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

[robsub@ariadne.org.uk]

South east of England, not the east coast of the States, but I like what 
you're saying so much, Tom, that I feel the urge to comment. 
Unseasonably warm here, to the extent that everyone has their lawnmower 
out, ruining what would otherwise be a peaceful weekend.

Just a couple of random thoughts. I wrote a blog post a while ago "A 
university degree in plumbing" which explores related territory. 
http://acomfortableplace.blogspot.com/2007/09/university-degree-in-plumbing.html

And my daughter worked for a couple of years at the National Maritime 
Museum in Cornwall, which features a lot of boats and occasionally does 
boat building as part of their programme, thus very clearly linking the 
craft to the liberal curriculum.

Rob

On 08/03/2019 10:55, PERRET-CLERMONT Anne-Nelly wrote:
> Tom,
> This idea of craftwork has always been central in vocational training 
>  in Switzerland. But it is now under pressure because of the important 
> changes induced by digitalisation of work practices. We have examined 
> some of these questions here: Perret, J.-F. & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. 
> (2011). /Apprentice in a changing trade./ Charlotte, N.C. USA: 
> Information Age Publishing.
> A very interesting field open for further studies!
> Keep us informed,
> Anne-Nelly
>
> Prof. em. Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
> Institut de psychologie et éducation Faculté des lettres et sciences 
> humaines
> Université de Neuchâtel
> Espace L. Agassiz 1,  CH- 2000 Neuchâtel (Suisse)
> http://www.unine.ch/ipe/publications/anne_nelly_perret_clermont 
> <http://www2.unine.ch/ipe/publications/anne_nelly_perret_clermont>
>
>
>
> De : <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of "Glassman, 
> Michael" <glassman.13@osu.edu <mailto:glassman.13@osu.edu>>
> Répondre à : "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" 
> <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
> Date : vendredi, 8 mars 2019 à 10:11
> À : "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
> Objet : [Xmca-l] Re: Craftwork as Liberal Education - interested contacts
>
> Tom,
>
> You might find a very receptive audience with the John Dewey Society 
> and related thinkers.  The idea of craftwork being of high value is a 
> central tenet in Democracy and Education, something we have lost with 
> STEM education (even though STEM education was originally based on 
> Dewey type principles – go figure – or better don’t try). Vocational 
> education and vocational schools in the United States were originally 
> based on an (I would argue misinterpretation) of Dewey in that they 
> really didn’t buy in completely to the idea of the basic educational 
> worth of practical skills.  I am sure there are Dewey schools in the 
> NYC area so that might be a place to start. But I think there is a 
> ready and waiting audience for this type of work.
>
> Michael
>
> *From:*xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> 
> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> *On Behalf Of *Tom Martin
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 07, 2019 8:40 PM
> *To:* xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Craftwork as Liberal Education - interested contacts
>
> 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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