriculum thus revealed business education as performative, emerging uniquely from students’ unique encounters in cluster classrooms. While students described cluster classrooms’ influence on how students learned, students also suggested that their encounters in cluster classrooms shaped what students learned. Jerome, Jack, and Elise talked about how the different courses that they had taken in cluster classrooms were fundamentally shaped by the space. Jerome suggested that his consumer behavior class relied more on an “emotional feel.” In this particular class, Jerome noted that the professor would facilitate conversations not only about course material, but also “about real ongoing world and life events.” Similarly, Jack and Elise mentioned that drama was an important piece of their business ethics class, also held in a cluster classroom. Jack explained that We do a bunch of different role-plays where we're assigned characters, so you go over some moral situation and it’s kind of cool where we had a bunch of space and you can move around and you talk to people. Elise corroborated Jack’s recollection, noting that in her business ethics course, We did quite a few role play scenario[s], and so this class was a lot of moving around and we would be in groups, sent out into the hallway to discuss a situation. And then…there would be a group that would stay in the room that wouldn’t know the information that the group in the hallway had, so then it would be like on the spot we’re performing this… Business education thus emerged as an intimate performance in cluster classrooms, one where consumer behavior and business ethics emerged through students’ personal lives and 146 bodies. Using these examples, I suggest that students’ business education was not an abstract set of principles that existed outside of space-time. Rather, the hidden curriculum revealed business education as a performance that emerged through students’ bodies, emotions, and movement in a particular classroom space. Subsequently, students co-created the hidden curriculum by partially constituting the assemblages through which business education emerged as performative. Case Classrooms’ “Lecture-Heavy” Structure Though case classrooms were configured differently than cluster classrooms, the case classrooms’ “material and materializing forces” also influenced how students performed their business education (Fenwick et al., 2011, p. 95). Students thus co-created a hidden curriculum that further revealed business education as performative by performing their education differently in different classroom spaces. As shown in Chapter 4, case classrooms featured three tiered rows of seating that left students facing the front of the classroom and relatively immobilized. Movement throughout the room was difficult for students, who had to squeeze behind their classmates to get into or out of their seats, and who had to pass by the front of the classroom (occupied solely by the professor) to enter or exit. However, the professor in a case classroom enjoyed freedom of movement throughout the front of the classroom and the center of the horseshoe-shaped seating. The semi-circle arrangement of student seating allowed professors to surveil their students while remaining at the focal point of the classroom space. Further, the professor had full control over all of the technology in the classroom. A large whiteboard spanned the front wall of the classroom, and two projectors cast simultaneously to two screens on top of the whiteboards. The professor I observed in a case classroom relied on the projectors to present prepared material and would use the whiteboard space to draw up examples to further explain concepts presented through the projector. In short, just as in a cluster classroom, the 147 spatial and material configuration in case classrooms played an active role in influencing how business education emerged as a performance within the space. Business education emerged as a vastly different performance in case classrooms than it did in cluster classrooms. Business education emerged in case classrooms as a performance that was defined by organizing, packaging, transmitting, and receiving information. In case classrooms, students performed their education primarily by sitting behind immobile desks, consuming content that the professor produced through digital projection, handwritten examples, and spoken words. Jerome and Elise respectively described their courses in case classrooms as “structured” and “lecture-heavy.” Jerome mentioned that case classrooms “seem more like energy forced toward the middle, toward the professor” and are better than cluster classrooms to give lectures or presentations. Similarly, Jerome thought that classes like MGT499, the class that I observed, “need to be more structured just because of how we’re receiving information…” Jerome followed up on this later, saying, “…a cluster classroom might be a lot more [personal], and a lot more free, loose, where a case classroom has a lot more structure in how the information is getting spread out.” Elise expressed similar sentiments, noting that she thought of MGT499 as a lecture course, and the seating in a cluster classroom would be too uncomfortable to sit through a formal lecture. In this way, students associated their professors’ pedagogical strategies with case classrooms’ distinctive configurations. In this particular sociomaterial assemblage, the hidden curriculum presented “Administrative Policy” (the title of MGT499) as a performance that required organization, packaging, delivery, and ultimately consumption. How Jerome and Elise described the nature of the courses they took in case classrooms is notable. The way that business education emerged as a performance mirrored the case classroom’s spatial and material configuration itself. For example, Jerome correlated the rigid 148 case classroom space with the structured nature of MGT499’s course content. This correlation was directly contrasted against Jerome’s correlation between the “free, loose” and “emotional feel” of the consumer behavior course he took in a more flexible cluster classroom. Similarly, Elise’s notion that MGT499 must be taught via lecture and would be “uncomfortable” in a cluster classroom demonstrates a correlation between how she performed MGT499 and the case classroom’s spatial configuration. Jerome and Elise both appeared to align the course syllabus, the MGT499 professor’s instructional strategies, and the classroom configuration itself. The meticulous organization of topics in the syllabus, of content during lectures, and of bodies in the classroom all formed an assemblage through which business education emerged as a structured and hierarchical performance. For Jerome and Elise, MGT499 could not be performed in a cluster classroom the same way it was performed in a case classroom. Because MGT499 was “lecture-heavy,” there would be no need for a classroom conducive to mobility and collaboration. Though the case classroom assemblage appeared as a natural fact to Jerome and Elise, I suggest that students’ structured and hierarchical performance of “administrative policy” was instead a function of the assemblage in and through which MGT499 was performed. The hidden curriculum revealed business education to have emerged as a distinct performance in a distinct assemblage, influenced at least in part by the case classroom’s spatial and material configuration. As such, students co-created the hidden curriculum in which students (as part of a greater assemblage) performed their business education into being. The Role of People: Performing Business Education with Embodied and Imagined Others The people I am surrounded by influence who I am around them. Not just how I act, or what I say, but who I am. I emerge in one way when I am with my friend Andy, and another way when I am with my grandfather. The way I encounter others simply changes how I emerge. I 149 observed similar patterns of emergence in the SCB. In this section, I will demonstrate that business education emerged as a performance influenced by other people, both embodied and imagined. I will begin by showing how the professor in MGT499 presented himself as a model for performing business education and how students’ performances reflected the model they perceived. I will contrast my observations in MGT499 against how students described their business education emerging through encounters with other professors in the SCB. I will end this section with a brief analysis of how “imagined others,” personalities that students created outside of students’ immediate space-time, further shaped students’ business education performances. This analysis will demonstrate that students co-created a hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative. Students co-created this hidden curriculum by enacting their business education through varying encounters with different people in diverse assemblages. Professors’ Influence on Students’ Business Education Performances Throughout my observations in MGT499, I discerned a pattern in which students’ business education emerged as a performance influenced by encounters with the professor. Rather than acquiring knowledge about “administrative policy” that existed outside of time and space, students performed administrative policy with/in an assemblage that comprised the students and their professor. Students thus co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative by shaping their own performances after their professor’s model performances. The sociomaterial assemblage that I observed in the case classroom created a context in which the MGT499 professor’s experience, credentials, and performance were physically and socially centered in the case classroom. This assemblage positioned the professor as an authority whose performance of business education presented little room for alternative performance 150 possibilities. A hidden curriculum thus revealed “Administrative Policy” as a performance shaped by the professor. As explained above, the case classroom’s physical and material configuration positioned the professor as the focal point at the center of the classroom. The professor, almost always dressed in professional business attire, would lecture and control technology from the front of the classroom while students sat in their tiered seating, wearing casual clothing, quietly facing him. Additionally, the professor’s performance of business education was amplified by his recognizable markers of success in the field. The professor’s doctoral degree, meticulous lesson planning and lecturing, and references to his 15 years of business experience in a technology sector supported the professor’s performances’ merit. Further, various encounters between the professor and the students revealed how the professor’s performance was worthy of emulation. The professor used phrases such as “how will I explain this to you…,” “listen to me…,” “let me see if I can explain this using another example…,” and “are you with me?” (emphases mine). Fenwick et al. (2011) argued that “agency is not an essential property of one actor but emerges through micro-negotiations at the various nodes connecting entities” (p. 113). This claim, made through an actor-network theoretical lens, helps illuminate the authority that the professor exercised by teaching MGT499 in a case classroom. The sociomaterial assemblage through which