ARPED · Artisan pedagogies: investigating craft experts as educators

Artisan pedagogies: investigating craft experts as educators

This project set out to investigate how expert craftspeople hone their educational skills: how they guide, support, and provide feedback to those learning their craft. It is often assumed, in public discourse and academic research alike, that this process is straightforward: once a craftsperson has acquired a skill, they can simply turn to others and help them learn. The project questioned this apparently simple transition from craft expertise to craft education, revealing its complexity and thereby valorising the often invisible and undervalued work of the craft expert as educator - especially in contexts where education is not formalised. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with dry-stone wallers in Switzerland, and using methods that enable the fine-grained analysis of social interactions in contexts of work and learning, the project examined the complex, in-the-moment, and activity-grounded ways in which exchanges around craft learning actually take place. While policy initiatives increasingly promote crafts as resources for sustainable development, they often rely on overly simplified assumptions about how intangible heritage is transmitted. What is needed is more careful attention to the diverse forms of learning and teaching that emerge from within diverse practices, in order to better recognise the everyday pedagogical labour of craft experts. The project responded to this challenge by developing the concept of “artisan pedagogies”, understood as the specific pedagogical forms that develop outside formalised educational contexts and in response to the situated demands of craft practice. Through close observation of how learning happens in situ, the project made visible the pedagogical labour linked to craft expertise: how experienced practitioners bring learners to see and feel materials and tools; how they render learning accessible through words and gestures; and how they convey work ethics as an integral part of the learning process.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз