Preparing Teachers to Re-Build Democratic Communities and Disappearing Middle Class to Reverse Global Inequality: A Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ and Dewey-Inspired Tools to Transform World Making

Abstract

‘Double structuring’ of objective economic wealth and subjective perception of wealth through language and culture produce a common world of divisions in the classroom from ‘bad taste’ to ‘good taste’. Teachers’ language and culture of instruction and ‘good taste’ perpetuate systemic injustice with unconscious bias. The tool ‘A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE) offers five steps to prepare teachers to recognize bias and reverse it with a Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Making Worlds. A—Ask questions about instructional Language and Culture and Community Languages and Cultures; B—Critique Typology of Taste: C—Develop statistical models with measures to monitor and evaluate incremental progress towards synthesizing/unifying different classroom languages and cultures into one democratic language and culture whilst honouring each; D—Create evidence-informed, logical and ethical qualitative pathways to re-building a democratic community/disappearing middle class; E—Identify a principle of unity that reverses local inequality, and through powerful Higher Education networks, mainstream it to reverse global inequality. A Professional Educators and Administrators Committee for Empowerment (PEACE) offers a systemic multi-level communication infrastructure to enable feedback loops from communities to policy makers to measure inequality and report narrowing income and wealth gaps to reverse the sharpest increase between 2019 and 2020 in global inequality since World War II.

1. Introduction

The purpose of The Chicago School of Education founded by John Dewey (1859–1952), was to conduct research with the teachers that centred on the student. The student’s education is conceived as a process of growth and acquisition of culture. Milestones can help monitor and evaluate incremental progress in the acquisition of culture. It remains unclear what culture is to be acquired when communities have diverse cultures. It remains unclear how teachers can be prepared to educate students to grow and acquire culture in a standardized way whilst being culturally relevant to local social environments that are different. Social environments in one country can be highly diverse, for example in Albania, Iraq, Jordan, Finland, France, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, or the US (these are the countries involved in the submission of a Spencer Foundation Planning Grant). Social environments can be highly diverse in the continents those countries are situated in. In sum, social environments differ greatly within and between countries. Dewey suggests immature members of society need to be educated to transition to mature members who can make good contributions to their communities and build communities in their social environments to live good lives. Living good lives can be mapped to achieving Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals [1]. This will look very different in different spaces. Teachers are prepared with a language of instruction and they are selected for preparation by interviewers with the language and culture of instruction that holds subjective ‘good taste’ and unconscious bias which has progressed since World War II [2,3,4,5]. However, students arrive in the classroom, in this case with the language of the school, but with diverse community languages, cultures, histories and social environments that differ to the language and culture of instruction. Bernstein’s [6] restricted language and elaborate language reveals that some groups may have a restricted vocabulary and range of literacies they can draw on, and some of these may only be understood by their marginalized communities. Reid and Vale [7] identify that students using the restricted code can be pathologized because their restricted language and culture is misrecognized as lack of ability. The teacher perceives a child with Bernstein’s restricted community language and culture not as different to the instructional language and culture of the classroom but as deficient using a deficit model [8]. The student is then rapidly re-labelled, not as a child who needs to acquire the instructional language and culture to learn but as a child who is not capable of accessing the curriculum and therefore has Special Educational Needs and/or Disability (SEND). The student is then segregated to a SEND program or streamed into low/lower ability classes. Harry and Klinger [9] identify that such programmes have disproportionately low-quality curriculums and instruction, with a high ratio of students to teachers. This may explain why Black Americans, making up approximately 12.1% of the US population, represent 23% of those with poor literacy skills.

Dewey’s Chicago School of Education prepared teachers to develop learning through informed inquiries that engaged inquirers as an informed and engaged community to gather data on what works and what does not work in learning to acquire culture. In other words, which learning experiences and Personal and Social Learning for Assessment prepared them to have ‘a good lifestyle’, evidenced by [10]. The academy, schools and community built robust evidence bases of professional languages of instruction and community languages as a praxis. Academic theory and teachers’ practice with engaged and informed communities of inquirers were synthesised. The merging of different knowledges of ‘what is’ can be called the merging of ‘epistemologies’ [11]. When new knowledge is generated with and for the community to build sustainable communities through enquiries in partnership with the academy, the academy delivers its civic mission for which the taxpayer pays [12]. The academy, teaching profession and independent regulators develop teachers’ professional institutions’ standards and codes of practice that are empirical, logical and ethical [13]. These underpin the credentialing of professional teachers and their Continuing Professional Development (CPD) as a community. Teachers mobilise their teacher preparation to teach collaborative, inquiry focused and problem-solving curriculums to the community to support Dewey’s [14] education for democracy. The approach elevates students to synthesize responses to the practical physical contacts and objects in the material and economic world in the community with responses to their subjective theoretical meanings [15].