MGT499 emerged—comprising the physical space and material configurations, representations of expertise gained across space-time, and the resultant encounters in which the professor exercised authority over his students—converged to position the professor’s performance of business education as an authoritative model to his students. Business education in the MGT499 assemblage emerged as a student performance that reflected the professor’s model performance. In this way, students co-created the hidden 151 curriculum through their performance of business education, which itself revealed business education as performative. Students’ emulation of their professor’s performance was most evident to me through the language and tone that students used in class. For example, the professor would occasionally solicit students’ responses to questions that were asked during class. In answering these questions, students’ tenor and diction shifted from the casual tone that was struck before class to the more professional, technical tone that the professor modeled. Some students used the exact same words that the professor would use instead of finding their own phrases or terms. This suggested that students’ business performances were directly modeled after their professor’s. Beyond diction, I also observed students trying to emulate the pace at which the professor would articulate professional discourse. During one classroom observation, a student raised their hand to speak and stumbled trying to articulate their thoughts at the same speed that the professor had been using. The student paused and uttered an apology before beginning again at a slower pace. This brief interaction indicated to me that this particular professor’s performance literally “set the tone” in this particular classroom. The hidden curriculum that I observed thus presented business education as an embodied performance. Students co-created the hidden curriculum by modeling their own performances after their professor’s performance. Business education emerged as unique performances in different assemblages. As such, performances with/in the sociomaterial assemblage through which MGT499 emerged were fundamentally distinct from performances enacted with/in other assemblages. That business education emerged as different performances in encounters with different people further illustrates how students co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as a performance. For example, Elise walked me past another case classroom in the SCB, a room 152 with a strikingly similar configuration to the case classroom where our section of MGT499 emerged. Elise recalled a marketing course that she took in the other case classroom, and described her business education emerging as a very different performance than what I observed in MGT499. Elise reminisced about the social encounters that defined her marketing performance in that particular space. The course was taught by “a professor who was super outgoing, she was just really fun, and I have a lot of memories of her just talking about very outlandish things in here.” Elise followed up by describing how her academic marketing class represented a social tipping point in her business education: that was when I first started to feel kind of the similar feeling that I had in high school, where it felt like we were a collective group…I felt like I actually knew some of the people that were around me…I hadn’t felt that up until that point, and that was in this [case classroom]. Elise suggested that her marketing course emerged as a social performance, led by a “super outgoing” professor and conducive to creating comfortable friendships with the other students in the class. Similarly, Jerome spoke about a professor he had for his consumer behavior class, in a cluster classroom. Jerome described this professor as “kind of like a caffeine shot, because he is a very energetic person.” According to Jerome, this professor “would just keep us going with conversations and even some days we were just not even talking about class.” Jerome’s description portrays business education that was performed as a conversation, influenced by encounters with the professor. The professor’s energy and amiability thus shaped how Jerome performed consumer behavior. In short, students’ business education emerged as a unique outcome of encounters with/in a particular assemblage, rather than an acquisition of knowledge that exists outside of time and space. As such, students co-created a hidden curriculum by 153 performing their business education through encounters with other people. Students learned that business education was performative simply by performing it, a performance enacted with the space and people also active in the assemblage. “Imagined Others’” Influence on Students’ Business Education Performances As described above, students’ business education emerged as performances influenced by embodied professors in material(izing) spaces. Students’ business education also emerged as performances influenced by “imagined others” who represented space and time outside of the SCB. Specifically, students’ business education emerged as a performance relative to future colleagues that students invented and onto whom students projected various character traits and attributes. In this way, students co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative by performing their business education in relation to others whom the students themselves created. For example, class discussions during MGT499 consistently referred to people who occupied distinct roles and were not physically present in the classroom. Students would systematically refer to “customers,” “consumers,” “shareholders,” “directors,” “competitors,” etc. These speech patterns were endemic in class, evident during case analyses, team simulation reports, and students’ final presentations at the end of the term. I find students’ routine creation of “imagined others” to be notable to this analysis. Specifically, students bore the dual responsibility for a) expanding their business education into a space-time outside of the immediate sociomaterial assemblage and b) responding to this expanded space-time appropriately. In other words, students’ business education emerged as a performance relative not only to the space and people that students encountered in the SCB. Instead, students’ business education emerged as a performance relative to the future spaces and people with whom students imagined themselves working. In this way, students’ business education emerged as a 154 performance relative to “the forces of encounter” that spanned both time and space (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 3). Students co-created a hidden curriculum by imagining others who, in turn, influenced how students performed their business education. This hidden curriculum did not present business education as an objective set of principles or skills. Rather, the hidden curriculum presented business education as a performance that emerged relative to a specific sociomaterial assemblage which itself spanned space-time. My analysis above resonates with Nespor’s (1994) observation that undergraduate management education compressed space-time by mimicking in the classroom the corporate performances that defined professional management practice. Per Nespor, undergraduate management students were not preparing to participate in professional practice as much as they were actually interacting with the field through compressed space-time within the discipline (p. 131). I disagree with Nespor’s conclusions about whether students were interacting with the discipline or engaging in a distinct academic exercise (see Chapter 5 of this study). Regardless, Nespor and I agree that students’ business education emerged as a performance relative to a sociomaterial assemblage across space and time. I contend that students’ responsibility for imagining the others with whom students would perform explicitly implicates students as co- creators of a hidden curriculum. This hidden curriculum presented business education not as an objective set of knowledge or skills but as a performance that emerged differently in different assemblages. The Role of Time: Business Education as Temporally Distinct Performances The above two sections have analyzed how business education emerged as a performance within specific sociomaterial assemblages. Rather than acquiring an objective set of skills and developing the Platonic form of business practice, students’ business education emerged relative 155 to the spaces and people that students encountered. Echoing John O’Donohue, I observed that students never wrote the same poem twice in their business education (Tippett, 2022, February 10). I continue this line of thought in this section by demonstrating that students’ business education emerged as a performance relative to the specific temporal landscape in which students’ education unfolded. I contend that students’ business education emerged as a performance relative to the time of day that students took their courses, the semester in which particular courses were scheduled, and the global timescape shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic. Time of Day Students described how the time of day in which they took their courses influenced how students’ business education emerged. Students predictably noted that it was harder to focus during their morning classes. Students also indicated that the intersection of time, space, and people, e.g., taking morning classes in a cluster classroom with a certain professor, influenced the performance through which their business education emerged. For example, Elise found that taking a morning course in a cluster classroom helped her be a more active presence in her class. Because cluster classrooms offered different work surfaces, Elise would seek out a standing desk to keep her awake and engaged. Elise noted that “I had an 8:30 [a.m. class] in there which I know is not that early, but I would come and standing really helped because I had more energy [while I was] standing.” Elise thus found that her business education emerged as a unique performance based on the particular intersection of the time of day and physical configuration of the classroom. Similarly, Jerome found that taking a morning class with a particular professor influenced how his business education emerged in that particular space and time. Jerome implied a need to stay alert during his 8:30 a.m. class, a need that was met by his energetic professor. Jerome noted 156 that “I think this is a great way to start my mornings…my professor…is kind of like a caffeine shot, because he is a very energetic person.” Jerome’s business education in this particular space and time emerged relative to the time of day and the professor’s energetic approach to teaching, which Jerome compared to a literal stimulant. The time of day in which students took their classes thus played a relevant role in how students’ business education emerged (i.e., was performed). Elise and Jerome suggested that the space and people through which their business education emerged offset the chronic lack of energy or engagement from which students would otherwise suffer at this particular time of day. In short, students’ business education emerged as a unique performance based on the specific intersection of time, space, and people through which