Making Pedagogy: The Critical Praxis of Feminist Craft Theory
Brittany M. Brewer and Jeanetta Mohlke-Hill
Michigan State University
Comaker Statement
Although our names are listed in alphabetical order, as scholars of FCT, we identify wholeheartedly as comakers. We resist the hierarchy of authorship and the idea that scholarship is made in isolation. Instead, we embrace and honor the impressions made on each other throughout the crafting of this piece, and know that not one impression carries more weight than another.
Video Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Jeanetta:
This project grew out of a friendship. Brittany and I met during the first-year of the pandemic when people were isolated in their homes. When bodies were mitigated by screens and space and sometimes timezones. It was a strange juxtaposition: our course, itself, was embodied, or, that was the intention.
Brittany:
Jeanetta and I met in a class called DIY, Craft, and Material Rhetorics. We are both housed in different departments: Jeanetta is a PhD student in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and I am a PhD student in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. We cultivated a connection near the end of this course shortly after I sent Jeanetta a private message on Zoom.
Jeanetta:
Over the next several months, we continued to spend time together, both in person and on Zoom, and discovered our shared passions for art, craft, and pedagogy. While meeting Brittany for a writing center session over Zoom, Brittany asked if I was interested in applying to a conference and framing a paper around crafting and pedagogy. And I said, “yes, of course” and we spent that session fleshing out our ideas. Shortly after, we were compelled to make a zine, instead of a traditional conference paper.
Brittany:
Why zines? As Allison Piepmeier notes, zinemaking is an embodied experience that allows us the opportunity to make sense of our many ideas through the physical practice of making, unmaking, and remaking. She describes, [quote] “The materiality of zines creates community that is embodied because it activates bodily experiences such as pleasure, affection, allegiance, and vulnerability” [end quote] (p. 79). This kind of making experience felt necessary for us to undertake in our storytelling process of making pedagogy. We believe that making is a process—that it is embodied, material, affective, and vulnerable—and that it is a valuable, if not necessary, lens to consider writing and our work as educators.
Jeanetta:
This project began with a set of magazines, paper, glue, and scissors. We didn’t start with a bibliography. All we had was a 300-word abstract and the intention to articulate what making pedagogy is through the act of making pedagogy together.
Brittany:
We brainstormed, outlined, and took notes on scraps of paper as we cut out words, images, and designs.
Jeanetta:
Our process was nonlinear; sitting together with our cutouts inspired themes and conceptual elements of making pedagogy.
Brittany:
It inspired conversations and experimentations in the way we arranged and rearranged our thoughts, ideas, and stories on the page.
Jeanetta:
We held our pedagogy in our hands. A material and embodied practice. In this layered and slow process, we created a space to encounter making pedagogy through sharing our own experiences. We pulled on the threads of each other’s stories to piece together a collaborate making: “Making Pedagogy: The Critical Praxis of Feminist Craft Theory.”
POSITIONALITY
Brittany:
We both come to making from different experiences and perspectives. Ever since I was in elementary school, I was involved in the arts. I danced, I sang, I played instruments, and I acted. As I was growing up, my family and I moved around a lot. Before I was twelve years old, I had lived in five different states: SC, IN, CA, GA, and NC. Moving so much when I was young was especially challenging. I remember being particularly disappointed after we had lived in NC for almost four years and learned that we were moving to a small town in Indiana—I had made some friends I really loved in NC. My involvement in the arts—being able to join band, to join choir, to participate in plays, to work on the newspaper—is what helped me start to feel grounded and find community. Truly, my favorite aspect of each of these activities was that they involved groups of people coming together to work on creating something. Throughout my schooling journey as a young person, the arts informed my most impactful educational experiences and to this day, play a pivotal role in my life, from my teaching and research to my personal growth and health.
Jeanetta:
My love for craft began at an early age. I grew up learning to craft from my mom and, as a kid, I would sit and watch my mom sew for hours. Eventually, I learned to sew and crochet. My mom and I would regularly make together while watching British television– I would craft scarves while my mother would make afghans. This interest in craft carried over into my adult life, especially while living and traveling abroad. After college, I moved to Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer with little fluency in Spanish and no fluency in the indigenous language, so the way I connected with community members early on was through making things with them— we would exchange crafts, gifts, and food— the crafts themselves became a way to communicate across different languages and cultures. A few years later, while living in Europe, I traveled to Paris during the holidays where I shared a room at a hostel with a woman who was very ill and couldn’t get out of bed. Even though I didn’t speak French and she didn’t speak English, I went to get her medicine from the pharmacy. The next day she thanked me by making snowmen ornaments out of little coffee creamer cups. Crafts have been my way of connecting with people, whether it is my family, my friends, community members, or even strangers. They have been a means for facilitating relationships and seeing the humanity in one another.
