“Mining the Archive: Evaluating and Improving a Course”

This classroom note demonstrates that a course may be improved by paying specific attention to Elliot Eisner's distinction between a course's explicit, implicit and null criteria. In an attempt to ground and identify those notoriously slippery curricula, this paper appropriates French philosopher Michel Foucault's concepts of practice, discourse and archival research. Having explored Foucault's understanding of these concepts, the paper analyses the course Communication and Processes within Groups at two distinctive phases in its twenty–year history. The resulting excavation of the course's implicit and null curricula twenty years apart shows that two different sets of facilitators teaching the same explicit curriculum to a very different student body, in vastly changed venues, are working out of two different understandings of what competence in the practice of ministry entails, two very different ministerial education discourses. This paper demonstrates that with students' questions, a teacher's intentional probing and Foucault's framework in hand, it is possible to access and articulate a course's hidden curricula. In such ways, the practice of mining the archive offers an imaginative way of both evaluating and improving a course that has been taught for many years.