We do not need to choose between critique and creativity, elite knowledge and public trust. But we do need to reimagine how these values meet in the classroom.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

In my courses, students not only handle historical texts and objects — they create them. They turn wooden soup bowls, then lacquer them; they build ceramic tea bowls, then use them to brew tea. They compose seasonal poems and construct scale gardens.
#CraftingThought #ThinkingThroughMaking

As the historian Dorothy Hartley documented in her indispensable Made in England, knowledge of craft, repair, and fabrication was not the opposite of intellectual life — it was part of it.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

Interesting call for papers from the fabulous Art of Fiction project, on stories inspired by and woven through (literal and metaphorical) fabric: artfiction.exeter.ac.uk/events/call-... Closing date 22nd Jan.
#StitchingStories #ArtOfFiction #TextilesResearch #ThinkingThroughMaking #Stitching #CFP

Bringing making back into universities, including in the humanities, is an invitation to rethink what literacy means in an era of digital automation.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

Of course, these pedagogies come with challenges. They can be difficult to scale, assess, and fund. But change is already underway.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

Universities once reflected this ethos. Land-grant institutions in the US were founded to connect the life of the mind with the work of the hands. British polytechnics offered rigorous technical and cultural education side by side.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

I don’t design buildings — I make them, because making is about listening, not control.
#CreativePractice
#AnnVanner
#MakeShareTeach
#StudioNotes
#ThinkingThroughMaking
#SlowWork
#CreativeCommunity
#Collaboration
#CreativeExchange
#CommunityOfPractice

This is not a new proposal. For much of the 20th century, to be an educated person did not mean being purely cerebral.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

This is not about turning literature departments into fabrication labs but considering an interdisciplinary way of teaching.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

The act of making becomes a heuristic: a way of asking sharper questions, developing closer attention and forging connections between theory and experience.
#ThinkingThroughMaking

The value of such work reaffirms that universities are not only places of abstraction and argument, but sites where knowledge meets skill.
#ThinkingThroughMaking