Bronner [16] states that The Chicago School of Education was closed because the administration blamed poor-quality subjective theoretical research unworthy of the academy after teacher preparation programs had stopped. The preparation of teachers to mobilize methodologies to synthesize the language and culture of instruction with languages and cultures of the community was absent. This led to a clash in instructional and cultural language and the community’s languages and cultures, resulting in culture wars being played out in the classroom. To address this professional challenge, we ask three questions. First, how and in what ways are teachers prepared to recognize a typology of different languages and cultures in their classroom? Second, how and in what ways are teachers prepared with methodologies and tools to (i) redesign culturally responsive pedagogies and curriculums to synthesize the language and culture of instruction with the languages and cultures of the community to (ii) reverse unconscious bias and optimize learning and wellbeing of all students in the classroom? Third, what barriers exist to reverse unconscious bias transmitted through the language and culture of instruction in the classroom? Finally, what government-level policy and Higher Education Institutional policy will (i) support professors in the academy to obtain credentials and develop teachers in partnership with the teaching profession to (ii) use methodologies and tools to reverse unconscious bias and to (iii) build communities of democratic cultures and languages to (iv) dismantle systematic injustice?

A conceptual paper that adopts a typology research methodology best addresses these questions. This conceptual paper is in five parts. First, the introduction. Second, this paper explains the research methodology of typology and thirdly mobilises the research methodology, A new contribution to knowledge, A Policy Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘taste’ from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ [15], is presented to categorise distinctive languages and cultures. Fourth, this paper identifies systemic barriers to reversing unconscious bias that evaluates particular languages and cultures in the classroom, finds them wanting and excludes them. Finally, this paper provides recommendations for government-level policy and Higher Education policy to (i) support professors in the academy to obtain credentials and develop teachers in partnership with the teaching profession, to (ii) take a Deweyan approach to using methodologies and tools mobilizing A Policy Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Making Worlds to reverse unconscious bias to (iii) build communities of democratic cultures and languages to (iv) dismantle systematic injustice, achieve Agenda 2030 and reverse global inequality.

2. Research Methodology of Typology

This conceptual paper adopts a typology research methodology which needs to be clearly explained and justified [17]. The intention of using typology for a conceptual paper is to build theory of different languages and cultures in practice and to categorize them [18]. The typology will also consider if any other factors related to cultures and languages are important to the classification process [19]. Snow and Ketchen Jr. [20] argue the typology methodology is important for classifying conceptually distinct types, like the distinction of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste.

Lowi’s [21,22] original typology theory focused on two premises. First, that policy causes power relationships among different individuals and groups in society and these can be predicted by policy type. Second, the government wields coercive power and can force individuals and groups into particular activities and behaviours with policy. Therefore, classification by typology is very helpful to keep people in their place and to prevent social mobility, any form of levelling up and perpetuate social injustice [23]. In this paper, typology is important because it reveals how governments can use typologies to create fissures within communities that can cause conflict to spew out and widen the income and wealth gaps. This threatens the very foundations of sustainable life on Earth and can be reversed by achieving Agenda 2030 with peace and prosperity that is kind to the planet and people in new partnerships [24]. From this position of being able to describe how typology can (i) claim to systematically classify individuals and groups by their political patterns of behaviour, when in fact it (ii) programmes the political patterns of behaviour, it becomes possible to use the typology methodology to understand how to move from coercive anti-democratic governance systems to democratic governance systems and Open Government Partnerships [25].

Further, the typology methodology allows incremental progress towards stated goals to be measured, monitored and evaluated through relational variants [26]. In this case, the progress is through relational variants of languages and cultures in the acquisition of shared democratic languages and cultures in the classroom. This moves from, for example, (i) policy creating different groups on a typology with different access to wealth and social mobility, to (ii) using the typology to describe, understand and dismantle systemic injustice in classifying individuals and groups to exercise coercive power. Thus, describing and understanding policy typologies can facilitate building inclusionary communities that strive for a more perfect union/equity, whilst celebrating diversity for social justice.

The variations in the typology offer proof of concept of the typology [27], but it is for the reader to decide if the Policy Typology is world making, by scripting the artificial division of different groups. If the reader decides this is the case, then the reader needs to decide how the typology can be used to dismantle social injustice that exists in a coercive Policy Typology.

The paper offers the typology methodology and tools for synthesising instructional language with community languages to build a shared democratic classroom language and culture. This moves from dishonouring to honouring diverse heritages of different languages and cultures with a responsible historical consciousness and textual literacies. The typology allows teachers and communities to address key issues around access when developing understandings of ethnocultural and linguistic diversity amongst groups that speak the school/instructional language as a first language or as an additional language, or they do not speak the school/instructional language [28]. The typology allows textual literacy to be monitored for progressive incremental progress towards literacies that promote a democratic culture and language. Thus, teachers may benefit from being prepared to know how to mobilise a typology of language and culture to ensure that each student and their carer/parent can access the language and culture of instruction and associated textual literacies. Further, by using the typology to build a shared language, culture and textual literacies with a responsible historical consciousness, it may be possible to redesign curriculums. The redesigned policy curriculums may be culturally relevant because the voice of the community can speak languages that are recognised by and synthesise the powerful teacher’s voice using the language of instruction. This allows a community to use the typology, critique it and modify the typology if required to (i) ensure all community languages and cultures are on it and (ii) to monitor and evaluate their development from being (iii) labelled as inadequate with a deficit language and culture to (iv) being heard, understood and valued using (v) an inclusionary model of language and culture.

