Among my favorite thinkers is a sociologist by the name of Chet Bowers. While I am not entirely sure Bowers is among the pantheon of more noteworthy sociologists, but there were a couple of concepts associated with Bowers that make more and more sense to me as I continue a journey of self-discovery related to unpacking what he calls one's " taken-for-granted beliefs or tacit knowledge." In my current role, I am in an environment where my tacit knowledge is being constantly challenged and I am unpacking many of those beleifs that have gone innocuously unexplored over my lifetime. I want to first talk about Bowers and then about the application of some of his concepts to the social growth that is happening in my own personal world.
Taken-for-granted knowledge generally relates to the patterns of behavior that have their origins in the historical development of institutions and structures that have largely determined how people function in response to the needs of these institutions. Social knowledge has been transmitted in a variety of subtle and overt ways to the point where they have created patterns of behavior that go unchallenged, The origins of many of our ways of thinking are gradually learned and reinforced through knowledge acquisition. If we assume the family and school as primary socialization agents, the knowledge each provides eventually begin to create in all of us values, beliefs and attitudes that becomes our tacit knowledge, those deeply embedded values and beliefs that are in us,. For Bowers, because tacit knowledge is not critically examined, it can be an obstacles to the creation of the kind of socially just society (equality, acceptance, respect) he envisions.
Starting from the premise that reality is socially
constructed, Bowers develops a theory of knowledge acquisition that treats
education and teachers as primary socialization agents in creating a society
characterized by human dignity, social justice and responsible political
citizenry. Bowers first seeks to more fully develop a theory of knowledge that
emphasizes the importance of communication in making explicit the ideas,
values, social meaning and behavior that are transmitted by language and then
describes the specific nature of teacher preparation, pedagogy, and curriculum needed
to substantively examine this knowledge. Through greater interrogation of
socially constructed taken-for granted attitudes, values, beliefs, and
institutions, teachers and students will reconceptualize the foundations of
their social knowledge and better understand the potential for alternative
social relationships in an “increasingly materialistic world.” (Pg. 73)
Bowers believes schools should play a primary socialization role in
creating the intellectual environment necessary to explore knowledge, meaning,
and practices that have been largely approached as outside human control and
therefore impervious to the kind of critical investigation that can persuade
people to consider the kind of social, political and economic ideas Bowers deems
necessary for the creation of a more just society. Bowers “promise of theory” challenges the
dehumanizing nature of learning and postulates that all knowledge has human authorship”. (Pg. 68)
Conceptual Framework
Owing much to the Sociology of Knowledge theory
originally developed by sociologists Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
Bowers develops a process of learning that leads to the establishment of
“communicative competence,” a state of sociological enlightenment and perhaps
the paramount goal of Bowers’ theoretical approach. The sociology of knowledge contends that communication
(primarily language) is the primary transmitter of cultural beliefs and the
patterns that result from these beliefs. Language, both audible and silent, transmits
the values, beliefs, and attitudes that construct social reality and creates
one’s cultural map. Bowers believe the
current state of social knowledge is largely characterized as
“taken-for-granted” knowledge about social reality and behavior. Taken-for-granted
knowledge generally relates to the patterns of behavior that have their origins
in the historical development of institutions and structures that have largely
determined how people function in response to the needs of these institutions.
Social knowledge and patterns of behavior have been determined by these
institutions, are reinforced through patterns of socialization intended to
support these institutional and structural needs, and become relatively
unquestioned aspects of one’s knowledge.
These values, beliefs and attitudes represent the tacit knowledge that
is deeply embedded in society and have been relatively unexamined for their
actual contribution to the creation of the kind of socially just society Bowers
envisions. Communicative competence is the outcome of becoming “culturally
literate, which is the ability to read or decode the taken-for-granted
assumptions and categories that underlie the individuals world of
experience.” (Pg. 2)
Bowers treats education, communication,
and socialization as nearly interchangeable terms. By treating them as interchangeable, Bowers
argues that all three have the potential to “liberate thought and facilitate
the communication of new ideas to others:
it is also a binding force that may prevent people from seeing how their
lives are shaped by social conventions.” (Pg. 31) Largely derived from Berger
and Luckmann, there are five underlying propositions to Bowers theoretical approach
to understanding the existence of social knowledge.
- Social reality is shared,
sustained and continuously negotiated through communication. (Pg. 35)
- Through socialization the
individual’s acquires knowledge that is used to make “sense of everyday
life.” This is the origins of tacit
or taken-for-granted knowledge. It
is at this point that people acquire cultural codes for organizing reality. (Pg. 39)
- Much of the social work of
everyday life is learned and experienced by the individual as the natural,
even inevitable order of reality.
The nature attitude toward the everyday world is experienced as
taken-for-granted.
