Mending Knowledge: Community Transmission and Its Challenges in Formal Education

Abstract

This paper examines how community-driven mending knowledge travels across time and into contemporary schooling, and what conditions allow it to persist. We pair a concise historical backdrop through a timeline called “How Mending Survives”, with a practice-led, design-ethnographic case study in a New York City public high school titled the ReGenerational Repair Program. Using a Value-Sensitive Design lens, we compare a spring after-school class series and autumn in-class intensive study and find that transmission flourishes where learners share time, table, tools and conversation, and falters where those conditions are scarce. Rather than adding a repair unit, we argue for designing classrooms as sociotechnical environments that provide the temporal, spatial and relational fabrics that mending requires, positioning schools as credible co-sites of transmission alongside community venues. The paper clarifies how historical dynamics are re-enacted in the present and why community remains not a supplement to education but a reciprocal site of transmission.