WRITING VS. CRAFT
Brittany:
We began the first two pages of our zine by situating ourselves and our interests in craft and composing. On the left-hand side, we gathered images and words that reflected our experiences with academic writing and ideas of professionalism. Then, on the right-hand side, we curated and arranged materials to represent our experiences of the way craft is devalued in academia. We wanted to explicitly resist that perception, as well as convey the tension we feel and witness as teachers, writers, and makers. In the middle, we wanted to disrupt the binary between art and craft, writing and making, rational and emotional, and male and female creations by obscuring the line between the two pages. These ideas were informed by our different interests as scholars, teachers, and people who love to create— and in this process, we found the ways our disciplines overlapped and can be in conversation and community with each other.
Jeanetta:
Originally, I approached this project through the lens of material rhetorics and multimodal composing. In “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” Kathleen Blake Yancey (2004) argues that students already do so much writing and composing outside of the classroom without the instruction of writing professors and she asks, [quote] “Don't you wish that the energy and motivation that students bring to some of these other genres they would bring to our assignments?” [end quote] (p. 298). Much of the scholarship about multimodal composing asks instructors to consider incorporating texts and assignments that use multiple modes of communication, such as images, sounds, and videos, instead of just traditional alphanumeric essays. However, the scholarship on multimodality primarily focuses on digital writing, particularly claiming the benefits of this type of composing for the professionalization of students, and focuses less on the material things that we make like art and craft. For our vision of this project, we drew inspiration from the work of Kristin Prins (2012) and Jody Shipka (2011), whose work emphasizes the value of creating material objects in the teaching of writing— in the ways that craft encourages students to take risks, experiment, compose without fear of failure, create original work, and see different possibilities for the way we compose and make meaning. Moreover, Kristin Prins in particular argues that there is a type of community building that occurs when we craft together that is hard to do when we are writing and reading traditional essays.
Brittany:
I come to this work from an arts-based research lens. Arts-based research is process-based; it calls upon researchers to problem solve through participation and exploration (Leavy, 2017), much like our zinemaking process. It is a practice that values multiple ways of knowing, from the aesthetic and sensory to the kinesthetic and imaginary (Leavy, 2015), and does not believe that research should move us to a more correct understanding or argument about the world as we know it (Barone & Eisner, 2012). Arts-based researcher Patricia Leavy (2010) emphasizes, [quote] “Arts-based practices are able to get at multiple meanings, opening up multiplicity in meaning making and decentralizing academic researchers as ‘the experts’” [end quote] (p. 10). My experiences in theatre-making and other arts making practices reinforce these understandings. Engaging in an art-making practice encourages us to engage in healthy risk-taking and fosters a deeper understanding of our own identities as individuals and as a part of our greater communities (Halvorsen, 2021). It offers pleasure and joy in the aesthetic process of making.
Jeanetta: The intersections of multimodality and arts-based research are essential to our theoretical and pedagogical frameworks— they inform the ways we approached working on the zine together and the values we share in our scholarship and teaching practices. These first two pages are foundational for ‘naming’ our theories and pedagogies.
FEMINIST CRAFT THEORY
Brittany:
Even though we took a class together that focused on feminism, craft, and activism, we didn’t find anything that ‘named’ what all these different authors and creators were doing. As we contemplated the next pages for our zine, we decided we wanted to ‘name’ these ideas and experiences we were witnessing in their work and our work as makers, scholars, and teachers. ‘Feminist craft theory’ provides a framework for making sense of all the possibilities of craft, a lens for thinking about the ways craft is a reflection of our identities, cultures, and backgrounds. While we drew upon the work of scholars who have studied craft while making our zine, we also wanted to emphasize that, because craft embodies our histories, cultures, and values, the craft itself is theory. The process of crafting takes ‘ordinary’ materials and allows us to ‘transform’ and ‘reimagine’ them into something new— an inherently feminist practice.
Jeanetta:
Together, in our DIY, Craft, and Material Rhetorics course, we read texts that explored the intersections of craft, feminism, and activism. We began the course reading craftivism manifestos that reclaim the slow process of creating in a way that is intentional and with love (Greer, et al., n.d.). We engaged in discussions about the art and craft divide in discourse, which associates art as a high-brow masculine form of expression, whereas craft is devalued because it is often made out of necessity by those with marginalized identities, like the working class, people of color, and women. We also read about the history of quilting in the U.S. in which upper-class white women’s quilts have garnered a lot of attention in the last few decades in scholarship and museums; however, the quilts made by working-class white women and women of color received far less attention, if any at all (Arellano, 2017). Craft is political. It’s relational. It’s a social justice practice.