- The individual’s self-concept is
the result of interaction with significant others: the individual not only acquires the
socially shared knowledge, but also an understanding of who she/he is in
relation to it. This is a dependent
relationship where the individual is the recipient of knowledge and is
incapable of negotiating this knowledge.
(Pg. 41)
- Human consciousness is
characterized by intentionality. Human
consciousness is free, but it is influenced by the learning that has been
internalized through socialization.
Communicative competency as a way to make
sense of social reality is intimately tied to the fifth proposition’s belief in
the power humans have to control and shape social reality. This occurs when individuals engage in
relativizing the taken-for-granted values, beliefs, cultural codes, and
attitudes that are part of historical meaning-making and are approached as
objective truths and therefore outside the questioning process. Relativizing these ideas and practices breaks
them down and reformulates them as part of a new social reality.
Underlying the process of relativizing is
belief in the individual to more fully exert authority over the social
knowledge that produces behavior.
Relativizing knowledge re-exerts human authorship over the ideas,
practices and values that have been largely understood as the result of system and
institutional needs. The sociology of knowledge characterizes these values as
objective truths, above examination and detached from human authorship. This dehumanization, or reification, is the
“moment of forgetting or losing sight of human authorship” over reality. (Pg.
60) Rationality, efficiency,
stratification, and competition are deeply embedded social values, seemingly essential
to a well-run, industrialized, society, and they have been relatively immune to
critical examination for their actual social worth. When these values are relativized, they
become subjective in nature and can then be more easily negotiated as part of new
knowledge.
According to Bowers, “liminal space
follows the relativizing process.” (Pg.
7). Liminality is the creation of intellectual
space that allows the introduction of new ways of social reality to be part of
one’s consciousness and is the result of relativizing current taken-for-granted
knowledge (tacit knowledge) because the process of going beneath the surface to
unpack this taken-for-granted knowledge opens up new ways of thinking about the
foundation of current social reality. Bowers
characterizes liminality as a “brief period of openness that follows the
relativizing of taken-for-granted authority.”
(Pg. 7) Relativizing and
liminality do not necessarily intend to replace the taken-for-granted values,
attitudes and beliefs that are the results of historically powerful language
socialization, but they do intend to be part of a process that moves their
existence to an explicit level, where they become part of language dialogue. They are now important parts of the everyday
language that is part of the creation of social reality. Treating them as subjective truths allows for
their examination. Communicative competency is the act of making sense of these
attitudes, patterns, and behaviors. The
potential is to broaden the understanding of the existing knowledge base of
values and beliefs and perhaps introduce new knowledge that can contribute to
Bower’s social vision.
Relativization and liminality are intimately
related to, and somewhat dependent on, an educational system that prepares
students to think critically about the very foundations upon which social
reality has been constructed. That education
has to accept a more prevalent role and a different approach to the
socialization of students is perhaps the key to Bower’s theoretical approach to
understanding the nature and power of existing knowledge, as well as
influencing the acquisition of new knowledge.
It is the role education, primarily teachers, can play in creating the
learning environment, organizing the classroom, and implementing the
curriculum, that allows students (and teachers) to explore the origins and
continued existence of these taken-for-granted values, beliefs and attitudes
that shape current society and will have to be renegotiated in Bower’s socially
constructed just society. Their role in
reestablishing human authority over social reality, engaging in de-reification
as it were, is tied to their access to language codes deeply embedded in
classroom structure, curriculum, textbooks and the teacher-student
relationship. They have to work hard to
unearth these codes as they are also products of the very same language
socialization.
In a change of the Berger-Luckmann
construct, Bowers includes teachers as sources of primary socialization. Indeed, Bowers believes that teachers do not
have a choice about getting involved in the socialization process; “How they
choose to socialize is the key. (Pg.
95) Bowers contends that educators are uniquely
positioned to be “significant others” in the process of examining knowledge the
origins of knowledge. (Pg. 55-57) Because there is such a strong connection between
language and thought in schools, “we can see the potential of schools to
influence the thought of students.” (Pg.
53) Schools’ power to control and legitimize
symbolic knowledge, the knowledge that relates to the institutionally
“sanctioned words, concepts, and theoretical framework,” is related to the
“simple fact that the primary means of representing the culture is through
language.” (Pg. 52)
Perhaps the greatest challenge to Bower’s theoretical
construct is the simple fact that the educational system he believes must play
a central role in creating change is the product of the very same values,
beliefs and attitudes that has created
the social dysfunction of which Bowers is so critical. The second part of Bower’s book is focused on
the specifics of a new educational approach, an approach that requires teachers
to create language environments that have the potential to reconceptualize
student attitudes in order to change the very nature of American society and to
create the communicative competence to support this new society.