3. Bourdieusian Analysis of ‘Good Taste’

Bourdieu [15] states ‘In Other Words’ that the social world may be articulated and built according to the people’s principles of unity, equity and diversity, or division that can be mobilised by the law or with the power of a small elite group of people or person, as defined by Kant [29]. Economic divisions in society are revealed with those of working class with low socio-economic status, those of middle class with medium socio-economic status, and elite millionaires and billionaires with high socio-economic status. Ethnic divisions exist with White, Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority groups. In society, economic and cultural factors have the greatest power of differentiation. These can be organised with a vision for division based on race, ethnicity, religion and nationality or they can be united by celebrating diverse languages and cultures that boosts inclusion with a common and shared language and culture of democracy. The social spaces and their properties are symbolic of the status of groups through their lifestyles. Objectively material goods are socially structured because they are attributed to individuals or institutions who possess a particular use of language that can be classified on a typology from mastery of language which Bernstein [6] calls elaborate code and language called restricted code. Thus, language can be expressed in pairs such as long/short, high/low, which can be used to categorise diverse ‘taste’ as good/bad on a typology in a socially engineered way. So, on the objective and economic side, material goods that are expensive are associated with the subjective ‘mastery of sophisticated language’, which is the elaborated code and ‘good taste’, and poverty is associated with the subjective deficit of this ‘mastery of sophisticated language’ which is the restricted code and ‘bad taste’. Bourdieu [15] calls this double structuring because the objective economic wealth and the subjective perception of wealth through language and culture act as mechanisms to produce a common world of distinct divisions.

At any time, humans can come together to build a community to define and understand how these two mechanisms create symbolic struggles of the objective and the subjective world. However, an elite, objectively powerful (very rich and greedy) group can construct institutions and languages and cultures to ensure they keep their economic wealth and culturally elite status. They do this by ensuring the categories on a typology of perception control the ‘legitimate’ principal of division that perpetuates their economic and cultural supremacy. The systemic mechanisms are scripted into policies that stratify the remaining wealth and culture between different groups. By ensuring these different groups continue to struggle over power, the elite can create political struggles that distract from the real cause of the nature of the effects of economic poverty and global inequality, which is them. They achieve this by undermining the principle of how all human beings are equal with a principle of division that segregates distinctive language and culture by labelling them ‘bad taste’. If communities begin to get close to building democratic languages and cultures, the ultimate distraction the elite can implement is war. The predicates of war therefore are poverty and segregation, which are already in place due to the systemic mechanisms that operate the principles of division on the typology of objective wealth and subjective language and cultural mastery. (Bourdieu [15], p. 135) states:

In the determination of the objective classification and of the hierarchy of values granted to individuals and groups not all judgement have the same weight, and holders of large amounts of symbolic capital, the nobilities (etymologically, those who are well known and recognized), are in a position to impose the scale of values most favourable to their products—notably because, in our societies, they hold a practical de facto monopoly over institutions which, like the school system, officially determine and guarantee rank. On the other hand symbolic capital may be officially sanctioned and guaranteed, and juridically instituted by the effect of official nomination. Official nomination that is the act whereby someone is granted a title, a socially recognized qualification, is one of the most typical expressions of that monopoly over legitimate symbolic violence which belongs to the state or to its representatives. A credential such as a school diploma is a piece of universally recognized and guaranteed symbolic capital good on all markets. As an official definition of an official identity, it frees its holder from the symbolic struggle of all against all by imposing the universally approved perspective. Objective relations of power tend to reproduce themselves in relations of symbolic power.

The truth of the social world is at stake in the struggles between principles of democracy that enable all with the opportunity for self-fulfilment on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs [30] and principles of division that operate by (i) a knowledge that enables recognition of symbolic or subjective mastery of language and associated culture by said culture (ii) that has power to direct, prescribe through policy or order by law what people have to do according to what they are on the typology of division and (iii) create an institutional point of view with questionnaires and official forms that imposes a typology of division objectively and subjectively to make the very unnatural or socially engineered division of people by language and culture appear natural. Universities, schools and lifelong learning institutions can institute a point of view as a legitimate point of view that is recognised by all that is loaded with unconscious bias. If institutions already exist that are democratic and map to human rights, the United Nations [1] Agenda 2030, then authoritarian governments that protect and perpetuate elite groups with objective and subjective ‘good taste’ can rapidly deregulate them. For example, in the US, the Republicans during their last government term (2016–2020) deregulated across the professions and Trump [31] proposed sixteen pieces of deregulation to increase annual incomes by more than $40 billion. The deregulation includes transport [32]. Rapid de-regulation was also the cause of the financial crash [33], so this strategy to reduce the economic impacts of drivers of change by rapidly liberating economic institutional rule-of-law to free it of all the laws that protect citizens’ human rights is being implemented to reduce the rule-of-law across institutions.

The process has been called ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘new-freedoms’, where communities are freed from having their human rights protected. Removing communities’ human rights allows those with elite mastery of language to (i) amplify their acquisition of culture and subjective ‘good taste’ to (ii) gain objective economic wealth. This propels double structuring and the elites’ mechanisms to produce a common world of distinct divisions that enables them to exploit the communities and transfer their economic wealth to the elites’ bank accounts. Deregulations may be reducing rights to annual leave, sickness leave, maternity leave, health and safety regulations for railways, buildings, regulations for government procurement with taxpayers’ money, narrowing curriculums to core subjects of English and Maths, and so forth [34].

