[Xmca-l] Re: Craftwork as Liberal Education - interested contacts/ Maker movement

Wed Mar 13 16:45:42 PDT 2019

Very glad we are agreed on so many points, Henry. From the NYC DOE's
viewpoint I'm indeed retired. However, it's the kind of retirement (more of
an emigration from the classroom) wherein I teach studio music lessons
seven days a week, and play and sing concerts fairly often. (Those high
school shop experiences were as a student.) As to Dr. Papert's apt quote,
it was equally much the increasingly Walmart-ized rote instruction that
really helped me understand where I did and did not belong.

Kind regards,

Daniel

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 6:02 PM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> The link is fantastic, Daniel! It’s the July 2014 issue of the on line
> journal Edutopia (funded it appears by George Lucas).  Reading only through
> the lead article on the Maker Movement is eye opening for me, and the video
> of a classroom where tinkering is done by students 6-12, is inspiring.
> Let’s face it, education needs to be reimagined top to bottom. And many of
> the articles that follow the one on the Maker Movement are clearly inspired
> by what I am thinking about. As a retired teacher educator I want to get
> back in and tinker with education. Or at least be in touch with those in
> the trenches who are re-imag(en)ing education. You say “back then” when you
> talk about wood shop when you taught high school. I guess you have retired?
> If you’re like me, you may have more time now to make look for ideas like
> tthe Maker Movement than you did back then, at least if you were working
> within the framework available. From Seymour Pappert in the article you
> linked me to:
> "[T]he same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased
> toward its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which
> measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in
> a Skinner box.”
> Not only less inspired, but more expensive! Money down Skinner’s rathole!
> Just saying.
> Henry
>
>
> On Mar 11, 2019, at 12:39 PM, Daniel Hyman <daniel.a.hyman.0@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Excellent point, Henry - my high school south of Pittsburgh had wood shop,
> metal shop, electronics, and a plentiful supply of Band-Aids. If we're
> referring to the same Maker Movement as in
> https://www.edutopia.org/blog/maker-movement-moving-into-classrooms-vicki-davis
> I not only see a connection; I can still smell the varnish and feel the
> different grades of sandpaper and steel wool. There wasn't, back then, an
> overt effort to "rise above" mere "manual labor", generalize, abstract, or
> any of that. We made tables, bookends, and the like, as well as we could.
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:06 PM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Daniel and Tom,
>> You will recall perhaps the push back when Bob Dylan went electronic with
>> his music. I see a connection with this subject line on craftwork in
>> education. Folk music enthusiasts, perhaps, saw what Dylan was doing on an
>> acoustic guitar as real folk music, the sound of the guitar unmodified
>> electronically. Even more authentic would be folk music without
>> amplification through a PA system? In the same way, perhaps, craftwork is
>> defined by the tecnologies that mediate between the creator and the final
>> product. The only music that is unmediated is song. But song is typically
>> mediated through language. And the use of the vocal chords without words
>> involves mediation, in the same way that the entire body is the medium for
>> dance. What I think is most powerful and human about craftwork is how
>> embodied the mediating is, how immediate, how in touch with the senses at
>> their most basic. That, maybe, is where Dylan went to the dark side. And it
>> was all about commodification. Curricula in education are always in danger
>> of being commodified in the same way. Perhaps the make movement is a way
>> out? What I mean is, do you see a connection between craftwork and the
>> maker movement? Sorry to be so long winded in getting to the question!
>> Henry
>>
>>
>> On Mar 11, 2019, at 9:42 AM, Daniel Hyman <daniel.a.hyman.0@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Tom,
>>
>> This topic is welcome indeed. Please consider the crafts of playing,
>> hearing, teaching, and building/maintaining musical instruments. I
>> personally specialize in playing violin and viola, and teaching (hence at
>> times rescuing) same. My craft training has taken me to
>> Indiana/Bloomington, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY/Queens College, Carnegie Mellon,
>> Cincinnati, Aspen, Teachers College, and the Suzuki-based School For
>> Strings in NYC. I continue also as a vocalist and very slowly budding
>> pianist.
>>
>> These specialties not only tie directly to development via hands-on
>> learning and experience. They also spark and require reflection,
>> imagination, invention, and wordless, affect-rich thought. Concert-goers
>> and musicians alike, also experience the longitudinal deepening of the
>> experience of hearing/performing the "same" work. At times this is in
>> genres calling for change in the moment, e.g. jazz, or Baroque
>> ornamentation, but often as well when all the notes are exactly the same as
>> before, or when historically-informed performance offers newly
>> restored/revised versions of familiar works.
>>
>> I live in Long Island, so if you have occasion to follow up offline, that
>> would be great.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Daniel
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 8:41 PM Tom Martin <martincommatom@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello XMCA,
>>>
>>> Apologies if this is a little off-topic, but as a long-timer lurker on
>>> this list, I suspect you all might have some helpful input into this
>>> question. My interest is in the ‘liberal’ side of craft/vocational
>>> education – i.e., how practical skills have educational worth beyond their
>>> market value; how they demonstrate a fundamental mode of understanding,