their business education unfolded. Students thus co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative by performing their education differently during different times of day. Time of Year I found that the semester in which students took their courses also influenced how students’ business education emerged. Different classes were taught in different classrooms each semester, so students’ business education emerged in different sociomaterial assemblages at different times over the course of the year. For example, eight of the nine sections of MGT499 met in a case classroom during the spring semester that I observed. However, seven of the eight sections of MGT499 met in a cluster classroom during the following fall semester. Courses other than MGT499 were also assigned to different classroom styles across different semesters. As shown above, the hidden curriculum revealed students’ business education as a performance that emerged relative to the space with/in which the course unfolded. Subsequently, different business courses would emerge differently in different sociomaterial assemblages across 157 different semesters. The “administrative policy” that students performed thus emerged not just as a function of the case classroom and their professor, but also as a function of the semester in which I observed. In short, the semester in which students took their courses was a relevant element of the assemblage through which students’ business education emerged as a performance. Pandemic Time Finally, the global timescape as defined by the Covid-19 pandemic influenced how business education emerged in the SCB. The Covid-19 pandemic emerged in many ways, including through biological microorganisms, social movements, political policy, medical mobilization, personal grief, and economic disruption, to name just a few. I also consider Covid- 19 to have emerged temporally, a period of time that lingers even as I write in 2023. As a temporal emergence, Covid-19 has defined a timescape that shapes how American higher education is forced to adapt to continue operating. Almost every student I interviewed expressed various ways that their business education emerged differently during the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, Covid-19 as a temporal object played a direct role in how business education emerged as a unique performance in the SCB. By altering how students performed their education during Covid-19, students co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as a performance that emerged relative to space, people, and time. First, students noted that their education during Covid-19 emerged through an online medium as opposed to the in-person classes that they were used to. This impacted how students performed their business education in different ways. Rebecca noted matter-of-factly that all of her classes went online, but others talked more about how the shift from in-person to online classes influenced them. Anne mentioned that she had to drop a class because of the stresses of 158 Covid-19, and Jerome observed that “being in class and being online are completely two separate things…the mindsets are a lot different.” Jerome also mentioned that “Covid knocked off a lot of my energy,” and continued to describe how one particularly difficult class unfolded as the pandemic raged on: It wasn’t my best performance in the class just because COVID had just started to happen…we’re trying to figure out if we’re balancing between staying in class and going online…So I wasn’t getting the full fruition of getting an education…I’m a hands-on person, sort of best thing would be having the professor there. Implicit in Jerome’s narrative is that he was unsatisfied with how business education emerged with/in the specific assemblage of time (Covid-19), space (digital media), and people (physical isolation and/or digital representations of embodied people). This demonstrates a hidden curriculum that revealed how business education emerged as a distinct performance with/in a unique assemblage in which the Covid-19 pandemic played a salient role. Second, several students noted that Covid-19 strained communication and relationships between students and professors. As a result, business education emerged through performances that sustained distance between people, rather than promoting the close proximity and communication I observed once social-distancing regulations were relaxed. Jerome, whose business education performance seemed to have been acutely impacted by Covid-19, noted that “Covid has definitely changed a lot now, like interactions between like professors and even students, between ourselves, interacting between each other, it seems, like, even with the masks it puts a slight barrier in between.” Elise and Faith also noted the distance between students, recalling particular times when meetings for group projects had to be moved outside to meet social distancing requirements. Elise pointed out a patio on the second floor where her group met 159 early in the pandemic, since meeting inside violated campus regulations around social distancing. Walking past the back patio on the first floor, Faith further recalled that “there was a tent out there, but we would sit out there. I did a group project out there, so we could space out six feet because the professors were very paranoid about that to begin with.” Faith went on to describe another class she took where the professor enforced distances between himself and his students as a result of pandemic regulations: I don’t even think he ever learned any of our names or anything…he wouldn’t even hand us our papers during Covid, he would just sit them somewhere and be like, ‘OK, you go,’ like he would not talk to us. He didn’t have office hours, like, it was very hard to reach him. When I asked Faith if this was a function of the Covid-19 regulations or simply a personality trait, Faith answered, “I think a little bit of both? Because no professor was like that.” According to Faith, at least a part of her professor’s business education performance—and the various distances she and others enacted between themselves—was attributable to the pandemic time in which they took business courses. Students thus co-created the hidden curriculum that revealed business education as performative by changing the way they performed their own business education during the Covid-19 pandemic. In summary, students co-created a hidden curriculum that revealed business education as a performance emerging through a specific assemblage in which Covid-19 played a conspicuous role. The performances through which students’ business education emerged emphasized practicing business as well as physical, mental, and public health. Students emerged as co- creators of the hidden curriculum because they were active participants in the assemblage through which business education emerged. In short, students learned that business education 160 was performative by virtue of performing it. The hidden curriculum revealed business education not as an object to be acquired, but rather as a “distributed effect” of the time, space, and people who performed business education into being (Fenwick et al., 2011). Visualizing Affective Emergence In Figure 21, below, I depict how students co-created the hidden curriculum that emerged through and as students’ encounters with/in the assemblage. Figure 21 A Hidden Curriculum Emerging Through Mutually-Affecting, Indeterminate Encounters Figure 21 builds on Figures 19 and 20, presented in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. Figure 21 adds that the hidden curriculum was not something that emerged because of an encounter, which is represented in Figures 19 and 20 by the space between the equilibrium arrow. Instead, Figure 21 depicts the hidden curriculum as emerging through the encounter, as the encounter, represented by the hidden curriculum (HC) superimposed onto the equilibrium arrow. Indeed, the 161 hidden curriculum emerged as students’ encounters with/in their assemblage. Additionally, the funnels of virtual outcomes for each encounter suggest that the mutually affecting and emergent encounters’ outcomes were indeterminate. For example, students may have learned how to perform their education in any particular way (e.g., emotional, structured, social), represented by the virtual outcomes in the funnel. Regardless, the hidden curriculum emerged presenting business education as performative, represented by the mutually-affective encounter with/in a particular assemblage. In short, Figure 21 shows how the hidden curriculum presented business education as performative by depicting the hidden curriculum as an emergent performance, i.e., a particular emergence in a particular assemblage. Conclusion Previous chapters in this study make epistemological claims about business education: business education is a distinctive experience; business education is a community-oriented experience. In this chapter, I make an ontological claim about business education: business education is performative, an emergent outcome of encounters within a particular assemblage. In this way, business education was not something that students could access outside of time and space, but only emerged through students' engagement with space, people, and time in the SCB. First, students’ engagement with/in a particular space influenced how their business education was performed. Different spatial arrangements facilitated different pedagogies, which literally shaped the content that students were performing in addition to how students were learning content. Second, the different people that students encountered influenced how students performed their business education. Students’ encounters with professors shaped how they performed their business education (ranging from integrating emotion to mirroring vocal discourse). Students’ encounters with others that students imagined into being also shaped how 162 students would respond in particular situations. Finally, the timescapes in which the various assemblages of space and people were situated influenced how business education emerged as a performance. Morning classes, courses taken in the fall semester rather than the spring, and the temporal object of Covid-19 all influenced how business education emerged. In the next chapter, I conclude my dissertation by discussing how my study complicates existing literature, theory, and practice. I also draw from my previous chapters to outline implications for how the assemblages that we call “education” are perceived, studied, and practiced. 