2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The core support resource of on-campus housing communities is the resident assistants (RAs) in the residence halls. These student employees oversee the well-being and day-to-day activities of residents in the halls. The well-being of RAs is overseen by other student employees, and professional staff who act as supervisors. RAs and their peer supervisors are students, learning both from their formal courses and their experiences as RAs. In any learning environment, the lessons learned by students can contradict the intended learning objectives. This project considers how this contradiction plays out for RAs. This applies the concept of “hidden curriculum” to highlight the gap between what and how RAs are taught and the resulting outcomes in practice. After summarizing our use of hidden curriculum, we review Wang and Degol’s (2016) definition of emotional to explore specific ways contradictions arise in RA training at a midwestern STEM university. After conducting 5 interviews and 2 focus groups with 9 unique RAs, we transcribed and coded the recordings according to dimensions of emotional safety. Our results show that many RAs identify contradictions between the content of training lessons and their learning experiences involving those lessons, with implications for their assessment of the integrity of the educational experience. We will illustrate these results by drawing on RA statements and provide recommendations to enhance the RA training experience by attending to hidden curriculum as a lever for transformational learning. We conclude by drawing implications of our findings for traditional engineering classrooms, focusing on how engaging the hidden curriculum can reposition students’ relationship to educational authority figures and their own agency as learners