CRAFT considers a cohesive and inter-disciplinary solution to the ever-widening issue of loss of intangible cultural heritage and knowledge. It also addresses the global, imperative concern in arts education of invaluable crafts and skills being lost due to lack of innovation and lack of a solid, established repository of knowledge. The project offers a tangible way forward, and enlists key players in the European ceramic field, to offer a specialised and complementary approach to bring together these fragmented practices, consolidating them into a range of forward-thinking pedagogical approaches. Ceramic practice and craft could then be shared and taught in a more democratic and reliable manner, to reach wider audiences and learners. CRAFT - Activating Pedagogy for Ceramic Education Futures is a 3-year project aimed to support ceramic knowledge retention and transfer by: - Mapping ceramic places, skills, process, technologies, intangible knowledge and training practices for making ceramics (O1); - Developing pedagogical approaches and innovative teaching methods to teach ceramics to sustain the future of the subject (O2); - Developing skills resources, offering repertoires of knowledge and practice for making ceramics (O3); Moreover, three short-term staff training events (M13, M18 and M25) will be delivered to co-design and test the intellectual outputs, involving all partners to carry out observations, gain feedback, evaluate the activities and integrate into these in the outputs and shape long-term impact. The project delivery methodology relies upon critical and creative thinking, participatory methods, problem and challenge-based learning approaches, design for transformational practices and collaborative methods. The project results will be research and industry informed, and implemented into each partner HEI’s teaching practice and pedagogies. Project results will be widely disseminated as open educational resources and their impact shall be maximised through dissemination and communication activities carried out by the partners, including the organisation of two multiplier events for industry and academic stakeholders. The project is delivered by a partnership of five leading European design HEIs pioneering heritage and future ceramic training. CRAFT will be undertaken by a multidisciplinary team committed to unleashing meaningful and innovative approaches to the planned activities. Partners in this project have connected through a recognised imperative and a shared commitment to providing ceramic education and the potential to scale the initiatives that they are each developing at BA and MA levels. CRAFFT reach out and impact is further extended through a network of five associate partners representing academic, societal and industry stakeholders. This partnership will be forming together the basis for a European network focused on the preservation and modernization of the ceramics craft, its effective dissemination through knowledge exchange, and the optimization and maximization of the ceramics curricula by developing new pedagogies. This partnership will enable the designer makers of the future through a new EU training network for ceramic learning, making and research at the university level.
CRAFT aimed to support ceramic knowledge retention and transfer by: • Mapping ceramic places, skills, processes, technologies, intangible knowledge, and training practices for making ceramics (IO1); • Developing pedagogical approaches and innovative teaching methods to teach ceramics to sustain the future of the subject (IO2); • Developing skills resources, offering repertoires of knowledge and practice for making ceramics (IO3); • Developing new training materials and innovative pedagogies to support the training of teachers and practitioners through the delivery of 3 short-term joint staff training workshops for ceramic teachers/trainers/researchers and practitioners (C1-C3). Project results are going to be disseminated widely as open educational resources, including through the delivery of a final multiplier event (E1) ‘CRAFT: Decoding Ceramics’ held by UAL in London at Central Saint Martins on 15th June 2023 that gathered 50+ attendees across ceramics education from UK, Europe, and China.
Expert Ceramic knowledge is fragmented across Europe, either concentrated in universities, research centres, museums or in areas of specialist industry knowledge such as Delft, Faenza, Stoke-on-Trent, or Selb. Ceramic Education has witnessed a progressive decline within Higher Education due to factors such as cost of provision and declining applications. Moreover, this knowledge is often held by individuals within these institutions and is subject to many external pressures. Higher Education institutions have become the custodians for traditions of skilled artisanship, as the ceramic industry faces a potential decline in skill in the face of economic and technological developments. Cultural and economic pressures to move towards hybrid practices, combining tacit knowledge of centuries of material expertise with innovations such as additive manufacturing, are pervasive. However, the reality is that the industrial imperative does not align with the sustained heritage of the subject and its pedagogic needs. The educational institution has become the home of the more traditional craft practices and a laboratory for the experimental combination of these traditional technologies with tools and methods of Industry 4.0. However, this ecosystem is fragile. Ceramics departments across Europe are run by a small, dedicated group of experts, keeping hundreds of years of tradition alive and relying on applicants to find the programmes attractive whilst heritage manufacturing struggles to sustain traditional craftsmanship and relies on cultural tourism as the main income source. This fragility makes the subject particularly vulnerable to outside forces such as recession, the cost of raw materials or more contemporary situations such as COVID-19, which can impact sales or tourism resulting in a lack of strategy and control and sometimes arbitrary but long-reaching decisions such as discarding intensive craft skills because of costs of production. This scenario is common and can mean the immediate end of a historical process. This problem is mirrored in education where a few cycles of under-recruitment can result in the closure of a department. Consequently, it is crucial to map this knowledge across Europe, assess the salience of practice to place, build a visual and oral record of specialist processes and techniques, develop methods to effectively share this knowledge across the teaching and expert network and award competency and qualification to ensure heritage crafts skill is relevant to future practice. This renewed and broad interest in the material should be encouraged, however, there is a need to make access to specialist forms of expert knowledge open and fit for purpose, to record and expose embodied and tacit knowledge, usually gained through experience and repetition, to non-traditional and non-formal learners. A drift towards this more fluid type of learner places the discipline at risk of losing the traditional subject specialist who would dive deep into the intricacies of the subject. This has been compounded by the ubiquitous access to ceramic processes available online on channels such as YouTube and Vimeo, where it is difficult to assess the quality and pedagogical intentions of these sources. Dedicated ceramic teaching platforms such as Ceramic Art Networks Clay Flicks offer higher quality instructable video from experts but there is little evidence of an attempt to decode the tacit knowledge embedded in the expert presentation to the new learner. It is time for a platform or repository which allows an extensive mapping of subject knowledge, a coherent pedagogical approach and a body of teaching tools, projects and instructables that provides a rounded educational possibility. CRAFT has innovatively addressed this problem through its approach to making expertise and knowledge open source, easy to access useful and reconfigurable to need. CRAFT aimed to support ceramic knowledge retention and transfer by mapping ceramic intangible knowledge (IO1), developing pedagogical approaches and methods based on innovative teaching cards embedding multimedia resources and instructubles (IO2), building an open repertoire of knowledge accessible through an online platform (IO3), and the delivery of three short-term joint staff training workshops for ceramic educators (C1-C3) to train the trainers on innovative methods. CRAFT draws together the Mapping of knowledge (IO1) and innovative pedagogy teaching cards (IO2) into a knowledge and skills repository ‘Decoding Ceramics’, an online platform (IO3) that packages the information together in an open-access online repository, the first of its kind in the crafts.