163 CHAPTER ∞: “YESTERDAY IS GONE, TOMORROW IS FOREVER” I began my career in higher education working in enrollment at my alma mater. During a work retreat in 2012, my colleagues and I were asked to read a book chapter entitled “A Christian University is for Lovers: The Education of Desire” (Smith, 2009). I soon found myself immersed in a persuasive argument that outlined how people’s values and beliefs are more evident in their embodied routines than their professed beliefs. The author argued that a university’s primary role is to form students’ lived routines to reflect what students claim to believe as well as informing students with information. In doing so, students will learn to enact their visions of “the good life” rather than merely articulating particular values. Reading that book chapter marked a new beginning for me where I began to pay conscious attention to the knowledge that I co-created and practiced through/as my own embodied intelligence. This dissertation marks my first scholarly endeavor into exploring how others co-created and practiced embodied intelligence. Of course, this is also to say that this dissertation marks my first scholarly investigation of my own embodied intelligence. While the content in the preceding chapters primarily focused on undergraduate business students, the research and writing process also reveals a great deal about me. In this concluding chapter, I will synthesize my findings as they relate to my original research questions. I will then discuss implications that my study and findings have for theory, methodology, and future research before exploring practical implications for my colleagues in higher education. I will conclude this chapter with some final thoughts on how I have grown and changed as a result of this dissertation experience. 164 Exploring an Affective Education This dissertation was explicitly informed by my interest in exploring embodied knowledge that is created and enacted with/in sentient bodies. I set out to explore undergraduate business students’ encounters with a hidden curriculum by exploring the following research questions: ● How do students encounter the hidden curriculum as an affective object in an undergraduate business management program at a comprehensive regional university in the Midwest United States? ● How does the hidden curriculum emerge through multiple people and objects (including faculty, language, physical objects, spaces, and events)? ● What knowledge about business education do students develop through their encounters with the hidden curriculum? The findings my questions elicited both respond to and challenge the questions themselves. While these questions commenced my affective research project, my findings do more than simply provide answers. My findings complicate some premises behind my research questions, which is consistent with the affective notions of encounter (mutually-impressing interactions between call and response), indeterminacy (never prescribing “An Answer”), and emergence (answering questions with new questions, as “answer” presumes finality). How Did the Hidden Curriculum Emerge Through Multiple People and Objects? In response to the first research sub-question, my findings reveal myriad ways that the hidden curriculum emerged in the undergraduate business management program in the SCB. Descriptive in nature, Chapter 4 painted the picture for the setting in which my research took place. Understanding the material, social, temporal, and personal parameters around my study is 165 important to understand what and how I observed students encountering through their daily routines. Chapter 5 analyzed how students came to encounter a hidden curriculum that emerged through the spaces (geographic and temporal) and objects that students navigated in their business education. This analysis demonstrated how embodied students encounter an affective hidden curriculum in an integrated educational environment, inclusive of space and time. Consequently, the hidden curriculum must be understood as an emergent, embodied phenomenon. Previous literature has explored how the hidden curriculum shapes students’ reflective understanding of business operations (e.g., Ehrensal, 2001; Sebastianelli, 2018; Sebastianelli & Trussler, 2006). However, Chapter 5 shows that a hidden curriculum is also evident in how students embody their business education. Additionally, incorporating a temporal setting as an object through which a hidden curriculum might emerge is a new contribution to sites where students may incorporate a hidden curriculum. Chapter 6 further complicated the first research sub-question by demonstrating that the hidden curriculum’s emergence should not be assumed as a given. By tracing the indeterminacy behind students’ routines and decision-making capacities, Chapter 6 challenged the hidden curriculum’s imminence. Chapter 6 foregrounded the indeterminate and unpredictable role that students played in encountering the hidden curriculum (or not) in the first place. Thus, I assert that the hidden curriculum should be considered as an indeterminate function of students’ experiences. Other literature (e.g., Costello, 2001; Gair & Mullins, 2001) has described a robust hidden curriculum that emerged through the built environment, though the reader is left to imagine how students interpret and respond to such a hidden curriculum. Analysis in Chapter 6 showed that I can observe, describe, and analyze a hidden curriculum through a research lens. 166 However, students’ indeterminate encounters with the hidden curriculum mediate how—indeed, whether—a hidden curriculum emerges. Building on my analysis that emphasized students’ role in how the hidden curriculum emerged, Chapter 7 demonstrated that the hidden curriculum emerged as a function of students’ encounters. The first research sub-question suggests that students’ experiences are separate from the people and objects through which a hidden curriculum might emerge. My findings in Chapter 7 problematize that separation and instead posit that the hidden curriculum emerged through students themselves as students encountered particular times, spaces, and people. I thus suggest that a hidden curriculum may not emerge as an intervention resulting in changes to students’ behavior, as explored by others (e.g., Apple, 1971; Winter & Cotton, 2012). Through my analysis in Chapter 7 I claim that the hidden curriculum may emerge through students’ behavior, the result of encounters rather than an object to be encountered. Thus, in response to my first research sub-question, my findings indicate that the hidden curriculum emerges not only through the social and material environments in which students' business education is facilitated. Rather, I find that a hidden curriculum emerges through students’ indeterminate encounters with myriad people and objects. Further, I find that in some cases a hidden curriculum emerges as students’ encounters with myriad people and objects. I thus progressively demonstrate in Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 that the hidden curriculum is not an object that students encounter separate from students’ own experiences. My findings across these chapters show that the hidden curriculum emerges because of, through, and as students’ encounters. 167 What Knowledge Did Students Develop Through Their Encounters with the Hidden Curriculum? My second research sub-question inquires into the types of knowledge that students developed toward their business education as a result of their encounters with the hidden curriculum. My findings reveal that students develop different types of knowledge about their business education. An affective hidden curriculum presented different traits of business education, such as “distinctive,” “community-oriented,” and “performative.” However, my findings also demonstrated that students developed knowledge about their affective capacities as actors in their business education, rather than passive receptors of knowledge. In Chapter 5, students learned that their business education was a distinctive academic program, distinguishable from other academic disciplines as well as their professional business careers. This facet of business education became evident to students through their encounters with a socially, geographically, academically, and temporally distinct campus and courses. Students also learned that they were not helplessly subject to business education’s imposing distinctiveness. Rather, as part of an affective encounter, students were able to impress upon that which impressed upon them. Students responded to business education’s distinctiveness in ways that shaped their encounters in the SCB as comfortable, lonely, and hopeful. In Chapter 6, I demonstrated how students could learn that business education is community-oriented, part of a local, national, and global business community. Some (but not all) students’ routines facilitated encounters with the local, national, and global communities in which their business education was situated. As far as I observed, all students mediated encounters with pedagogical, architectural, and material objects that encouraged working together with other students. Students thus learned that business education may be intended to be 168 taken on with or around others. However, students also learned that they could choose the extent to which their business education was community-oriented. Some students were more inclined to experience business education in community if their routines and preferences allowed. Others either missed opportunities to practice business education in community or chose to practice alone. In learning about business education’s community orientation, students also learned that their own indeterminacy exercised the mediating power to deny or comply with the hidden curriculum, even if only by chance. In Chapter 7, I observed students learning that business education was performative by virtue of enacting their own business education as a performance. Students performed their business education differently depending on the people, space, and temporality that students encountered. Students’ performances thus demonstrated that business education was not something objective to acquire, but a performance that emerged through affective encounters. In learning that business education was performative, students also learned that they were a fundamental part of how their dynamic, lived education emerged. I progressively demonstrated through Chapters 5, 6, and 7 that students developed knowledge about business education that also centered students’ own affective agency in how their business education would emerge. This became evident through students’ responses to their encounters, students’ autonomy as realized through their indeterminate routines and preferences, and students’ participation in performing their business education into being. Important to note, however, is that students never responded to the hidden curriculum as a monolith. This is consistent with the affective tenets of encounter and indeterminacy. Some students may have responded to the hidden curriculum similarly, such as interpreting business education’s temporal distinction from professional practice as hopeful. However, to speak of “students” is to speak of 169 a diverse group of indeterminate emergences that encountered and interpreted the hidden curriculum in myriad forms. How Did Students Encounter the Hidden Curriculum as an Affective Object? Finally, my findings respond to my guiding research question that asks how students encounter the hidden curriculum as an affective object. In short, students do not simply encounter the hidden curriculum as an affective object. An essential “hidden curriculum” does not exist outside of students’ encounters. Rather, by virtue of students’ and the hidden curriculum’s affective nature, the hidden curriculum emerged as a mutual encounter between students and the various spaces, objects, people, and temporalities with which students routinely engaged. Sometimes, as explored in Chapter 5, students encountered spatial and temporal contexts that suggested isolation or distinctiveness. However, students’ responses to these encounters shape what students learn from