We also want to situate ‘feminist craft theory’ as a relational practice that connects us to each other, our communities, our identities, and our histories. For example, during my undergraduate studies, I was the co-president of the campus feminist organization. In the beginning, our organization was primarily making crafts like protest signs for ‘Take Back the Night’ and women’s history month displays on campus. Later, we decided that we should do more social events outside of advocacy so we formed a biweekly ‘Stitch n’ Bitch’ where we hung out and crafted various things together. These meetings became a type of consciousness-raising where we unexpectedly discovered shared experiences that we thought we were going through alone but were actually part of larger systemic issues in our social and political system. Crafting provided us a shared space to connect with one another and support each other as people with marginalized identities. It also ended up informing our social justice work as an organization, as well as made me a more critical human as I’ve approached different professional and educational experiences after graduation.
Brittany:
‘Feminist craft theory’ invites you to approach making from a personal place, an embodied place, a feeling place—I did so in 2016 when I decided to collaborate with a number of folks to self-produce a play, Trigger Warning by Iris Dauterman, for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Trigger Warning is a five women play, where “in a twisted take on an old-fashioned sewing circle, [they] come together with a plan to stop rape and sexual violence in their college town. They each have something to hide, and together, they each find something to heal”.
This craft was a labor of love: myself and a friend curated an artistic team, hired contracted artists, created a budget, raised funds, secured rehearsal and production spaces, created marketing and promotional materials, contacted media outlets, secured WOAR, WOAR—or the Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence, as a community partner, devised talkbacks—the list goes on and on. But we came to this show because of an experience I had in 2013. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, I attended a new works festival that featured productions of plays written by MFA students in playwriting. And when I saw Trigger Warning, I cried, silently and cathartically in the audience—not at the end (though also, probably at the end) but at the moments where my experiences felt acknowledged and validated in Iris’ writing, the actors’ performances, and the artistic collaboration as a whole. That feeling sat in my artist heart and gut over the years that followed. While working in Philly, my friend and I wanted to create more room for female and queer stories. I remembered this experience, shared my story with my friend, reached out to Iris and it was a new beginning.
Jeanetta:
These stories and these experiences are aesthetically represented on these pages. In our conceptualization of ‘feminist craft theory’ our identities, bodies, and stories matter. The things we create, the stories our crafts provoke, and the histories our crafts convey necessitate a larger cultural and social context. Our ‘making pedagogy’ is grounded in this theoretical framework because ‘feminist craft theory’ is praxis.
MAKING PEDAGOGY
Jeanetta:
Through these pages, we aspired to communicate that ‘making pedagogy’ is process-oriented and exploratory
Brittany:
Is a relational and social act
Jeanetta:
Is embodied pedagogy-- not just the “texts” themselves, but also the way we engage with “texts”
Brittany:
Brings humanity into our composing practices
Jeanetta:
Is dialogic in nature and invites cocreation
Brittany:
Embraces subjectivity– it purports that there is no one ‘good’ way to ‘make’ or ‘write’
Jeanetta:
Centers the makers’ voices and identities
Brittany:
My most impactful education experience in high school took place outside of the classroom and was steeped in theatre, writing, and making. During my senior year, I was the high school winner of the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s Young Playwrights in Process Competition. Before a winner was selected, several semifinalists were invited to come to a full day workshop at the Indiana Repertory Theatre (IRT). Among other things, this day included a table reading of our plays with professional actors, directors, and dramaturgs, followed by a feedback session that focused on resonant moments, questions posed by the playwright, and questions from the actors. This reading and workshop took place around a table—I did have a seat—and for the first time in my education journey, the process itself was embraced, it was celebrated, and it was completely collaborative; every individual in the room had an impact on the revisions I chose to make or not make. The adults in the space shared the moments of my writing that activated joy for them, they shared their interpretations of and hopes for characters’ stories, they listened to my questions and participated in exploring and imagining the possibilities for my play…Eventually, it was the directors’ and actors’ own readings that would further the play through the staged reading process.
My experience as a theatre professional, from my own artistry to my administrative experience as the Associate Director of Education of an arts nonprofit, continues to influence my growth as a human, as a storyteller, and as an educator. Currently, it impacts how I shape and scaffold the classes I teach at Michigan State University, as well as how I approach collaboration, broadly speaking. Most recently, it brought me to my friendship with Jeanetta and our ongoing dreaming, discussions, and explorations around ‘making pedagogy’.
