title: Classed beginnings
title: the implicit lessons preschools teach about status, health ownership, and the learner role
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Espy, Hannah W.
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2025
Subjects: hidden curriculum
organizational reproduction of inequality
preschool education
status socialization
public abstract

description: Preschool plays a particularly influential role in socializing young children; as most children’s first educational experience, it is where young children learn how to be students and important lessons about their place in the world. These lessons are imparted via the ‘hidden curriculum’ – the unofficial lessons embedded in the daily routines, interactional styles, and organizational practices of the preschool classroom. But how and to what extent do preschools teach children to behave in class-specific ways? Previous research shows that students bring classed styles of interacting from home into school, where middle-class styles are rewarded over working- and lower-class styles such that students from more privileged class backgrounds receive academic advantages over their peers, but far less is known about how schools can socialize students into classed roles. Through three inter-related studies, this dissertation examines how preschools quietly transmit class-specific lessons to their young students about status, health ownership, and the student role, and in doing so, teach them to relate to institutions with differing levels of agency. The first study is a comparative in-depth ethnography of two preschool classrooms, one Head Start and one serving children from middle- and upper-class families, that provides a detailed description of the messages that students learn about the social structure of power and control, and the mechanisms by which these messages are transmitted through the daily routines of the preschool classroom. This study documents three distinct organizational practices through which preschool institutions routinely transmit implicit messages about who controls whom in social life. Status socialization occurred via (1) teachers exercising their status over students in everyday interactions; (2) the extent to which organizational practices empower students as autonomous decision-makers through the recognition of individuality and the pacing and meaning-making of activities; and (3) staffers enacting their own status position with respect to higher authorities. Overall, Head Start implicitly taught lower-class preschoolers that they occupied the lowest position in a vertical hierarchy of relations. In contrast, more advantaged preschoolers were implicitly taught to take ownership of themselves, and that they exist at the center of a relational nexus of personal caretakers (parents, teachers, and the institutional curriculum). This study shows just how early in the life course students are taught class-specific logics of control through the hidden curriculum and provides a theoretical framework for understanding the multiple ways in which schools routinely but quietly transmit messages to students regarding their position vis-à-vis authority structures.
description: The second chapter identifies how preschools define the student role vis-à-vis key relationships students form with teachers and their own learning. The relationships students form in school are an important contributing factor to their academic outcomes from grades to persistence/dropping out, and the school environment plays a role in defining these relationship styles. This study analyzes text from the websites of 32 accredited US preschools for explicit messaging about preschoolers’ (ideal, prescribed) school relationships, and how they differ by social class. I find that preschools’ organizational logics differentially define the content of the relationships that preschoolers form with teachers and with their own learning based on the social class of the preschool’s student body. Tuition-charging preschools serving affluent families tout a familial teacher-student relationship and emphasize the learning process and development of intellectual curiosity. In contrast, free preschools emphasize teachers’ qualifications and authority in the classroom, and descriptions of learning focus on academic outcomes and concrete skills acquisition. This study highlights the role of educational organizations in defining student role expectations and could contribute to understanding the long-term educational impacts of preschool attendance. In addition, this chapter discusses how text analytic methods can be used to examine relational content—a topic that is typically the purview of small-scale, ethnographic studies—in a way that leverages larger samples of text data and goes beyond simply coding ties with respect to positive/negative valence.
description: Using the same dataset from Study 2, the third study explores health-related cultural capital transmitted via the hidden curriculum. Health behaviors and social class are strongly and bidirectionally correlated, and while these behaviors are first developed at home, lessons from family can be reinforced (or undermined) by messaging from school. This study analyzes text from preschool websites to identify how preschools define values and norms related to health ownership and nutrition in class-specific ways. I find that preschool organizations talk about health differently based on social class of the preschool’s student body, specifically in terms of who is portrayed as in charge of a student’s health and the level of specificity that is used to define healthy food. Free preschools serving children from working- and lower-class families frame health as the purview of professionals and formal institutions, and generally describe food as ‘healthy’ without further definition. In contrast, tuition-charging preschools serving children from middle- and upper-class families frame health as the responsibility of the preschooler and define healthy food using specific reference to nutritional components, sourcing, and preparation. By examining the early formation of health ownership, this study reveals missing links between social class and health behaviors and illustrates the breadth of the preschool hidden curriculum beyond strictly academic types of cultural capital.