Bourdieu [15], p. 135, identifies ‘The representative of the state is the repository common sense: official nominations and academic credentials tend to have a universal value on all markets’. Codification through certificates by the representative of an institutional profession is appointed to deliver a point of view in University certificates, sick notes, or certificates of competence or incompetence. Bourdieu [15] p. 137 states:

But in the struggle for the production and imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world, the holders of bureaucratic authority never establish an absolute monopoly even when they add the authority of science to their bureaucratic authority, as government economists do. In fact there are always in any society, conflicts between symbolic powers that aim at imposing the vision of legitimate divisions, that is at constructing groups. Symbolic power in this sense is a power of ‘world making’. ‘World Making’ consists according to Nelson Goodman, ‘in separating and reuniting, often in the same operation’, in carrying out a decomposition, an analysis, and a composition, a synthesis often by the use of labels. Social classifications, as is the case in archaic societies where they often work through dualist oppositions (masculine/feminine, high/low, strong/weak, etc.), organize the perception of the social world and, under certain conditions, can actually organize the world itself.

Having identified the power of distinction through subjective language and culture and objective economic wealth, it is now possible to examine what strategies can offer sightlines to transforming objective principles of union and separation, association and dissociation.

4. Strategies to Prepare Teachers to Re-Build Democratic Communities and Disappearing Middle Class to Reverse Global Inequality

Sightlines to change require strategies that can be mapped to social world classifications as ways of monitoring and evaluating incremental change. Teachers can be prepared to (i) describe and understand how objective economic realities meet subjective hopes that (ii) can empower or limit what is possible for each category, for example working classes, lower middle classes, middle classes, upper middle classes and upper classes. (We have discussed how the stratification of the social world by classification of ‘class’ can be further classified with intersectionalities of discrimination. These need to be carefully considered when building communities of democratic languages and cultures to achieve Agenda 2030. This is achieved with goals for sustainable inclusion, equity and diversity with green circular digitized economies leading to peace and prosperity for all. The goals are delivered in new partnerships that are kind to both people and planet).

On a micro level, strategies using a Bourdieusian analysis in teacher preparation can change the world of students, in a student by student, classroom by classroom, and school by school manner. Teacher educators and teachers in schools work in partnership to mentor student teachers. This requires community building with democratic language and culture to change the very ways of world making between Higher Education Institutions, Schools of Education, and the schools they work with.

On a meso level, the University and school community can democratize language and culture and expand the community to participate in the ways of world making. This is achieved by including parents, carers, beneficiaries of the education system including employers and all stakeholders.

On a macro level, the vision of the democratic ways of world making can be mobilized through world organizations and signatories of Agenda 2030 with emergent frameworks, standards and guidelines that show promise and have transferability for different contexts where decisions are made [35]. This is important because participatory feedback loops to local, national and international organisations and policy makers need to include students, parents and community beneficiaries, particularly those with less-heard voices. This facilitates recommendations for policy and programmes to be culturally relevant, in order to maximize and facilitate the uptake of group-sensitive recommendations in policy for democratic cultures. These strategies must operationalize the mechanisms and practical operations by which groups/communities are produced and reproduced to change the ways of world making and therefore the ways groups are produced and reproduced. Using a Bourdieusian analysis, it can be deduced that this can be performed in two steps.

4.1. Step One

Step one is to create authentic opportunities for a democratic elected government to script policy to guarantee the credentialing of institutional professionals to implement the rule of law defined by Kant [29] with social authority of a constitution or social contract that does what it says it is going to do on paper. In other words, a democratic government creates democratic institutions that mobilise the best that has been thought and said from millennia of empirical evidence, logical deductions, and moral inquiries into ethical frameworks.

A representative who is elected to lead the institution that operationalises rules of law and protects human rights receives the power from the community to Chair a committee with transparent agendas and published minutes. The community can then hold the Chair and committee to account in the building of a socially just community to ensure an agenda item is always a reflection on all intentions and acts, and business is guided by the principle of unity and not a principle of division. This removes the power of a person being able to impose their vision of the social order upon the minds of communities who have been prevented from accessing the languages or cultures of the elite. Access to the languages and cultures of the elite would give access to the knowledge on the library shelves that the elite have accessed.

The democratization of access can lead to all communities questioning ways of world making by demanding a public inquiry into corruption, exploitation and rapid deregulation of laws which can be organised as agenda items for the committee. For example, at the end of World War II, ‘The declaration of Human Rights’ [36] was scripted and signed by nations of the world in the wake of the horror of world war. Community building needs to include an agenda item of reflection of why the principle of unity was needed to replace the principle of division. Such organised reflection on history protects against the elite rising again and world making with unnatural ways of social engineering that create divisions that appear so natural that communities will vote for them.

4.2. Step Two

Step two requires the democratic government to offer a vision that creates unity and builds communities of democratic languages, cultures and economies that have gained the skills in their academic careers to be culturally responsive to the social environments. In other words, the educational offer must be rooted in reality that can be accessed by all in the classroom from compulsory to lifelong learning institutions. It is no use offering communities knowledge, skills and experiences in science, English and math to pass PISA and other testing industries’ examinations when these leave a gap in skills so young people cannot access the labour market. In the following imagined vignette, a young woman is in an interview for a job:

Interviewer:

 You must forget all that you have learned in your formal education, those skills are irrelevant to what we expect you to do if you work here’. In other words the guaranteed certificates, your credentials endorsed by the Government are worthless here.

