Horizontal pedagogy is an approach to learning with roots in the work of
many activists, scholars, and educators through their various encounters
within teaching and learning (Freire, 1972/2000, Guattari 2005).1 This
chapter presents horizontal pedagogy as a prefigurative educational experiment
that emerged from the Occupy University in New York City’s General
Assembly. This experiment drew together several traditions of facilitation
practice in order to work against neoliberal-capitalist relations of production,
but also to learn what other kinds of relations of knowledge production
might be possible. The following chapter offers one description of the pedagogy’s
history and practice during 2011–2012. The chapter first outlines the
emergence of the horizontal pedagogy (HP) group in the Occupy Wall Street
movement (OWS), followed by an annotated dialogue from a horizontal pedagogy
session which occurred in 2014. Through this history and dialogue, the
chapter addresses the question: What is Horizontal Pedagogy?