Paper short abstract:

For a recently taught course I put making (concretely: embroidery) at the centre of pedagogy. Students' and my experience show that thus a kind of low-threshold space was created for students to learn to think, reflect and critique, thus empowering them to develop their own voice.

Paper long abstract:

For the course I recently taught entitled DIY in Times of Crisis and Beyond, I went the pedagogical extra mile, putting making at the heart of it all. Creating a space of epistemic uncertainty we developed our thinking from tool-guided making. Temporarily marginalizing the intellectual realm, we allowed it to gain momentum peripherally while stitching away on our embroidery hoops.

I will give insights into how crafting while thinking and vice versa within an academic teaching context serves as a low-threshold approach for students to learn to think, reflect and critique and thus empowers them to develop their own voice. Putting the body and “felt sovereignty” (Cvetkovich 2010) centre stage in a space that has traditionally suppressed the body in favour of reason by bringing tools, materials and crafts into the classroom, also offers haptic certainty in biographically and societally disorderly times.

Ultimately, I will argue that this approach not only fosters creativity and imagination but also offers strategies to detox university (Prior 2022), to mitigate social acceleration and instrumentalisation of education and to cultivate self-care. Bringing the body into the knowledge factory, we take one step further from making knowledge to crafting wisdom.