Young woman:

 I really want this job, I am willing and eager to learn the skills for the job, but I do not have the certificates or the credentials that you speak of, and I did not say that I had on my Vitae’.

Interviewer:

 If you do not have the certificates or credentials, then you are not qualified for this job and the interview is over, please leave.

The above vignette reveals the paradoxes young people currently face. They are required to have certification, but the certification is irrelevant and creates a huge skills gap. Therefore, to change the ways of world making, it is necessary to have the power to reveal or guarantee ‘things’ that are already there with clear and transparent definitions and understandings. The elected committees must assure Institutional rule of law protects and defends innocent people so they cannot be degraded or dehumanised or falsely accused of having ‘bad taste’ or led into a world war ever again.

In summary, using Bourdieusian analysis of the distinction of ‘good taste’, languages and cultures categorise the world. To create new ways of world making, it is necessary to democratise the language of instruction and cultures with the languages and cultures of the communities in real ways that are culturally relevant. Communities need teachers prepared to be able to do this to build democratic languages and cultures that are credentialed by democratic institutions that are guaranteed by impartial democratic governments that operationalise the rule of law defined by Kant [29]. Thus, the main idea of teacher professional development (TPD) is to move from a bureaucratic and rigid system controlled by the government to a dynamic approach where teachers are empowered and autonomous and held to account by the highest of professional standards. These are informed by classroom research conducted with, by and for the community of higher education (gown), schools (bridge) and town/village (the community education systems they serve) [37,38].

Affouna, Salha and Habayeb [39] indicated that the impact of TPD enhancements could be seen on teachers’ performance as the teachers gained significantly from the lessons learnt through group discussion, practices and personal reflections.

5. Preparing Teachers with a Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ and Dewey-Inspired Tools to Transform World Making

The problem is that there is a ‘them and us’, a dichotomy of epistemologies, where ‘epistemology’ means the ‘knowledge of what is’. So, a child may enter the classroom steeped in White middle-class culture, which Bourdieu [15] calls a dominant culture. This dominant culture has the same language as the language of instruction. Another group may enter the same classroom steeped in a working-class culture and they know they have ‘good taste’. However, the group from the dominant culture perceives the group with the working-class culture as having ‘bad taste’ by mobilising their unconscious bias. This may be the first time the group steeped in a working-class culture has ever been evaluated as people recognised as ‘bad’. The clash in culture is further divided by intersectionalities of discrimination where class meets gender, race, ethnicity religion, school language as an additional language, Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) and/or GLBQTI+ and so forth. The culture wars that take place in the classroom remain unknown to those in the fight. For example, a group of pre-school children aged three–five years old, excitedly enter their classroom on their first day. The children steeped in the dominant White middle-class culture are highly likely to be of the same culture as the White middle-class teacher speaking the instructional language. The Pew Research Centre [40] found that circa 79% of US public school teachers identified as non-Hispanic White.

This pattern of White supremacy is found in a Global Black–White achievement gap [41]. Further, Elliott [42] identifies there is a widening gap between the world’s rich and poor, of which more than 200 leading economists have said is entrenching poverty. In an open letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres and the World Bank President Ajay Banga supported by signatories from 67 countries, world-leading economists called to (i) reverse the sharp increases in global inequality, which in 2019–2020 was the sharpest experienced since World War II, and (ii) demand better tools to measure inequality and more ambitious targets for narrowing income and wealth gaps [43]. A tool that can be used is shown in Figure 1, the Policy Typology Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Transforming World Making.

Teachers need to be prepared to use this typology to describe the languages and cultures in their classroom. To do this, the teacher can assess each student’s work and if the student does not meet the expected level, the teacher and the student can spend time building a shared language. This is conducted by finding words from the instructional language and culture that mean the same as the words from community languages and cultures, and vice versa. This enables students and teachers to build a common democratic language and culture with a community thesaurus or synthesis of the perceived unification of languages and cultures. This moves beyond the division of languages and cultures that Bourdieu [15] identifies makes worlds unequal to making them equal. To ensure the synthesis of languages and cultures makes a community democratic language and culture authentic, teachers and students need to recognise and honour each language and culture that does no harm. Further, each and every language and culture in the classroom needs to be perceived as having parity of esteem and ‘good taste’. Thus, democratic taste will align with ‘good taste’ and communities must establish what democracy and good taste means to them as they build their community and make their world [ibid.] to narrow equity gaps and achieve Agenda 2030 with the Sustainable Development Goals [1].

Teachers can then use the typology and their assessment of learning to redesign culturally responsive pedagogies and curriculums to reverse unconscious bias with the synthesised languages and cultures in the classroom which democratises languages and cultures. This can be conducted across a department or a school depending on the size of the educational institution. Unions, leaders and policy makers can support teachers in reversing unconscious bias and help students and communities gain exposure to worlds they did not know existed. This can be conducted with textual literacies when they write their narratives for the person they want to be and plan strategies with education milestones they need to realistically achieve their goals [44].

