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

[JULIE WADDINGTON]

Hello Tom,

Although I'm not in a position to respond to your specific question about
contacts, I wanted to say that I think this work/focus is totally
worthwhile.

I once managed the Outreach Training programme for a Women's Centre in the
north of England. We organised craft courses (with ERDF funding) for women
in severely disadvantaged situations. The educational and personal
benefits of these programmes fits entirely with your suggestion that:
"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 fulfilment."

Since today is International Women's Day, I offer no apologies whatsoever
if this message appears off-topic ;)

Good luck with this very interesting line of research :)

Julie




> 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.,
>
>
> 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.
>


Dra. Julie Waddington
Departament de Didàctiques Específiques
Facultat d'Educació i Psicologia
Universitat de Girona