>>> through which learners might find personal and intellectual fulfillment.
>>>
>>> My specific question is who I might connect with in the USA who is
>>> interested in these themes. After finishing a PhD at Oxford, I have
>>> recently relocated to NYC, where my academic contacts are quite sparse. I
>>> would be very interested in having this conversation in more depth, and
>>> perhaps even publishing/working with others, if I were able to find people
>>> with complementary interests.
>>>
>>> I have included a relevant excerpt from my PhD below to further
>>> illustrate the topic I’m asking about. The full text is online at
>>> https://ora.ox.ac.uk/ (search my name), for anyone curious.
>>>
>>> A million thanks in advance,
>>>
>>> Tom Martin
>>>
>>>
>>> <dissertation excerpt begins>
>>>
>>> … Having served as a workshop trainee myself, I can confidently claim
>>> that learning to build wooden boats is a worthwhile undertaking for reasons
>>> that extend far past the market value of the resulting skills. In aligning
>>> their perception with that of those around them, novices like myself are
>>> introduced to the possible depth of understanding that perception can
>>> relate, as well as with the nuance in meaning that can be comprehended in a
>>> short glance or with a passing touch. While getting ‘the feel’ does not
>>> entail developing an entirely new way of interacting with the world, it
>>> does require exploring the extent of the possibilities of our fundamental
>>> mode of understanding, which we take for granted in our everyday dealings
>>> with physical things. Working somewhere like the wooden boat workshop
>>> allows the learner to encounter the myriad layers of meaning and
>>> context-bound purposes that operate at once within such a complex system,
>>> exposing him or her to the full extent of our inherent human capacity for
>>> meaning-making.
>>>
>>> This conception of boat building as a medium through which our
>>> fundamental mechanism for understanding the world can be refined points to
>>> a vision of craft as ‘liberal education’, a mode of fostering personal
>>> growth rather than solely achieving extrinsic ends (Peters, 1970b, p. 43).
>>> Of course, competence at work should still be a concern in a well-rounded
>>> education, which serves as an introduction to ways of interacting with
>>> others in society, fulfilling the collective functions through which we
>>> support one another’s needs (see Dewey, 1916/2004). As Pring points out,
>>> however, intellectual growth and training for work are not necessarily
>>> incompatible:
>>>
>>> *...there is a mistaken tendency to define education by contrasting it
>>> with what is seen to be opposite and incompatible. ‘Liberal’ is contrasted
>>> with vocational as if the vocational, properly taught, cannot itself be
>>> liberating – a way into those forms of knowledge through which a person is
>>> freed from ignorance, and opened to new imaginings, new possibilities
>>> (Pring, 2004, p. 57; org. emp.)*
>>>
>>> In the passage above, Pring echoes long-standing criticisms by Dewey
>>> (1916/2004) and Oakeshott (1989), who challenge the notion of a
>>> liberal/vocational divide in education. Collectively, these authors argue
>>> that subject matter has little bearing on the promise for fulfilment of
>>> educational aims such as intellectual growth and personal fulfilment. What
>>> does matter is the perspective from which a subject is taught; if the goal
>>> of teaching is to foster new ways of engaging with the material and social
>>> world, then the outcome might rightly be called ‘education’. A strict focus
>>> on the production of finished goods, by contrast, leads only to ‘training’,
>>> the memorisation of routines detached from context and therefore deprived
>>> of their full significance. Returning to the definition of ‘craft’ that I
>>> provided in the Introduction (Chapter 1) – organised practice combining
>>> tools, materials, and the body, joined with a sensibility for the
>>> aesthetic, social, and practical value of the objects produced – it becomes
>>> apparent that craft learning is therefore liberal education, by definition.
>>> My analysis throughout this thesis merely serves to translate into the
>>> technical language of philosophy the premise that craftspeople intuitively
>>> understand, that historical ways of working with tools and materials in
>>> their meaningful contexts demand a highly-sharpened intellect.
>>>
>>> In arguing that craft learning is intellectually comparable to the
>>> learning of literature, history, and the other mainstays of liberal
>>> education, I do not merely mean to defend craft education against those who
>>> would see it as mere job training. Indeed, this investigation also provides
>>> the logical foundation for asking what craft learning provides that those
>>> traditional ‘liberal arts’ do not. Peters (1970) argues that a liberal
>>> education cannot result in a single, narrow mode of understanding the
>>> world, writing that ‘[n]o scientist should emerge, for instance, without a
>>> good understanding of other ways of looking at the world, historically, for
>>> instance, or aesthetically’ (p. 44). The circumspective understanding that
>>> the wooden boat builders employ demonstrates a rich, nuanced way of
>>> ‘looking at the world’ in the most literal sense, recognising meaning in
>>> physical objects and their interrelationships rather than through words and
>>> numbers. Following Peters, it is possible to ask whether a person can be
>>> considered well educated without refining their perceptual capacities,
>>> especially if, as Heidegger asserts, pre-reflective perceptual
>>> understanding is our foundational mode of engaging with the world, upon
>>> which other ways of knowing are founded. Unfortunately, one wonders whether
>>> opportunities to nurture such understanding are disappearing as small-scale
>>> craftwork is replaced by mechanised mass production, as Heidegger (1968)
>>> suggests in his final lectures on understanding in the era of technology.
>>>
>>
>>
>
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