6. Preparing Teachers with Methodologies to Implement the Typology

Teachers need to be prepared with the methodologies and tools they need to build a common language that synthesises the language of instruction with all the languages of the community in the classroom. Through effective and efficient investment in teacher preparation, teachers can be prepared to use baseline assessments to develop differentiated learning and teaching. The Assessment for Personal and Social Learning (APSL) [10] enables learning to start where the students are, recognising their community language and culture. This is the opposite to delivering a curriculum scheme of work. Wan et al. [45] identify that planning time can be a barrier to implementing differentiated learning and teaching. This is a critical point because it is by planning time to plan that it becomes possible to develop culturally responsive multi-cultural languages and identities in the classroom. These are the foundations upon which democratic cultures and democratic communities can be built. Teachers can be prepared to celebrate their students’ diverse cultural heritages, their languages, their cultures and their artifacts and build multicultural classrooms where Dewey’s sense of ‘the precarious’ meets ‘histories’ that meet ‘ends and goods’ using [10,46]’s ‘A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution in five stages A, B, C, D, E’ (Figure 2).

A Professional Educators and Administrators Committee for Empowerment (PEACE) is a systemic multi-level communication infrastructure to enable feedback loops from communities to policy makers. This facilitates recommendations for policy and programmes to be culturally relevant, embedded by inspection regimes, in order to maximize and facilitate the uptake of group-sensitive recommendations in policy for democratic cultures. PEACE can include indicators in their culturally responsive models created with, for and by the community to measure and report narrowing inequality and narrowing income and wealth gaps.

The Professional Educators and Administrators Committees for Empowerment (PEACE) multi-system level communication infrastructure allows information and data to cascade down to teachers and communities. PEACE is the mechanism that allows feedback loops of teachers and community voices, via hubs of Higher Education Schools of Education, to enable policy makers to script policy for a democratic language and culture in the classroom. The policy scripting can be monitored and evaluated for honouring each and every language and culture as having ‘good taste’ in the classroom that does no harm. The PEACE members create their own agendas for developing methodologies for synthesising instructional language and culture with community languages and cultures. This enables the community to plan for building a community’s democratic language and culture for dismantling systemic injustice in ways that are culturally relevant to make real worlds in social environments that boost inclusion and reverse rapidly expanding poverty gaps.

An example agenda drawing on [47] is as follows:

Proforma 1 for Agenda for PEACE Meetings (47)

Meeting Description:	PEACE Meeting 1 Zoom link and passcode if connecting within and between settings
Meeting Date and location	Day Date Time For queries please call (Chair) on WhatsApp or Ce number +XX XXXXXXX

Item	Subject	Details	Summary statement of discussion	List of items of reduced statement for questionnaire to test teachers’ Model	Actions
1	Welcome and Attendees	Name, Name, Name
2	Apologies,	Pre-reading; Reviewing PEACE member’s students’ assessments top, middle and bottom for incremental progression with evidence of using synthesised language and cultures of ‘good taste’ within and between classrooms and year groups
3	Minutes of previous meeting approved and matters arising
4	Time for building pedagogical relationships to compare and contrast languages and cultures to ensure a common language and culture enables all to access the curriculum, fostering culturally responsive learning in the classroom for each stage of ABCDE using Assessment for Personal and Social Learning.
5	Time for providing Assessment for Personal and Social Learning for each stage of ABCDE.
6	Time for students responding to feedback in the classroom and checking that the language and culture is understood by all. This moves beyond the divisional deficit model where the teacher fails a student for not meeting the expectations and ensures a differentiated curriculum offers access to students who have never previously used the language or culture of instruction.
7	Time for students and teachers talking about how Assessment for Personal and Social Learning informs lesson planning and ensures students can access the curriculum with a full understanding of the synthesized democratic language and culture of the classroom.
8	Time for students and teachers to talk about ABCDE and how each and every language and culture that does no harm has ‘good taste’ and how to develop a synthesized democratic language and culture with parents, and community stakeholders for group feedback loops for robust evidence base.
9	Any Other Business
10	Date of Next Meeting

However, elite authoritarian governments may want to keep their dominant capital and their socially engineered ‘good taste’.

7. Barriers to Reversing Unconscious Bias within Instructional Language and Culture

Increasing threats to the thesis of democracy by the anti-thesis of dictatorships in the Freedom in the World Report [48] show democracies across the globe in crisis. Rapid new deregulations of laws and standards, freeing people of human rights (neo-liberalism), creates systemic injustice and mistrust and leads to Violence, Uncertainty, Chaos and Ambiguity. MacClean [49] argues that the Libertarian-Right, or in other words the deregulating-right, do not want full civic engagement and full and free participation in the social contract for all groups. Buchanan [50] p. 44 states that in a strictly personalized sense, any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behaviour of others so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.

Karlin [51] argues that for Libertarians to realise their goals, they need a deliberate strategy to promote their cause that does not support full inclusion. The absence of inclusionary practices limits the textual literacies of communities which prevents them from holding governments accountable for their democratic human rights [49]. Hoggart [52] suggested, on the one hand, that the ruling authoritarian classes might prefer to have a society of mass illiteracy to control them so that they do not know what is going on and they do not have the skills to be inquirers into what is going on. Hoggart [52] countered this argument by saying that the authoritarians (libertine right) do not need to keep people illiterate, because with mass literacy reduced to a pliant level, it is possible to manipulate popular opinion and manipulate people with fake news in the mass media. Practical evidence of using a government-controlled media to control the masses is found in Hungary. Fehérvári [53] identifies that when Hungary was a Soviet Satellite State, the Russian regime reduced Hungary’s education quality, which grew the working classes and reduced the middle classes. The reductionist curriculum synthesised the language of instruction with the working-class culture and language and the textual literacies were controlled by Pravda, Stalin’s newspaper for which he was Chair and Editor, which prevented resistance to the regime.