them. After all, “distinctive” and “isolating” are my terms, and are not necessarily shared by all of my interview partners! Further, as explored in Chapter 6, students mediated the hidden curriculum through their indeterminate routines and decisions. Consequently, students’ actions shaped the hidden curriculum, and not necessarily the other way around. Indeed, perhaps I only perceived a hidden curriculum presenting business education as community-oriented because my routines spanned the entire SCB and were not limited to a particular class schedule. Finally, as explored in Chapter 7, a hidden curriculum that presented business education as performative would be impossible to discern without observing students enact their business education. Students could not merely encounter this hidden curriculum; students’ bodies were this hidden curriculum. As affective beings, the undergraduate business students that I interviewed and observed were constantly “becoming” through the flows of space, time, people, and objects that comprised 170 students’ business education. Thus, utilizing an affective onto-epistemology and methodology, I respond to my guiding research question in two ways. First, I reveal the shortcomings of assuming a subject/object posture towards encountering a hidden curriculum. Second, I emphasize the mutually affecting, indeterminate, and emergent nature of how and what students learned through their mutual encounters with the hidden curriculum. Implications for Theory and Future Research The research design and findings that I have discussed in this paper make valuable contributions to existing work on affect theory, the hidden curriculum, postsecondary teaching and learning in general, and business education in particular. In this section I will discuss some of my studies' implications for existing theory and future research. Affect Theory and Affective Methodology In Chapter 3, I described affect as an onto-epistemological theory that foregrounds embodied people emerging in a world defined by physical encounters, social rhythms, and interpersonal intensities (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). This study was just as much about affect as it was undertaken through an affective theoretical lens. Notably, not much empirical work has been done with affect theory. Existing affect theory literature is largely conceptual, though some scholars apply descriptive or analytical methods to study existing phenomena (cf. Timm Knudsen & Stage, 2015). For example, Massumi’s (1995) foundational work on affect theory used existing scientific studies to describe how affect emerges, Berlant (2010) applied an affect theory lens toward published works of fiction, Ahmed (2014) used a small corpus of texts to represent how affect manifests in contemporary politics, and Stewart (2007) teased out affect’s role in everyday encounters. In contrast to existing literature, my affective methodology operationalized core affective tenets, specifically those of encounter, indeterminacy, and 171 emergence. Using these affect theoretical lenses, I traced students’ affective encounters and identified how otherwise amorphous affective flows engaged undergraduate business students as a pedagogical force. My study and findings have no precedent in a higher education setting. As such, my findings add to a small body of literature (e.g., Healy, 2016; Timm Knudsen & Stage, 2015) that examines affect using empirical methods. The assemblages that I analyzed provide insights into how affect shapes ordinary routines in higher education, and my methodology provides a pathway for continued affective research. Implications for Future Research The methodology that I articulated in Chapter 3 may contribute to future studies in affect. The traditional empirical methods I employed could be further used to witness affect at play, and develop a more robust empirical perspective on the nature and implications of affect. However, future research should consider the local rhythms and norms that provide context for interpreting affect. As Gunew (2009) noted, affect is culturally-mediated. My findings, while substantial in their own right, may be misunderstood outside of the local geographic and cultural context in which I collected and analyzed my data. What I have interpreted as disciplinary isolation or a community orientation may be interpreted differently in a different region or by a different researcher. As such, future studies on affective topics should consider the broader affective assemblage in which the assemblage under study is located. Similarly, future studies may benefit from multiple researchers. Utilizing more than one interpretive lens would lend a degree of intersubjectivity to nuance findings and collect more data more efficiently (Peshkin, 1982). In short, future research should consider the time, space, place, and consequent interpretive lenses through which researchers observe and analyze. 172 Finally, I intend to pursue the connections and overlap between my affective methodology and more traditional phenomenological methodology that has evolved over the past century (e.g., van Manen, 2016). Affective experiences are truly lived experiences and affect offers heuristic language for understanding that which is essential about lived experiences. By simply observing and following students around a building as they described their experiences to me, I was able to examine the role that affect played in shaping students’ lived experiences as undergraduate business students. This future work also represents a cross-methodological endeavor that could strengthen both affect theory and phenomenology as we seek to understand the emergent, embodied, and relational essence of lived experience. The Hidden Curriculum My findings have three significant implications for theorizing and studying the hidden curriculum. First, the hidden curriculum should not be theorized as a static object to which students are held helplessly subject. Rather, the hidden curriculum must be considered as a process, one that may be observable and sometimes predictable but is never determinate. Second, the hidden curriculum’s physical and embodied nature must be considered essential to future study. My findings make clear that the hidden curriculum influences students beyond their cognitive capacities and is capable of literally shaping students’ professional routines. Third, my study emphasizes the agency that students exercise in their encounters with the hidden curriculum. My findings provide evidence that the hidden curriculum should be considered an arena for “conflict, compromise, and struggle” (Margolis et al., 2001, p. 15), rather than a unidirectional flow of power. Additionally, much of the existing work on the hidden curriculum paints the hidden curriculum as politically nefarious, a phenomenon which can be used for good but more often 173 reifies existing social structures that protect an unjust status quo (Apple & King, 1977; Giroux, 1983; Klikauer, 2015). Produced through a constructivist paradigm rather than a critical paradigm, my findings do not implicate the hidden curriculum as an inherently partisan phenomenon. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, my interviews did not yield much attention to conflict and power struggles. I observed more consensus with established norms in the SCB than tension between people-groups and/or policy. Certainly any professional practice will have social implications, but the knowledge and orientations that I name in my findings are not particularly prejudiced. For example, practicing business education in community with others and as a performative product of time and space is not necessarily oppressive in nature. This is not to say, however, that the knowledge and orientations I name in my findings are simply apolitical despite the appearance of consensus. As such, implications for future research abound. Implications for Future Research Future scholarly efforts toward understanding the hidden curriculum must consider the hidden curriculum’s fluid and relational nature. The hidden curriculum’s fluidity could mean that no single course of action actually materializes, given the dynamic relationships through which a hidden curriculum emerges. Researchers would do well to consider the hidden curriculum’s pedagogical nature before making claims about what it is that the hidden curriculum actually teaches. Despite emphasizing how the hidden curriculum teaches, critically analyzing what the hidden curriculum teaches is also necessary and urgent. As Abes et al. (2019) asserted, “Constructivism is not intended to dismantle oppressive systems...the outcome of constructivism is not intended to be liberation” (p. 208). Future researchers might create a baseline understanding of the hidden curriculum’s pedagogical nature through a constructivist lens, as I 174 have done in the preceding pages. However, I urge future researchers to employ critical methodologies to “critique, interrogate, and transform any system” with/in which students encounter other people and objects (Gonzales et al., 2018, p. 514). Many critical scholars have demonstrated how schooling’s fundamentally ideological nature reproduces existing social attitudes and expectations that benefit the few at the expense of the many (e.g., Apple, 1971; Apple & King, 1977; Bhattacharya, 2016; Cornbleth, 1984; Giroux, 1981, 1983; Giroux & Penna, 1979; Margolis & Romero, 2001). Despite the valuable foundations set by existing critical work, an affective methodology provides new tools for critical theorists who seek to “critique, interrogate, and transform” education as an institution (Gonzales et al., 2018, p. 514). For example, an affective-critical lens might dismiss the notion of “an” education, organization, attitude, or even ideology. Affect theory maintains that knowledge is gained and exercised through encounters, resulting in an ontological form of emergence with no determinate outcome. Thus, the notion of “structural” oppression must go beyond the unidirectional imposition of power to explore how historic patterns of encounter have appeared to crystalize affective flows that resemble a static construct. Specifically, an affective-critical lens implores researchers to analyze various “isms” (e.g., racism, sexism, ableism, etc.) not as set dispositions toward essentialized elements of a person’s presented identity. Rather, an affective-critical paradigm emphasizes the imbalanced exchange of affect between those who have historically been allowed to be objectified (e.g., racialized, sexualized, ableized) and those who have historically been allowed to objectify others. Specific to my study, a critical-affective lens could do more than describe the hidden curriculum as value-neutral encounters, as I have done here. Rather, an affective-critical analysis might illuminate the flows of power and accessibility to reveal unjust discrepancies in how 175 different people encounter their environments. For example, an affective-critical analysis may not interpret business education as distinct based on the SCB’s geographic isolation. Rather, an affective-critical analysis may reveal business education as the benefactor of philanthropic gifts made from graduates who earn at higher rates compared to other majors and academic programs (Manzoni & Streib, 2019). Similarly, an affective-critical analysis may interpret “community- oriented” as “imposing consensus.” Whether analyzing “community” through student teams or a Global Trade Center, an affective-critical lens might reveal coercive isomorphic tendencies that stifle indeterminacy and impose behaviors and relationships normalized by historic patterns of encounter within the field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). In short, an affective-critical perspective would enable researchers to analyze the politics of the encounter. This builds on Healy and Mulcahy’s (2020) work on an “affective ethics” to identify routinized patterns of encounter between groups of people. Future research on the hidden curriculum could also benefit from a longitudinal approach. For example, expanding the length and depth of observations beyond undergraduate study could be especially beneficial. Since much of the hidden curriculum operates behind reflective consciousness (Borges et al. 2017; Cotton et al., 2013; Elliot et al., 2016; Otteweil et al., 2005), interviews with current students may reveal a limited capacity to understand how a hidden curriculum has shaped business professionals. Extending the scope of the study to include observations and interviews with program alumni could provide insights into how former business students practice business in relation to their organization of employment. Extended observations could perhaps unveil some of the unconscious habits that students developed that align with any hidden curriculum as perceived by future researchers. Similarly, considering students’ experiences prior to their enrollment in a business school could also prove productive. 