Action Recommendations
Relying a bit on Tyack’s interpretation of
the origins of educational organization, schools are characterized by a
structure that is bureaucratic, efficient, and highly centralized, are designed
to control the scope of knowledge and behavior of an increasingly pluralistic
student population, and exist to serve the needs of an industrialized, politicized
society. Reflecting this interpretation,
Bowers believes students are “processed” through the system. It is this powerful
historical tradition that teachers and educators must confront and change. Teachers must contest these objective truths
that are responsible for the cultural ideas that influence the organization of
schools and that have shaped teacher preparation and behavior since the early
days of the common school movement. Through their understanding and use of
language, teachers can exert control and shape social reality, as opposed to
being largely subservient to the dehumanized schools.
This whole idea of human authorship is
fundamental to making sense of Bowers’ sociology of knowledge construct. Bowers postulates that the loss of human
control can be countered by an education that is focused on a communication
approach that encourages human ownership over ideas and practices. It is not necessarily about creating new ideas,
but understanding the origins of current attitudes in order to internalize
them. Bowers argues that all “social
reality is a human construct: all
knowledge has human authorship.” (Pg.
68) Because communication, education,
and socialization are interchangeable terms, teachers have the power to control
the language that is being used to create social reality. The question is whether the “dynamics of
cultural transmission carried on by the teacher contributes to the student’s
ability to think and communicate more effectively or binds the student to a
world of taken-for-granted beliefs where behavior and thought are culturally
dictated. “ (Pg. 56) It involves a
reexamination of how teachers organize their classrooms, how they interpret
their relationship to students, how well they have relativized the curriculum, what
kind of pedagogy they use to deliver knowledge, and their willingness to
problematize taken-for-granted attitudes. These are all manifestations of a communication approach that demands
much of teachers. To a certain extent
they are also faced with understanding and overcoming facets of their own
socialization. The following are aspects of the kind of
teacher Bowers believes can create an intellectual environment that will ensure
the development of communicative competency.
- Teachers must possess the means
of understanding the dynamics of the socialization process in which the
student is involved. Teachers have
to comprehend the nature of socialization.
- Teachers must understand the
content of the curriculum and how it conveys the take-for-granted beliefs
and knowledge. They must make some
of these explicit and therefore subject to critical analysis and
understanding. They can
problematize taken-for-granted knowledge.
(Pg. 58)
- There should be very little
objective reality and the teacher has to be able to identify which aspects
of reality need to be “de-reified.”
(Pg. 63) This is part of the
process of becoming culturally literate.
- Teachers should guard against
audible silence. This form of
communication suggests that teachers are unable or unwilling to deal with
the taken-for-granted belief. They
are aware but unwilling to communicate.
- They must analyze the cultural
codes embedded in the curricula. Curricula
create and reinforce reality. Teacher
need to identify the language codes embedded in curricula.
- Teachers must redefine the
nature of authority relationships with students. They cannot be “ego-involved” in
protecting their traditional role as classroom authority. (Pg. 75)
- They have to reevaluate their
role as protectors of taken-for-granted beliefs. They control more complex language codes
and may be unwilling to explore these codes at an explicit level. This “undermines the development of
communicative competence that the educational process is supposed to
foster.” (Pg. 67)
- Teacher preparation has to be
reevaluated and include greater focus on cultural and cognitive preparation.
- Teachers have to recognize the
educational moment in order to make explicit the cultural message being
transmitted.
- Teachers have to better understand
the world of the student in order to examine the deeper level of their
cultural maps. Teachers have to
understand the language environment of the student, recognize the power
that metaphors have on behavior, and generally incorporate the “student’s phenomenological
culture in the process of socialization.”
(Pg. 87
- Teachers should use a
cross-cultural approach to broadening realities.
Teachers, then, play an essential socialization
role in the Bowers approach to making explicit the taken-for-granted assumptions
and ideas that have created social reality.
On the surface, Bower’s reconceptualization of the teacher seems to be a
radical departure from the more traditional teaching role, but Bowers believes
that “teachers should not be neutral public servants because knowledge is not
neutral. (Pg. 68) Bowers points out that teachers exercise
power over the process of socialization and this power can either limit or
increase the student’s taken-for-granted knowledge.
Through their use of language, teachers
are important conveyors of symbolic knowledge and language codes that contain
powerful, largely unexplored, meaning that comprises much of our tacit
knowledge. According to Bowers, “one
participant has cultural capital—symbolic knowledge—language codes, rules,
assumptions, images and conceptual models.”