The reductionist Russian regime effected centralized extractive economies. People did not have the education that built communities with the democratic language or culture to execute inquiries into what was going on. In neo-liberalist regimes, workers serve corporations’ elite shareholders as money is extracted from their pay packets and redirected to corporation shareholders’ dividend [54,55]. This widens the gap between the rich and poor of all races and ethnicities, costing the US more than $300 billion annually [8].

Communism and neo-liberalism centrally control extractive economies that prevent people working out of poverty [56]. For Dewey, this works against the social spirit by preventing a community from articulating a subjective desire to have a good life and becoming engaged with participative inquirers and scripting narratives into objectively realizing a good life [57]. Skills that empower sustainable growth of the middle classes and narrow the gap between rich and poor can be gained in inclusionary classrooms with democratic languages and cultures. Here, the language of instruction and culture, loaded with unconscious bias, can be synthesised with community languages and acquisition of democratic culture and textual literacies. This process of democratic world making in the classrooms pump-primes the elimination of poverty and the indignity of labelling poverty as ‘bad taste’, laying the foundations for community building for sustainable peace and prosperity for all to meet Agenda 2030.

Neo-liberalism creates the gap between the rich and the poor which results in elites’ continued access to what Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [58] call ‘preserved knowledge’ in their mission statement [58,59]. Schools of Education can become the mobilisers of that preserved knowledge through Dewey-Inspired high-quality teacher preparation and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs. Removing teacher preparation and CPD programs from the Schools of Education disconnects the academy (gown) and knowledge production for human evolution from schools, colleges, apprenticeships and the working people (town/village) they are meant to serve with their civic mission. Dewey-Inspired high-quality teacher preparation and CPD programs in Schools of Education located in the academy can train teachers to build robust evidence bases to redesign curricular and pedagogies to support education for democracy. Dewey [60] and Haidar-Baldwin et al. [61] argue that for democracy in education, students need to gain competences to ask questions that hold half the answer and to think about the ideas behind the physical contacts and objects such as: ‘How can interest of $1000 be charged on a loan of $500?’ [62]. Communities must know how to collaboratively resist undemocratic social contracts that widen poverty gaps, trap citizens in debt and cost the US $300 billion annually [8]. Collaborative advocacy of civil rights, including belonging to a union, builds capacity for collective bargaining [63] to stop exploitation. This expands the middle classes [62] and openness to diverse sources of information, perspectives and criticism [64] with which to navigate complexity impartially.

Teachers are aware that there is systemic injustice in their classrooms and evidence they are unhappy about this would be poor teacher recruitment and retention. Darling Hammond [65] identifies there is a critical shortage of teachers in the US. The Commission Europeene [66] identify there is a critical shortage of educators in Europe. Schermele [67] identifies 86% of public schools in the US are struggling to hire educators, and the United Nations [68] identify that 69 million more teachers are needed by 2030 to achieve Quality Education (SDG 4). Current trends see the gap between required teachers and actual teachers increasing. The evidence reveals that teacher retention and teacher recruitment is a significant problem for the profession globally. At the same time, the Open Letter of Signatories of Leading world economists from 67 nations identifies that, between 2019 and 2020, the sharpest increase in global inequality was experienced since World War II. Harsh or Generous post war responses can create identities for war or peace [69,70], for anti-democratic government Policy Typology for coercion, or democratic government Policy Typology for social justice.

8. Conclusions

The paper has identified that making worlds that perpetuate social injustice is possible by elite policy makers using Policy Typology. Policy Typology classifies groups and individuals in society as good and bad based on levels of poverty that can be perpetuated by double reduction. The first reduction is to create the language and culture of instruction with the means to wealth and the second reduction is to cap the number of citizens who can access this language and culture of instruction. This traps people without the language or culture of instruction into not acquiring the language and culture of instruction and therefore traps them into cycles of poverty. The result of this Policy Typology is to widen the working classes, making them more pliant and less resistant to the coercive government whilst reducing the middle classes. Overall, this reduces participation in open government partnerships for the majority of citizens and widens income and wealth gaps. Policy Typology creates instructional language and culture surpluses (good taste) for the few and creates deficits (bad taste) for the many, which stratifies community/society with political struggles. These political struggles are creating subjective culture wars over very real objective resource wars which distract citizens from focusing on the cause of their poverty: the coercive governments making the stratifying and divisive Policy Typology. Stratification is compounded by climate change, creating massive water and food insecurity, and people who are not learning how to become self-managing in their education systems in their particular environments. Policy Typology positions those with ‘bad taste’ as failures because during their entire education, possibly of 12 years, they do not gain the language and culture acquisition required for a good life that propels (i) entrepreneurial economies and (ii) grows the middle classes who can (iii) access objective goods and their means of production, which is (iv) creating conditions for war which are (v) resulting in wars across our world, which could lead to World War III.