176 To assume that students developed all of their knowledge about business education from their formal postsecondary business education experience alone would be naïve. Business schools are certainly an important site for professional socialization, shaping students’ values, behaviors, and attitudes (Blasco, 2012; Boyle, 2007; Ehrensal, 2001; Ghoshal, 2005; Haski-Leventhal et al., 2020). Even so, understanding students’ histories and existing impressions of business education would prove beneficial to understanding how unique, historied students engage with hidden curricula in undergraduate business education. Additionally, future research on the hidden curriculum might consider assemblages in different institutional types, in different regions of the country, and in different parts of the world. The research methodology that I have modeled in this study could be beneficial in comparing patterns of how a hidden curriculum emerges. My methodology could also help future research explore different students’ encounters with hidden curricula in different times and spaces. Further, future research should consider comparative research between different schools and colleges. For example, GRSU built an entirely separate campus dedicated to the health professions within a well-known stretch of hospitals and medical schools in the city’s downtown. How might students at the GRSU “health campus” engage with a hidden curriculum? Could the health campus’s isolation relative to the rest of campus (located farther away from the downtown campus) produce a similar hidden curriculum to that which emerged through the SCB? Or does the health campus’s close proximity to other medical centers frame distance from the rest of GRSU’s campus differently? Regardless, building on my research in other pre-professional schools could provide productive insights for contextualizing and better understanding how undergraduate students engage with the hidden curriculum. 177 Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Business Education Finally, this study has implications for theories of postsecondary teaching and learning, and business education as a specific branch of undergraduate education. For postsecondary teaching and learning in general, this study affirms previous assertions that space and time matter in postsecondary education (e.g., Beyes & Michels, 2014; Healy, 2016; Liao et al., 2013; Nespor, 1994). For example, classroom setup can influence not just how students learn (for more on active learning spaces, see Baepler et al., 2016; Park & Choi, 2014) but also how students shape and practice the content / knowledge that they develop. Additionally, my findings expand the definition of an educational environment. Campus layout, building maintenance, support services’ locations, and even unique soundscapes can shape student behavior and, in turn, student learning. The learning environment is a broadly inclusive space that should benefit from careful planning, observation, and evaluation. Further, changes to the learning environment should be informed by a rigorous examination of the interplay between the human, non-human, and temporal elements that comprise the environment (see Cox, 2018; Strange & Banning, 2015). In reference to space and time, I also refer to digital spaces (e.g., learning management systems) and digital time (e.g., asynchronicity). Though Anderson (2002) wrote about the hidden curriculum of online learning, further research could consider how a hidden curriculum emerges from hyper-linked digital texts, search engines that feign neutrality, and the variable geographic and emotional distances that digital space and media present. My study also expands conceptual definitions of learning itself. As a series of affective encounters, “learning” cannot be reduced to a single artifact that is assessed formally (e.g., a project or test) or informally (e.g., if the car still runs after watching a video on how to change spark plugs). Rather, “learning” becomes an ontological construct that describes how people 178 encounter other people and objects. My findings resonate with Dall’Alba and Barnacle’s (2007) assertion that “...knowing is always situated within a personal, social, historical and cultural setting, and thus transforms from the merely intellectual to something inhabited and enacted: a way of thinking, making and acting. Indeed, a way of being” (p. 682). Seen through an affective lens, “learning” becomes less about what is learned and more about how the learner becomes. The affective tenet of emergence helps illuminate informal learning, for example. Informal learning occurs inside and outside of formal educational settings and may be described as “an incidental education and includes all non-intentioned, heterogeneous influences…which spontaneously happened, unexpected, unplanned, without being conscious” (Manolescu et al., 2018, p. 8). Insofar as people are in a continuous state of emergence resulting from their various encounters, Manolescu et al.’s definition takes on an ontological tone. Manolescu et al.’s definition suggests that informal learning is affective emergence. Thus, what I have considered to be a “hidden” curriculum in my study may not be all that hidden so much as it is “hiding in plain sight,” as Gair and Mullins (2001) suggested. In other words, “informal learning” might be the foundation of human existence (i.e., emergence): the water in which we swim, which is the most difficult to recognize and analyze (Wallace, 2009). By drawing attention to an affective hidden curriculum, I draw attention not so much to what has been hidden. Rather, I draw attention to the continuous state of informal learning that has been taken for granted to the point of forgetting the nature of our own affective emergence. Commentary on the academic content that is or should be taught in business education programs lies beyond the scope of this study. However, my findings suggest that the way business is taught could have implications for how students practice their profession. The location of the building, the artwork on the walls, the furniture in common spaces, and different 179 pedagogies practiced in different classrooms play more than an aesthetic role in undergraduate business education. Rather, my findings suggest that such features of a business education program inform students’ formation as future professionals who work with and around other people, traditions, and disciplines. In short, my findings echo Caza and Brower (2015) and Borges et al. (2017) who insisted that discussions about business curriculum have to go beyond transcripts and formal studies in order to consider the environment in which dynamic, holistic students learn. My findings provide examples of how this could be done, and what future researchers might find. Implications for Future Research This study uses the concept of the hidden curriculum to redefine postsecondary teaching and learning. Though formal instruction is a part of the teaching and learning process, this study frames teaching and learning as a continuous encounter between people, time, space, and objects. As such, future research should consider the inclusive concept of the assemblage when considering isolated instances of pedagogy or student performance (Bøhling, 2015). The intra- active nature of students’ encounters with their environments complicates transactional theories of teaching and learning (Barad, 2007). Thus, future research on postsecondary teaching and learning might continue to study topics such as personal connection (Schwartz, 2019), power in the classroom (Brookfield, 2013), and challenging students (Bain, 2004). However, redistributing pedagogic power amongst people, space, time, and objects is necessary to gain a fuller understanding of what teaching and learning actually means in a postsecondary context. Specifically in a business education context, future research should consider the practical nature of business education and where content and practice converge. Other pre-professional disciplines (e.g., nursing or engineering) could benefit from similar research. If space and objects 180 hold pedagogic power, research into business education should consider how students are socialized into the business profession simply by navigating physical spaces. In short, the business school building is more than a setting for the classroom, the building is a classroom. Future research might draw from my findings as well as Costello’s (2001) and analyze the impressions and expectations that business students develop by virtue of inhabiting particular business-oriented spaces. Future research might also build on my findings in an online learning “space.” I have suggested that “learning” is an ontological practice that influences how and who students become, rather than simply an epistemological process that influences what students know (Barnett, 2009; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007). Consequently, online or digitally-mediated learning presents fertile ground for future research on how the compression of space and expansion of time through digital communication influences students’ emergence through the learning process. Online learning turns any space into a learning space (Cox et al., 2020) and asynchronous conversation stretches response time across hours and days. How might students emerge differently through encounters in digitally-mediated space and time as opposed to materialized space and time? What might students learn about their education if they are digitally connected but physically immersed in their own unique environments? Further, though Anderson (2002) wrote about the hidden curriculum of online learning, further research could consider how a hidden curriculum emerges from hyper-linked digital texts, search engines that feign neutrality, and the variable geographic and emotional distances that digital space and media present. In short, future research might explore the body’s role in a digitally-mediated, yet still affective, learning environment. 