Blog post Part of special issue: Flipping the deficit narrative: Working-class people in UK higher education
Adopting ‘a view from within’: On the importance of centring working-class knowledges in university curricula
UK higher education (HE) has undergone profound transformation since its early inception. No longer the preserve of the elite few, HE has since massified. Despite the expansion of UK HE being a positive force with regard to the increase in the number of students and academics from working-class (and other non-traditional) backgrounds there is also cause to pause. It is only in recent years, in line with the expansion of UK HE, that those outside the elite have participated. In this blog post, I argue that the inclusion of working-class contributions to knowledge, from both within and beyond the academy, needs to be embedded within university curricula. In so doing, we will begin to address the historical epistemological injustices that continue to underpin the classed politics of knowledge production, by establishing inclusive curricula that speak to wider societal experiences.
Within academic thought and beyond, the working-classes have rarely been positioned as knowledge holders, or tellers of their own social histories, but rather subjects to be researched on (rather than with or alongside). Working-class life has been represented, within the academy, media and political discourse in derogatory, pathologised and homogeneous ways that perpetuate negative and harmful stereotypes and vilify working-class life. While there are working-class academics producing working-class knowledges and foregrounding the working-class perspective across academia, contemporary academia remains ‘the bastion of classed knowledge’ (Walkerdine, 2021, p. 67).
‘Within academic thought and beyond, the working-classes have rarely been positioned as knowledge holders, or tellers of their own social histories, but rather subjects to be researched on (rather than with or alongside).’
This raises important questions for the politics of knowledge production as well as pedagogy. What knowledge is being taught within UK HE curricula? From whose perspective? What impact does this have on student learning and issues of ex/inclusion? How then might I then rethink and reconsider what and how I teach when reflecting on issues of class inequality within sociology? As bell hooks remarks in Teaching to Transgress (2014): ‘class shapes … biases that inform the way knowledge would be given and received … [yet there is] no critique of the bourgeois class biases shaping and informing pedagogical process (as well as social etiquette) in the classroom’ (p. 178).
As a working-class, first-generation feminist academic and sociologist I am passionate about the amplification of working-class voices, inclusion and change within UK HE. One way in which I seek to challenge the classed politics of academia to create inclusive spaces for working-class students is through my curriculum design, and, importantly, through the pedagogical practice of adopting ‘a view from within’. My module ‘Class, Culture and Conflict: A view from within’ was co-created with four working-class students from the Department of Sociology at the University of Sussex, and originally sought to explore class inequality in the UK from a distinctly working-class perspective. I conceptualise a ‘view from within’ as: ‘to refer to the act of exploring a phenomenon, academically or otherwise, through the eyes of those who have experienced it first-hand, those who look out rather than look in and down from the outside’ (Rowell, Forthcoming). Adopting ‘a view from within’ recognises that credible knowledge is not only found within academic walls but is also generated in close proximity to the issues being explored and addressed; it is about foregrounding working-class voices, avoiding the objectification that is commonplace in scholarship and teaching of social class.
Adopting ‘a view from within’ highlights the positive pedagogical power of drawing from a working-class background and perspective for both teachers and students of HE for a multitude of reasons. Not least, centring working-class knowledges within university curricula serves to establish both an epistemic and a curriculum base that more suitably reflects the wider society in which the university serves. It turns on its head harmful and stereotypical representations of working-class lives that entrench class divisions, distinctions and the misunderstandings that serve to alienate working-class students from the university classrooms that they have fought to be in. Importantly, adopting ‘a view from within’ establishes working-class people as valuable knowledge holders in their own right, a premise overwhelmingly reserved for the middle-class knowledge constructors. It empowers working-class students in the classroom and beyond.
References
hooks, b.(2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.
Rowell, C. (Forthcoming). A View from within: The Pedagogy, Practice and Possibilities of Drawing from a Working-Class Background. In J. Pilgrim-Brown, T. Crew, & É. Attridge (Eds.). Working class people in UK higher education: Precarities, perspectives and progress. Emerald Publishing.
Walkerdine, V. (2021). What’s class got to do with it?. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(1), 60–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1767939