To reverse this trend, teachers, need to be prepared to describe, understand and critique a Policy Typology of Applying Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Transforming World Making to enable them to know why they need to create democratic languages and cultures in their classrooms and how to do this. This paper has presented A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE), the Dewey-Inspired Assessment for Personal and Social Learning (APSL) and the Professional Educators and Administrators Committees for Empowerment framework of communication infrastructures to enable teachers to be prepared to redesign culturally responsive pedagogies and curriculums. Using ABCDE as a guide for the PEACE agenda and Dewey’s Assessment for Personal and Social Learning, trainee teachers can work with teachers, their mentors, including HEI teacher trainers, and teacher leaders to build a professional learning community. The PEACE can meet for an hour every two weeks and can create culturally relevant indicators and models of classroom cultural democracy using Policy Typology. The models they develop can describe, understand and synthesise (i) the instructional language and culture of the academy and middle classes with (ii) the community languages and cultures in their classroom. On a micro level, this enables them to ensure they use Policy Typology to create an inclusionary, unified democratic language and culture, reverse unconscious bias and dismantle systemic injustice in their classrooms. The democratic culture created with the Policy Typology honours each and every different language and culture with a responsible historical consciousness buttressed with textual literacies, which is the antithesis of cultural assimilation.

The Models of Cultural Democracy teachers are prepared to create, which enables them to identify milestones mapped to curriculum pathways and whole school schemes of work. These enable students’ incremental progress on qualitative pathways to be monitored and evaluated, supported by the PEACE. Students’ missed milestones can be mitigated for in the development of cultural democracy in their classroom and their school by planning differentiated learning informed by the Assessment for Personal and Social Learning. On a meso level, the teacher trainers from HEI Schools of Education can, with appropriate ethical consent and ethical frameworks, collect the data from each school’s models, that they are partners with, along with the minutes of PEACE meetings. Administrating regressive abstraction to the data, a general Model of Democratic Cultures using Policy Typology can emerge. This model can be fed back to the school’s PEACE who can validate the model and its indicators, or otherwise, with the potential of providing proof of concept. The PEACE offers a systemic multi-level communication infrastructure to enable feedback loops from communities to policy makers with schools bridging between the town/village community and the gown/Higher Education Institution to measure inequality and report narrowing income and wealth gaps. On a macro level, the vision of the democratic ways of world making can be mobilized through developing the Bourdieusian Policy Typology through world organizations and signatories of Agenda 2030, with transferability for different contexts where decisions are made with Open Government Partnerships.

9. Recommendations for Macro International-Level Policy, Meso Government-Level Policy and Micro Higher Education/School Level Policy

The recommendations are as follows: Mobilise ABCDE through PEACE committee meetings, face to face or hybrid, for one hour every two weeks with an agenda mapped to A Blueprint for Character Development for Evolution (ABCDE) using the Dewey-Inspired Assessment for Personal and Social Learning:

(A)

Support professors in the academy to obtain credentials and develop teachers in partnership with the teaching profession to ask questions about instructional Language and Culture and Community Languages and Cultures;

(B)

Interrogate the Typology of Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ for Making Worlds (found in this paper) and use the critique to address questions in Stage A;

(C)

Use methodologies to reverse unconscious bias by creating models with indicators for:

(D)

Building communities of democratic cultures and languages with and for society to dismantle systematic injustice and provide ways of world making for equity and to:

(E)

Identify a principle/s of unity that reverses local inequality, and through powerful Higher Education Networks, mainstream it to reverse global inequality at the micro, meso and macro levels.

An International Consortium, Peace Educators Globally (PEG), is presenting at the Reimagining Teachers and Teacher Education for Our Futures Conference at a Pre-Conference and Conference Symposium organised and hosted by faculty of Education Sciences, University of Helsinki Finland, and its UNESCO Chairs professor Hannele Niemi and professor Arto Kallioniemi. The Conference is in collaboration with the UNITWIN UNESCO network on Teacher Education for Social Justice and Diversity [71,72]. PEG is poised to (i) implement the above project to (ii) optimise potential for mainstreaming and adoption of instruments and online statistical analysis systems for generating visual reports facilitated by tutorials to achieve SDG 4, (iii) with boundary crossing international networked micro-credentialing credit transfer at the Masters level mapped to existing quality assurance guidelines of the US Credit Transfer System, European Credit Transfer System (ECTs), Bologna and the AUN/Asian Credit Transfer System (ACS) in Asia, with the aim of creating a global credit transfer system. This creates democratic access to teacher preparation and credentialing to re-build democratic communities and the disappearing middle class to reverse global inequality, serving groups from refugees in camps under siege to students in elite private education and all those in between. The democratic cultures are created using The Policy Typology Bourdieusian ‘Taste’ and Dewey-Inspired Tools to Transform World Making

By synthesising the languages and cultures in the classroom, it is possible to rebuild a disappearing middle class, whilst honouring each and every community language and culture by creating principles of democratic cultures. This moves society towards a more inclusionary, diverse and equitable perfect union. Developing such ways of making worlds with principles of democratic cultures, starting in the classroom and reaching out to build a community with parents and carers, stakeholders and employers offers ways of measuring and benchmarking, (i) reversing the sharpest increase between 2019 and 2020 in global inequality since World War II, with (ii) PEACE, ABCDE and Assessment for Personal and Social Learning as community tools to build a community who know how to measure inequality and develop their own more ambitious targets, progressing their PEACE agendas for narrowing income and wealth gaps. This addresses the Open Letter of Signatories of Leading world economists from 67 nations [43], through Open Government Partnerships.