181 Implications for Practice As an emerging scholar, I enjoy playing with theory and ideas. I am energized by reading about new concepts, and making connections and finding contradictions with concepts with which I am already familiar. However, part of what makes playing with theory so enriching is the burgeoning invitation to employ theory in practice. In this section, I will outline my findings’ practical implications for postsecondary instructors, student affairs practitioners, and postsecondary administrators charged with college students’ holistic development and education. Practical Implications for Postsecondary Instructors As a freshly contracted assistant professor, I have spent a substantial amount of time considering what implications my findings have for the education that happens within a postsecondary classroom. Of course, in-classroom experiences are not isolated and are part of a broader context of various campus features and the time of day that class meets. Instructors have little control over the impressions and orientations that students bring into the classroom. However, instructors bear the responsibility to consider students’ experiences outside of the classroom and how in-class experiences are a part of the broader educational context. Below, I will discuss my findings’ practical implications for how postsecondary instructors can consider their campus setting, classroom context, pedagogical repertoire, and academic planning as productive elements of an affective hidden curriculum. Though I present these considerations as separate, I remind the reader that the considerations overlap and inform each other in an integrated educational environment. Considering Campus as Pedagogical First, instructors must consider how the rest of campus informs students’ perspectives about students’ coursework. As demonstrated in my analysis, students’ encounters with their 182 geographic, architectural, and material environments can influence how students interpret their role as students and future professionals. While course content may inform students about particular skills and knowledge, course content is performed within a specific context. As such, understanding the affective landscapes that students navigate between (and during) classes is imperative to understand how students will ultimately embody the knowledge taught in class. For example, instructors should consider how the physical space in and around their academic buildings presents their field of study. If the academic spaces represent distinctiveness relative to other academic programs (as explored in Chapter 5), instructors could be intentional about making cross-disciplinary connections in class. In short, exploring campus ecology as an affective pedagogy should inform the content and application that instructors teach. Considering Learning Spaces as Pedagogical Second, and related to the above, I encourage postsecondary instructors to utilize their learning spaces creatively, and choose learning spaces suitable to their pedagogical leanings if possible. By learning space, I refer to recognizable classrooms as well as those spaces where learning is intended to occur: laboratories, weight rooms, computer labs, art studios, mock hospital rooms, etc. As was demonstrated in Chapter 7, space informs how knowledge is performed. Desks bolted to the floor may be more suitable for a bureaucratic and hierarchical performance of knowledge, while an abundance of whiteboards may encourage students to embody collaboration and mobility. Similarly, an auditorium with tiered seats facing an elevated stage may be more suitable to traditional performance while a stage surrounded by chairs or risers may indicate audience participation through interactive theater. Ensuring that an instructor’s learning space is conducive to the knowledge performance that the instructor intends students to practice can reinforce course objectives through both mind and body. In this way, I 183 propose adding space and/or material as another consideration to Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework. My findings indicate that employing technology through specific pedagogical strategies to teach in a specific content area is not enough. Rather, instructors should consider how spatial and material surroundings are as influential as the technology and pedagogies an instructor utilizes. Learning spaces are also pedagogic (Healy, 2016), and in concert with technology and pedagogy space can shape how content knowledge is performed. Considering Pedagogical Content Knowledge Third, continuing from the above, my findings resonate with existing scholarship in emphasizing pedagogical content knowledge’s importance (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2000; Segall, 2004; Shulman, 1987). Pedagogical content knowledge “represents the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction” (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). Postsecondary instructors should be aware of how their pedagogy is structuring the content they intend to teach, the pedagogical and epistemological paradigms from which instructors draw, and how those structures influence students’ performance of such content. Pedagogy has already been identified as a site of the hidden curriculum inasmuch as pedagogy can reify power distances between student and teacher (Ehrensal, 2001). However, my findings should encourage postsecondary instructors to identify a hidden curriculum in their pedagogical content knowledge inasmuch as how content knowledge is taught and organized may also influence what affective content is taught. 184 Considering Academic Planning as Pedagogical Finally, I encourage postsecondary instructors to consider how a program’s academic plan might shape students’ professional socialization. Lattuca and Stark (2009) define an academic plan as a process that defines the curriculum, including the purposes, content, sequence, and instructional practices that define the curriculum. Instructors should work with their colleagues to develop and communicate clear program objectives to guide content standards. Further, instructors should consider how academic space (physical and digital), course assessments (e.g., group projects), and experiential learning requirements (i.e., internships) support program objectives. Carefully reviewing students’ embodied and emotional journeys through an academic program may reveal what hidden curricula are present. In this way, I resonate with other scholars who have already called for aligning the hidden curriculum with the formal curriculum (e.g., Blasco, 2012; Boyle, 2007; Høgdal et al., 2021; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Practical Implications for Student Affairs Practitioners My findings also have implications for student affairs practitioners working on college campuses. Specifically, student affairs practitioners should share with students the responsibility for developing, facilitating, and assessing program objectives. This shared responsibility might take the form of employing student workers or developing a student-run advisory board. Sharing responsibility may also include temporary partnerships with existing student communities such as residence halls, Greek organizations, disciplinary-specific fraternities, and athletic teams. Including students in student affairs programming would provide an opportunity for students to perform their experiential and classroom knowledge in a way that promotes community and development. For example, a career center could recruit students from a business fraternity to 185 develop programming around effective interview strategies. The business students would not only be affirmed in their pre-professional expertise, but translating students’ own interview experiences into suggestions for other students would facilitate a performance that models communication, collaboration, and social philanthropy. In short, an understanding that knowledge is performed should prompt student affairs practitioners to include students in an active knowledge performance. Finally, physical layout is important. The material environment should reflect student affairs practitioners’ intention to invite students into development opportunities. Student conduct offices could investigate lighting and seating conducive to a restorative conversation, rather than an environment that suggests discipline and punishment. Academic advisors might consider a shared screen or collaborative surface to map out students’ interests, experiences, and expectations for their major concentration. Social justice centers and resources intended to facilitate marginalized populations’ sense of belonging on campus should materially and spatially reflect that intention by positioning themselves at the core of campus. Student affairs practitioners should ensure that the “materializing forces” (Fenwick et al., 2011, p. 95) over which practitioners maintain control reflects students’ agency in student development during college. Practical Implications for Postsecondary Administrators I focus my practical suggestions for postsecondary administrators on matters of campus ecology. As such, I speak to facilities and grounds committees, instructional designers for digitally-mediated courses, administrators who control the purse strings for maintenance and new construction, and development officers who court donors to fund future projects. Drawing from the data and analysis that has already been presented, I amplify the simple idea that campus 186 ecology matters. This is not a new idea; Costello (2001), Gair and Mullins (2001), Healy (2016), Strange and Banning (2015), and others have already established the importance of intentional campus design and decoration. However, my findings add new insights to existing scholarship by illuminating the different ways that students’ engagement with their material (and perhaps digital) environment influences students’ education and socialization. Students will still encounter their environments in different ways. The built and material environments may present imposing messages to students, or students may mediate the messages that they could potentially receive through their embodied routines. Regardless, my findings indicate that geography, architecture, web design, and interior design are important elements in students’ education. Campus administrators should take these “materializing forces” seriously as pedagogic elements with which students interact (Fenwick et al., 2011, p. 95). Projects as large as capital campaigns for new buildings, and projects as small as selecting the artwork for existing buildings all represent pedagogical encounters. Campus administrators should think through students’ embodied and emotional routines as students navigate their material environments. To the best of their abilities, administrators must ensure that the meaning students could make from their encounters reflect the meaning that administrators intend students to make. In short, I echo some of the suggestions that others have already made in the context of undergraduate business education: make the hidden curriculum explicit (Anderson, 