Research

DISSERTATION RESEARCH 

Preschool prepares children for kindergarten by teaching tangible academic skills like counting and the ABCs, but also important lessons about self-control and how to behave like a student. These less tangible, non-academic “soft skills” are just as important for future academic success, but these lessons can differ substantially between classrooms by the socioeconomic status of the preschool’s student body, resulting in preschoolers receiving substantively different and ultimately unequal preparation for kindergarten. This hidden curriculum impacts the development of preschoolers’ identities as students, with potential consequences for their relationships with learning, their teachers, and their personal health. My dissertation examines the hidden curriculum in preschools across the US to identify important characteristics of preschool hidden curriculums, the mechanisms by which soft skills lessons are transmitted in the preschool classroom, and how relevant aspects of the hidden curriculum differ between preschools by social class, contributing to the classed academic achievement gap. Specifically, I focus on the messages that preschoolers receive about the structure of power and control in school, their relationships to teachers and learning, and lessons about health and wellness. I utilize a combination of ethnographic data from two preschool classrooms and big-data from a nationally representative sample of preschool websites to identify the language and logics of the preschool hidden curriculum. This research is supported by the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' Dissertation Writing Fellowship and the University of Iowa Graduate College's Post-Comprehensive Exam and Summer Fellowships.