The power of living knowledge: re-imagining horizontal knowledge

ABSTRACT

Educationalists tend to imagine school curricula organised solely around academic, formal knowledge or horizontal discourse. Yet, despite curricula organised around vertical discourses such as science, geography and mathematics, the working classes, the poor and minority ethnically groups achieve less well in education than the middle classes. The paper aims to re-think horizontal knowledge by paying attention to it as place-based, sensory, embodied, indigenous and historically developed forms of knowing in order: 1) to broaden debates about school knowledge; 2) to support teachers to recognise and legitimate forms of knowing beyond those prescribed by academic curricular and 3) to re-imagine it as living knowledge that has value. To illuminate what might be powerful in horizontal knowledge Gilbert Simondon’s genetic ontology and his concepts of pre-individuation, persons are not fixed for all time, and transindividual, a uniquely collective form of knowing, are introduced. The paper argues that by re-thinking horizontal knowledge young people can be imagined as having multiple ways of being and education can support them to become more; more than social class, more than poverty, more than an exam failure and more than an individual, fixed for all time.

KEYWORDS:

• Horizontal knowledge
• Gilbert Simondon
• transindividual
• living knowledge

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of the special issue for their high level of engagement with this paper as it evolved and two anonymous reviews for invaluable insights and intellectual guidance.

Ethics statement

All studies had ethical approval from the relevant university ethics committees, and all participants gave consent.

The paper draws on a succession of studies conducted between 2006 and 2018 in the ex-mining and steel producing valleys of south Wales. (1) on young people’s understandings of skill in the Llynfil Valley in primary and secondary schools between 2006–2010; (2) on young people’s understandings of place, in schools and communities in the Cynon Valley, called the Young People and Place (PI Ivinson) project between 2010–2013, and (3) on young people’s sense of wellbeing in schools and communities in the Taff Valley between 2013–2018 as part of Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement project, and was called Making, Mapping and Mobilising in Merthyr.

Notes

1. The paper draws on a succession of studies conducted between 2006 and 2018 in the ex-mining and steel producing valleys of south Wales. Three studies were conducted in schools and communities in south Wales ex-mining valley communities: (1) on young people’s understandings of skill in the Llynfil Valley in primary and secondary schools between 2006–2010; (2) on young people’s understandings of place, in schools and communities in the Cynon Valley, called the Young People and Place (PI Ivinson) project between 2010–2013, and (3) on young people’s sense of wellbeing in schools and communities in the Taff Valley between 2013–2018 as part of Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement project, and was called Making, Mapping and Mobilising in Merthyr.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/K002716/1] and RES-576-25-0021 (ESRC/HEWFCW).

Notes on contributors

Gabrielle Ivinson

Gabrielle Ivinson develops arts-based methods to attune to what lies beyond the spoken word, enabling embodied, affective dimensions of difficult issue such as poverty to be recognised.