Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum of University Computing Majors via Undergraduate-Written Mentoring Guides: A Learner-Centered DesignWorkflow

The hidden curriculum consists of the unwritten rules, unspoken norms, and field-specific insider knowledge that are essential for student success but are not taught in classes. Examples include social norms about how to interact with authority figures, where to ask for unadvertised career-related opportunities, and how to navigate around the official rules of a bureaucracy. The hidden curriculum can be pervasive in university computing majors because some students come in with more prior childhood exposure to technology culture and can thus navigate this cultural context more fluently. It is possible to learn this type of tacit knowledge from personal mentors, but not everyone has access to a good mentor. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel thesis for how to teach students the hidden curriculum in a more scalable way: We propose that a peer-written guide that has a relatable tone and a focus on local context can emulate what a peer mentor does by emotionally resonating with students, teaching them aspects of the hidden curriculum, and motivating them to take concrete action. To demonstrate this thesis we created a mentoring guide for interdisciplinary computing HCI majors at our university. Interviews with 17 students and a survey of 112 students showed that our guide's relatable tone could emotionally resonate with students, that it boosted some readers' self-confidence, and that it inspired them to take actions such as creating a project portfolio. Based on these experiences, we developed a five-step learner-centered design workflow to help others create guides for their own local contexts, with recommendations for 1) setting up a mentoring guide, 2) needfinding, 3) creating, 4) distributing, and 5) maintaining.