Re-imagining education by thinking with craft as a spatiotemporal, embodied and material practice

Abstract

This article explores informal contemporary craft learning, and the challenges it poses to the neoliberal logics entrenched in dominant Western education models. In particular, we share examples of craft learning that disrupt the linear and fixed notions of time and space, and the disembodied, humancentric approach, that have consistently shaped formal education. Drawing on Barad’s notion of ‘intra-action’, we consider pedagogic encounters in two different informal education contexts – a pottery studio and a textile workshop – where learning unfolds continually through mutual negotiations and encounters between time, space, humans, bodies, materials, and others. We think with craft as a contextual practice and also argue for its value as a conceptual lens in the work of re-imagining new and different education future-presents. Thinking with craft as spatio-temporal, embodied and material has significant potential to contribute to this re-imagining through the ways it inherently invites us to think with the complexity and difference that is generated through and within relational contexts and intra-actions.

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