Craft spaces as a medium of learning for children

When we talk about ‘learning,’ many tend to assume that it takes place mostly in educational institutions, such as schools and colleges. It is thought to comprise things taught specially in schools, such as reading and writing, arithmetic, the sciences, history, geography, etc.

However, learning in its broadest sense can be anything from learning to walk and talk, brushing your teeth, cycling, climbing the trees, and cooking. We also tend to believe that learning in schools is independent of students’ lives and experiences outside the school.

This article is based on the experience of Khamir, an NGO working in Gujarat’s Kachchh district. The organization experiments on how the school curriculum can be more contextualized to where children live, what they observe, and the experiences they have.

Kachchh, crafts and children

Kachchh is well-known for its diverse handicrafts, practised for hundreds of years collectively by craft communities. These include textile and non-textile crafts, such as weaving, spinning, embroidery, felting, block printing, pottery, lacquer work, copper bell, leather work and many others.

For children coming from villages where crafts are practised, it is an everyday experience to see these crafts around them. The question is then how they can be connected to what they already learn in schools. This must involve an acknowledgement that the crafts themselves are a learning experience on their own.

The knowledge of the crafts, the materials used, and the craft processes followed, are passed on from one generation to another. Children belonging to craft families see craft practices since their childhood. They play with craft materials, tools and equipment, and hear stories and songs related to their work.

A child from a potter’s family, for instance, will play with soil and clay and try to make various things on his own. Whereas a weaver’s child plays with fibres, yarn, the loom, and other things found in the craft workspace.

While sharing about his childhood memories with weaving, Khimji bhai, a local weaver says, “After I was born and opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the handloom.” He explains that when his father went to sleep in the afternoon, he and his brothers used to sit on the loom and tried working on it. They did so, even though it was difficult for them to reach the loom’s pedals. This reveals the close connection a child from an artisan family develops with the craft.

The learning crafts offer

Crafts spaces offer a wide scope for education. Understanding craft materials and equipment, and playing with them, are certainly a primary form of learning. These involve a child’s psychomotor and cognitive capabilities. Through this, children develop a sensorial understanding of the properties of different materials, and how these respond to varied processes. They get an opportunity to see the transformation of materials sourced from nature into different products and how these are used by people in their daily lives.

Production is one of the fundamental activities of humans. Observing it closely is a unique learning experience. This cannot be simulated in any educational setting at such an intricate level. The learning is of course about materials and craft processes. However, this also involves developing an understanding of the local ecological processes these are connected to, and the socio-economic and cultural aspects of crafts.

The child sees how different people in the family are involved in the craft. They also experience it as a shared, collective activity. Men and women traditionally played different roles dependent on each other. In pottery, for instance, the women were involved in preparation of clay and painting on clay articles. These were made by the men, who work on the pottery wheels. Similarly, the women in weaving worked on pre-processes such as sizing and setting warps. The men worked on the looms.

Thus, family members performed different roles and responsibilities to collectively produce something. The rituals in craft communities, such as those related to birth, death or marriage often depend on each other. A spinner and a weaver not only exchanged their products, but took collective part in different ceremonies as well.

These cultural ties existing since centuries convey the values of unity and cooperative living among communities. The child experiences this by being a part of it. Traditional songs, poems and music sung by craft community members, and the stories shared by the elders, convey the philosophy of life. These predominantly use simple examples from crafts. Saint Kabir, one of India’s popular poets, was a weaver. His songs are part of craft communities’ daily lives.

Finally, the market and the sale of craft products is an integral part of any craft, especially in the modern times. This is another experience that a child observes, where elders are involved in taking orders, transportation, managing finances, dealing with customers and guiding laborers, if any. The crafts, thus, touch upon diverse aspects of human life and nature, all of which are closely accessible for the child living in such a community.

Crafts and learning in the school

A close look at the crafts reveal that the experiences provided by them are not independent of the learning we expect from schools and the curricula these follow. These experiences touch every subject of the school curriculum, whether science, mathematics, history, geography or the languages.

The craft of pottery, for instance, deals with various types of soils used to make different products. A child’s experiences with these provide opportunities to connect with the properties of soil, their formation, and geological landscapes.

Experiences in the crafts of spinning and weaving, in using fibres like wool or cotton, give an opportunity to talk about the sources of fibres. These can also be used to discuss their properties. The way these have changed historically due to climatic, socio-economic and political factors also provide rich strands of resources for learning.

The staple length of cotton is a good example of this. It was one of the important considerations for the spinning mills emerging during the industrial revolution. This changed the history of cotton production. It also impacted livelihoods. This process shaped the political history of our nation as well. A social science curriculum deals with all these aspects.

The processes undertaken with materials in each craft has a scientific basis. These provide the knowledge of science. They also give opportunities for developing a scientific temperament of looking at things. This is something which the formal curriculum in the schools is expected to address and which every craft artisan possesses.

Khamir’s work in education

Khamir is originally a craft organization, working since 2005 with the craft artisans of Kachchh. Looking at the educational potential of craft, it has begun the process of integrating crafts as a medium of education in the formal schools of Kachchh through its ‘Sugri Shala’ program.

It’s a process of understanding crafts from an educational lens and designing a curriculum for the same. Craft artisans are an integral part of the program. They help in taking crafts to the school. Students get an opportunity to engage with different crafts. They understand these through their diverse aspects and explore the ways in which these relate with their academic subjects in the school.

For example, while preparing clay during pottery, grade 7 students learnt about the different components of soil. This is also a part of their science textbook. Making such integrations needs an active participation of the teachers as well.

They need to identify the overlaps between the craft and the curriculum. They also must use the students’ craft experiences to enhance their regular teaching practices. All of these require the teachers to understand the crafts to be able to integrate these with the curriculum.

Khamir facilitates this collaboration of teachers and artisans to implement the program with children. This is a new and challenging experience for everyone. This is because schools follow a fixed structure. And Khamir’s program demands teachers to make a fundamental shift in the approach toward teaching and learning. The program closely resembles Gandhi’s education philosophy of Nai Talim. It also aligns with many provisions in National Education Policy (NEP), 2020.

Through its work, Khamir has been able to recognize crafts’ educational potential. The organization has also been able to build a network of craft artisans. It has been taking steps to involve them in education. All this prior work, the resources that Khamir has been able to build on crafts, along with the support of local schools and the enabling provisions of NEP 2020, have allowed for the development of a platform that is ripe for experimenting with an organic integration of crafts and school education.

Conclusion

Within every craft, one finds innumerable examples that become a potential starting point for connecting to diverse subject matters that are part of the school curriculum. All the crafts together, therefore, have the potential to become a dynamic learning resource.

These are available right in our schools’ backyards. How can we, as educators, utilize it for this purpose, remains a challenge. It calls for changing our perspective toward looking at local resources and wisdom within communities. We must acknowledge their value for children’s education.