Learning on Equal Terms
Beitragsbeschreibung
Emine Mulgrew, Malula Remote Intern
9/28/20263 min read
Most institutions treat knowledge as something that moves in one direction. It is often perceived as belonging to an expert, professor or intellectual, and is passed downwards to whoever is there to receive it. There is an assumption that the student brings little of their own, and success is measured by how accurately they reproduce what knowledge they have been given.
Horizontal learning starts from a different assumption. It suggests that knowledge is not owned by one party and delivered to another, but built between people who each provide different aspects of it. Not only does the academic hold knowledge, but so does the grandmother, the displaced family, the farmer, the former combatant, the community that has lived through a traumatic event. A top-down model recognises only the first of these as ‘knowledge’. A horizontal one recognises learning as an exchange of ideas not a direct transfer.
The idea of horizontal learning is not a new concept, and has been widely discussed in Colombian literature. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, understood education as a means for people to develop self-awareness and recognise their own position within society rather than simply absorb instruction. In Colombia, the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda developed what he called ‘investigaión-acción participativa’, participatory action research, beginning in the 1960’s with communities in the Chocontá region near Bogotá. Fals Borda emphasised that the work felt no need to appeal to the authority of what he termed ‘the western academy’ in order to accurately capture Colombian reality. Knowledge about Colombia could be produced within Colombia, by and for the people who live there.
When Malula’s volunteers describe what the work has meant to them, they are describing this inheritance, though they rarely name it as such. For Jefrey, Malula has represented "a continuous dialogue between applying my academic knowledge and skills and the learning and exchange of knowledge with communities." The sentence is deliberately balanced: what he brings, and what the community brings, given equal weight. He draws the conclusion plainly, that the work makes clear "how social work is done on equal terms." Laura León states the same principle more strongly. Being part of Malula, she says, has meant "a different way of seeing the world and approaching the social sciences, one where the community is always the starting point for the construction of knowledge." The community is not the object to which expert knowledge is applied. It is where knowledge begins. That reversal is the substance of horizontal learning, and it is precisely what Fals Borda spent his career defending.
These are students, people currently advancing through the academic system, describing what it means to step outside its usual hierarchy. They arrive with real training and genuine skills, and Malula does not ask them to set those aside. It asks them to hold their knowledge alongside other kind rather above them. Lina’s experience shows how this changes what counts as being taught. She had already studied the history of Bojayá, one of Malula's partner communities, in the conventional way: academically, at a distance, through the written record and through photographs and videos. She knew the facts. Yet by her own account the history remained remote, "lejano o ajeno," distant or foreign, until she encountered it differently, through the testimony of someone who had been with the community, and through the River Atrato, the canoes, the songs, and the loss that still marks that place. Only then did it cease to be an abstraction. The conventional approach had given her information; the direct encounter gave her understanding. In that exchange the community was not a subject she studied but, in effect, her teacher, and the lesson was one no top-down method could have delivered, because it was not composed of facts.
This is why Malula treats listening as seriously as any formal method. To listen in this way is to accept that the person in front of you knows something you do not. Academic training, however real, does not place you above the exchange. There is a political dimension to this that the volunteers register even when they describe it gently. Freire and Fals Borda did not present participatory learning as a more agreeable teaching style; they saw it as a way of questioning the hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is treated as legitimate.
Alejandra describes what that recognition yields. Peacebuilding, she says, "begins by listening to the stories of people we perceive as radically different from ourselves," and through that listening "we come to see that there are more stories and memories that unite us than those that divide us." What the exchange teaches is not only new material but a different relationship: the recognition that the division between the one who knows and the one who is known was never as settled as a top-down model implies. Gabriela describes the same thing on a smaller scale. At a Malula training on inclusive and non-violent communication, the learning did not come from an instructor issuing rules but from the participants themselves, identifying in dialogue the moments when they had unthinkingly reproduced exclusion or violence. The understanding was already present among them; the method was to let it circulate.
Horizontal learning can sound like a purely theoretical commitment, and within the Colombian tradition it is a serious one. The volunteers return repeatedly to a single modest word: listen, and in their accounts, it proves the most demanding requirement of all, because listening in earnest means conceding that the other person has something to teach you.