Jeanetta:
I first began employing ‘making pedagogy’ in my first-year writing classes. At the beginning of the semester, I ask students to make *something* other than a traditional academic essay for their first project— they can draw, cook or bake, do a DIY project, knit a scarf, etc. Students are often thrown off by this because this isn’t what they expect for their first assignment in a writing course. However, I begin with this assignment because it teaches students that the writing in this course is not about the end product, but rather writing allows us to engage in inquiry, process, and reflection. The assignment also emphasizes community— we have a day where I bring in materials for students to craft together in class and then, in the following class, we have a show-and-tell day where we critically reflect on their motivations, process, and rhetorical choices while they worked on their craft. This also gives students an opportunity to learn how to give feedback about work as a whole, rather than focus on minor sentence-level revisions or grammar.
I have found that beginning class this way allows students to reimagine what is possible for them to create in a writing class and what counts as academic writing. It helps reorient students to value process, choice, and slowing down in writing, instead of relying on the writing formulas and structures they were taught in high school. It helps to bring students' whole selves into their writing– it emphasizes their humanity and the humanity of their peers.
CONCLUSION & INVITATION TO PRAXIS
Brittany:
In these last pages of our zine, we invite you all to engage in ‘making pedagogy’ and consider the implications of ‘making pedagogy’ for our work as educators. By valuing our bodies and identities, ‘making pedagogy’ brings the humanity into education spaces. It is relational and communal. Through emphasizing dialogue and process, ‘making pedagogy’ rejects the hierarchy between teachers and students and transforms us into critical comakers.
Jeanetta:
In life, we make things every single day. Making pedagogy allows us to reframe our daily makings as meaningful literacy artifacts through feminist craft theory. Through the lens of feminist craft theory, these everyday artifacts are imbued with meaning, values, and stories, which are critically engaged and celebrated— and, ultimately, crafted into an intentional pedagogy.
Brittany:
A place to start this work is finding the materiality in story— opening up the texts that are brought into educational spaces and the texts that are created. Then, value, explore, and unpack the creation process, including the experiences students have in their own bodies. What are their intentions as makers? How have their intentions been made visible in the craft itself? How might we offer our noticings as critical comakers? Making pedagogy is about the embodied process of making, unmaking, and remaking— our experiences, our worlds, our relationships, and ourselves.
About the Authors
Jeanetta Mohlke-Hill (she/her/hers) is a PhD Candidate at Michigan State University in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures. She earned her BA in Women’s and Gender Studies and MA in Spanish. Influenced by her foundation in feminist theory and praxis, her work focuses on multimodal composing as an embodied practice that facilitates communication across cultures, languages, and experiences. In her work, she places particular emphasis on the embodied and sensory acts of storying and world-making, confronting exclusionary writing practices and reimagining restorative pedagogy. Her work has been published in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and she has a forthcoming publication in Routledge Resources Online. Additionally, she is actively involved in teaching and supporting writing instruction. She serves as a first-year writing instructor and also works as a writing center coordinator and consultant. She is also a former editorial assistant for constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space. Before beginning her path in rhetoric and writing, she was a college Spanish instructor, an advocate for the children of migrant farmworkers in Kentucky public schools, and a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay.
Brittany Brewer (she/her) is a queer & chronically ill poet, [theatre] artist, and educator who researches and writes plays and poems whose aesthetics sing of sticky, midwestern basements, of stumbling queerness, of female friendships and sexuality and bodies, and of the magical possibilities that exist in the in-between. She is an alumna of Indiana University, Brown University, and the Arden Professional Apprenticeship program. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education at Michigan State University where her research focuses on the intersections of poetry and playwriting, arts as research, embodiment, young adult narratives, queer theory, and arts-based feedback practices. Her scholarly writing appears or is forthcoming in English Journal, The Reading Teacher, The Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, and Routledge Resources Online among others. Before MSU, Brittany worked as the Associate Director of Education at Philadelphia Young Playwrights where, among other things, she facilitated over 300 classroom workshops and created/facilitated professional development workshops for classroom teachers, teaching artists, and classroom actors. As a playwright, Brittany’s work has been produced by Revolution Shakespeare, Going Viral Festival, Elephant Room Productions, and Allens Lane Art Center. Her poetry has appeared in Rougarou, Months to Years, and Hole in the Head Review, among others. Most recently, she was awarded a Workshop Fellowship to attend the Key West Literary Seminar Writers’ Workshop in early 2024. Her poetry chapbook, Tendering the Body, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in early 2025.
Reading List
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