Exploring the Relationship Between Teaching and Learning Through Practice
This research focuses on how students in key craft disciplines learn physical technical skills and how these are taught through demonstration
Project Leaders & members: Alma Boyes, Cynthia Cousens & Helen Stuart
Abstract
Reading a demonstration, identifying what is critical to enable emulation and applying such information, is recognised as a complex process for learners. The research outlines the intricate range of communication methods employed in delivery, focusing on the importance of experiential learning and non-verbal language, gesture and its link to the haptic process of making, gathering information by touch, the inter-relationship between hand-making and the individual body’s physique, and how temporality and rhythm in making impacts learning.
The importance of live performance in demonstration is recognised in discussion of its flexibility to meet diverse learner needs, to be continually evolved, updated and improved, and how the learner is engaged through theatricality, danger, risk and unpredictability. It reflects how the physicality and materiality of craft practice is sustained in a dynamic pedagogic framework by learning and teaching through demonstration.