These are the initiated group who will share the “basic recipe beliefs
with the uninitiated.” The uninitiated
have limited access to alternative interpretations of one’s world. Symbolic codes become powerful shapers of
the individual and teachers as significant others are in a position to
understand the power that language has to create social meaning. Bowers believes that “the individual must
possess knowledge of the culture that is being renegotiated.” (Pg. 29)
Culture, communication and consciousness moving
that knowledge from tacit to explicit through interrogation and the ability to
engage in meaning movement should be part of teacher preparation, classroom
organization and curriculum design. Bowers
is challenging teachers to explore the content of their own socialization as
well, and to realize that language is loaded with meaning that creates social
reality. How they use it has a profound
impact on the origins of meaning. Only
by breaking down the ideas and meanings hidden in this language can students
begin to build it back up. The goal is
to create communicative competence in students, preparing them to be active and
constructive contributors to their own social reality.
Critical Conclusion
The radical element in Bowers approach is
that he is calling on teachers to examine fundamental values and beliefs that
have been part of the institutional and organizational fabric of American
society. These are also the very same
very values, beliefs and ideas that have given them (teachers) their
identity. (Pg. 45) These beliefs are historically grounded; they
permeate textbooks and curriculum, and have gone largely unquestioned for their
social, political, and economic value. Bowers is highly critical of these ideas; the radical nature of his
argument then is the call for teachers to lead the examination of the specific content
of knowledge, those deep-seated truths that have largely created society, and
the exploration of alternative values and beliefs that could possible
contribute to a different social reality.
Bowers wants to “bring ideas and values to the level of explicit
awareness and examine them for their social worth.” (Pg. 63)
The radical aspect is two-fold:
1) Teachers challenged to interrogate their own consciousness, and 2) teachers
are challenged to examine fundamental assumptions. As a group they are now elevated to a position
of meaning maker. It assumes that they are capable of creating explicit
awareness.
Although communicative competence, the “culturally
literacy, which is the ability to read or decode the taken-for-granted
assumptions and categories that underlie the individuals world of experience,” is
dependent on education, Bowers recognizes out that teacher preparation programs
are not designed to prepare teachers to engage in the kind of sophisticated
language interrogation that is essential to exploring tacit knowledge. He writes: “Communicative competence demands the
individual must possess knowledge of the culture that is being
renegotiated.” (Pg. 29) University departments of education must
seriously consider the importance of communicative competency and design their
programs to more fully prepare teachers to achieve this goal. He correctly points out that the community
could resist this activist teacher.
Again, communities do not necessarily understand, but they accept as
objective reality the ideas that Bowers wants schools to more fully examine. These
are “sacred (although we do not know why) realities and to challenge them is
neither easy nor readily acceptable.”
(Pg. 111)
Lastly, no discussion of Bower is complete
without mention of his criticism of neo-romanticists, liberal-technocrats, and
neo-Marxists, other social theorists intent on changing the existing social
system. Bowers believes that “their
denial of one’s history is problematic. This
denial does not allow them to provide the perspective that would enable the
individual think about the direction in which their culture is
developing.” (Pg. 27) He contends that “awareness of the past is
simply not part of the conceptual framework of these educational critics.” (Pg. 27) As cited above, communicative
competence demands the individual possess knowledge of the culture that is
being renegotiated. Further, Bowers is
not necessarily advocating overthrow of the existing system, but rather the
inevitable social growth that can occur through a better understanding of its
origins and foundations. Compare this
consciousness to the Neo-Marxism, liberal-technological, and new-romantics
belief that the new can be understood on its own terms with Bowers theory of
socialization that says that we are unconscious carriers of our past and we
must first understand how that past knowledge has been acquired and what
identity it has created in terms of a conceptual framework and sense of
identity before we begin to a new process of socialization. Bowers’ construct may be critical of
historically grounded knowledge, but unlike other modernist reform ideologies,
he does not believe we can truly break from the past.
Bowers concludes his discussion by asking
the following question: Does the
socialization process in the classroom contribute to the student’s ability to
understand the conceptual foundations for the major problems confronting
society? Communicative competence, in the full sense of that phrase, thus
becomes the litmus test of the adequacy of the theories that guide our approach
to the education of teachers. When
debating the value of Bowers’ promise, one has to decide if the kind of
communicative competence Bowers advocates is appropriate and if so, are
teachers capable of creating the conditions necessary to give rise to this
dialogue. It is an enormous undertaking
and one that demands mobilization of many other sources of socialization. Teachers alone, even those most capable, are
but a few of the voices that must be heard in order to ensure that human
dignity is part of the language of American society. Epilogue
I originally wrote most of this essay in 2009. Since then I have moved into a new job where I am in a diverse socieconomic and racial work place. Additinoally, I did my doctoral field work and research in the poorest zip codes of a larger Midwestern city, In both these phenomenological experiences, I was put in a position of exploring and unpacking my tacit knowledge through a process of communicative competence through knowledge acquisition that did not necessarily have its origins in the formal classroom or was led by teachers. Mine has been a rather personal journey toward the kind of outcomes Bowers envisions for a society based on social justice and equality.
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