2002; Cotton et al., 2013; Martin, 1976); and ensure that the hidden curriculum aligns with the formal curriculum (Blasco, 2012; Boyle, 2007; Høgdal et al., 2021; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). My study makes clear that students may mediate messaging differently than it was intended. However, my findings also emphasize the importance of the built environment in students’ learning, which 187 necessitates that careful attention is paid to the materiality that contextualizes students’ educational experiences. Final Reflections I will conclude this study with some final reflections on how I am emerging relative to this dissertation process. This research has most certainly shaped how I understand affect, the hidden curriculum, and undergraduate education. However, this research process has also shaped me as an emergent scholar, teacher, academic, and all of the identities that I enact outside of academia. In what follows, I will discuss how my research has shaped me as an emergent being in relation to my various assemblages. First, this process has revealed to me the animate subjectivity that is inherent in all of the bodies, objects, and spaces that I encounter. I learned how students’ encounters with/in their environments have the potential to shape both student and environment; this also teaches me that my emergent existence is constantly shaped by that and those with whom I am surrounded. I joke that this process has resulted in “the death of the noun.” I do not consider “things” as much as I consider “processes,” which means that “objects” have given way to “relationships.” This has given me a renewed understanding and appreciation for my spirituality, family, friends, colleagues, and students, not to mention my dog (a beloved member of the family to whom we had to say our final farewells during this writing), house, neighborhood, etc., insofar as we are as much a part of each other as we are our own, individual selves. This existential relationality has moved me outside of a self-centric understanding of my own being, and toward a more communal outlook on who and how I am. Further, this existential relationality has moved me to see the value in the encounter, as well as the object (if I dare draw a distinction between the two). Understanding that people, places, and things exist in relation to each other amplifies the 188 importance of our relationships, and our historic patterns of contact. Perhaps this is only another articulation of virtue ethics. Regardless, developing an affective lens that emphasizes the emergent amplifies the importance of my encounters with others (for more on an affective ethics, see Healy & Mulcahy, 2020). Second, and related to the above, seeing the promise of the virtual instead of assuming a determinate actualization of events has helped me to develop a hopeful orientation toward my own future (Anderson, 2009). I find myself resonating with the students I interviewed as I curate hope even in uncertain times. As I wrote this section, I caught myself listening to a song more closely than I had before. As I heard the lyrics wailing that “yesterday is gone, but tomorrow is forever” (The Weather Station, 2013), I interpreted the poetic implication that the actual has been settled, but not at the expense of the virtual that the actual still holds. In other words, I find hope in the redemptive idea that what is does not necessitate what will be. I reflect this sentiment in the title of this chapter. Titling this chapter as Chapter “8” would have followed the sequential ordering that my chapters have followed thus far. However, I refuse to betray the promise of the virtual by ending this dissertation with a finite integer implying boundedness. As such, I flipped the “8” on its side to indicate infinity, indeterminacy, and virtuality; a visual shorthand for “tomorrow is forever.” Third, the act of researching, analyzing, and digesting my own findings has made me a more astute teacher. I teach in a graduate program, not an undergraduate program like the one I studied. I teach student affairs and higher education, not business education. Even so, my findings have informed my own teaching practice insofar as I see my students not merely as receptacles for knowledge (Freire, 1996), but as active co-conspirators in our shared project of developing student affairs practitioners. I am picky about my classrooms because I understand 189 that a socio-spatial dialectic influences how and what students learn (Soja, 1980). I openly discuss the intentions behind my teaching style, the readings I assign, the “fun-tivities” I facilitate, and the assessments I design. In short, my findings have made me a better teacher, a teacher more attentive to that which I am not (yet) aware. Finally, I have learned so much through this process that I did not foresee learning. (The irony of me engaging a hidden curriculum during a study about the hidden curriculum is not lost on me.) First, I learned about teaching in higher education by watching the professor in MGT499. The professor’s expert balance of authority and rapport, enforcing the spirit of the syllabus and letter of the syllabus, and practicing time management (among other things) has inspired my own teaching practice. Second, I learned so much about the nature of research, writing, community in academia, accountability, mentorship, and guidance simply by observing Dr. Shahjahan, my advisor, care about my work. I cannot separate my appreciation for Dr. Shahjahan from my pride in my work. Finally, many of the reports I heard about doing dissertation work have been negative: dissertating is lonely, it is difficult, it is academic hazing, and the “best” dissertation is a “done” dissertation. Without contesting at least some of the truth behind these sentiments, I also learned that research is a wonder-full activity. I learned that developing questions does not lead to developing answers, but to developing more nuanced questions. I learned that learning about the world is something that brings me great joy (despite being lonely and difficult) and that I emerge a more curious, hospitable, and empathetic person as a result. My research project and processes confirmed my previous suspicions that research is an act of love, one that requires critical introspection and an openness to alterity. Though this dissertation was a program requirement, I see now that I personally required this process to better understand the world and my place with/in it. In other words, I have engaged with a hidden 190 curriculum in this study about a hidden curriculum. My doctoral education, and this dissertation specifically, has been a profoundly transformative experience. As a result of my doctoral education (broadly defined), I have emerged in ways unforeseeable when I started, and continue to emerge in ways that surprise me. 191 REFERENCES Abes, E. S., Duran, A., Jones, S. R., & Stewart, D. L. (2019). 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Affective ideology and education policy: Implications for critical policy research and practice. Journal of Education Policy, 37(4). 511–526. 205 APPENDIX A: OBSERVATION PROTOCOL Date of Observation: Location of Observation: Start and End Time: 1) What role does the space play in how people act, move, sit, etc.? 2) How do the objects present (art, furniture, flooring, etc.) influence the setting? What messages do their presence/placement send? 3) What power differentials are evident between people in the location? How are social hierarchies exhibited, if at all, and how does power impact the way that people navigate the space? 4) What is assumed, idealized, implied, or otherwise prescribed by the formal curriculum, including texts, activities, assessments, etc.? 5) What language is spoken, written, or otherwise made explicit? How does language influence or describe the relationships between people, action, and space? 6) What elements of culture are evident? How are they evident, and how do they implicate the people and space? 7) What is the atmosphere of the space? What emotions are visibly displayed, and what kind of behavioral expectations are implied by the space and the people who occupy it? 206 APPENDIX B: LETTER OF INTRODUCTION Hello! My name is Paul Bylsma, and I wanted to introduce myself before I join your section of [MGT499] tomorrow. I am a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University studying higher education and will be participating in your class for a few weeks to observe how business management is taught at [GRSU]. My goal is not to observe your work or evaluate you as a student or pre-professional businessperson. Rather, my goal is to observe how your business management education unfolds in the classroom. I intend to do this by studying the curriculum you use (textbooks and other readings, assessment styles, discussion topics, etc.) and observing the general interactions between members of the class, including the professor. Other than perhaps saying hello to be polite, I will join your class as a “fly on the wall” and will do my best not to distract you from your learning. At some point during my participation in your class, I will send out a survey asking for volunteers who wish to give me a tour of the academic buildings in the college of business. These tours will be a chance for you to tell me, as a researcher, about the spaces that are socially and/or academically significant to you. In doing these tours, I hope to gain a better understanding of how you have navigated the physical spaces in your business management education! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions and concerns, and thank you (and Professor [X]) for welcoming me into your community! Sincerely, Paul Bylsma (he/him) Doctoral Candidate: Higher, Adult, Lifelong Education bylsmapa@msu.edu 207 APPENDIX C: RECRUITMENT EMAIL Hello all, This is Paul, the MSU researcher from our [MGT499] class. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your class routine! As mentioned in class today, I am including a link to indicate willingness to participate in an interview as a part of my research. Here is the link to a form where you can indicate if you are interested in participating, not interested, or if you would like more information before deciding. Interviews are as long or short as you want them to be, and involve you "touring" me around [Shulman] to identify and talk about some spaces that are significant to you academically, socially, and/or personally. In general, I am interested in how we - as embodied humans - interact with the spaces around us. So hearing from you about your experiences in the [Shulman] building will be so interesting to me, and hopefully a fun way for you to relive some memories in the building! As a reminder: you are not obligated to do an interview; participating in an interview or not is not connected to, and has no effect on your grade in, [MGT499]; and all information will be kept anonymous and confidential. I am attaching an "Information and Consent" form that goes over this in more detail. Thank you all for considering, and please reach out if you have any questions or concerns! Paul Paul Bylsma (he/him) Doctoral Candidate: Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education Dept. of Educational Administration | Michigan State University bylsmapa@msu.edu | (616) 284-1808 208 APPENDIX D: INTERVIEW INTEREST FORM 209 210 211 212 213