A Craft Pedagogy in Practice: Embodied Learning Through Wood, Tools and Traditions

Abstract

This paper examines how historic wooden-built environments and open-air museums can function as pedagogical settings for craft education. Drawing on teaching experiences from higher education in Norway, it analyses how students develop knowledge through guided engagement with tools, materials, and traditional practices in situated learning environments. Two teaching cases, spoon carving in a museum workshop and the investigation of a historic log-built structure, are presented as pedagogical designs. The analysis focuses on how learning is structured and develops through relational and responsive engagement with materials, tools, and professional guidance, rather than solely on learning outcomes. The cases demonstrate how teaching can be organised to support the development of embodied and practice-based knowledge. The paper develops a theoretical framework grounded in 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition) and Tim Ingold’s concepts of meshwork and wayfaring. These perspectives are applied as analytical tools to examine how learning emerges through action, feedback, and iterative engagement within specific learning environments. Historic workshops, tools, and buildings are approached as pedagogical resources that shape the conditions for learning. While such environments carry historical and material depth, the focus here is on how they structure students’ engagement and influence learning processes in practice. The paper argues that craft pedagogy involves the design of learning situations where material engagement, reflection, and professional guidance are integrated. It proposes an understanding of learning as a situated and relational practice, in which knowledge develops through participation in practice rather than through transmission alone.