Tacit Knowing and Education

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Tacit Knowing and Education

How is tacit knowing or tacit knowledge utilized in the classroom? This has been my question since discovering the term coined by Michael Polanyi and reading the excerpt of The Tacit Dimension. I have reflected on my experiences in a second grade classroom and observations of students being able to or not being able to refer to the tacit dimension in the classroom. In rethinking through Polanyi's assertion that "we can know more than we can tell", I will review ways in which students (children and adults) use intuition and other forms of tacit knowing in the classroom. I will also speak to the detrimental effects of particular school reforms such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which diminish the student's ability to use tacit knowledge in the classroom.

What is tacit knowing/knowledge? It is something that is "implied or indicated but not actually expressed." It is what we already know by way of previous experience, or, habituation that has become second nature. This is not a far-fetched idea. If we go back to Plato's Republic, even he believed that humans have the capability to know the right thing to do because we were born with that information already in our minds. A life of study was a way to reflect on this knowledge and use it for the good of all.

Children respond to material in the classroom using tacit knowledge. All we learn in some way relies on us connecting it somehow to something we already know. Tacit knowledge requires a synthesis of previous experience into the inner workings of the mind and memory. Certainly, other educational theorists saw the importance of this in the classroom. Some ways children use tacit knowledge is in the different interactions between other children and to adults, crying in the classroom to signify pain, confusion, and anger, etc. John Dewey's Experience and Education speaks specifically to this concept. "Every experience is a moving force." I equate "tacit knowing" to having previous experiences. Regardless of our being conscious of the importance of an event, our mind holds on to that experience and becomes a knowledge that we can utilize in the future.

Can tacit knowing be utilized in the classroom? It is my opinion that it is becoming increasingly more difficult, particularly in public schools that must adhere to the strict testing of children for the sake of compliance to the No Child Left Behind Act, to rely on previous knowledge to help students learn in the classroom.

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