Relational Encounters with Folk School Pedagogies: Craft as Creative Inquiry

How can the gentle wisdom of folk schools reshape the future of educational research? Amber Ward’s Relational Encounters with Folk School Pedagogies draws inspiration from the history of The Clearing Folk School and the enduring vision of Jens Jensen to redefine pedagogy, ethics, and inquiry. At the heart of this work is the concept of craft as creative inquiry—a relational process that bridges art, nature, and posthuman philosophy. Ward skillfully integrates folk school principles with innovative approaches to research, offering a vision of inquiry that is as tactile and grounded as it is transformative. By embracing materially meaningful practices like sewing, collaging, and journaling, this book reimagines research as an act of wonder and care, always in motion and always in relation. With profound insight and imaginative depth, Relational Encounters invites readers to weave new ways of thinking and being—crafting a more connected, ethical, and creative future for educational research. Maureen Flint, University of Georgia, USA Amber Ward provides new understandings of craft education and folk school pedagogies, beautifully weaving together personal and embodied narratives of craft practice through a posthumanist lens. The book traces lines of influence and relational interdependence that emerge through crafting with the land, communities, pedagogies, and technologies; illuminating entangled global histories of colonization and capitalism with threads of resistance generated from creative inquiry and collective learning with the earth. In addition to its impressive breadth, the book is a creative resource, providing inspiration and practical suggestions for building partnerships through crafting as a mode of care and connection. Cala Coats, Arizona State University, USA Relational Encounters with Folk School Pedagogies vividly explores ecological visions for educational research. This intimate, evocative text asks us to see afresh the possibilities of teaching and research embedded in deep webs of relationality with places, people, and more-than-human others. Acknowledging the pressures to conform that so often prevail and contribute to unequal and unjust societal, environmental, and educational conditions, Ward offers a welcome corrective. She tenaciously invites us to rethink our understandings of craft and crafting, care, materiality, technology, time, humanity, and creative inquiry for renewed existence and response-abilities in the world. This book is for any educational researcher invested in social and ecological change through ethical, embodied, emplaced inquiry. Joy Bertling, University of Tennessee, USA What does/might/could teaching and learning look like when we embrace the task of crafting more-than human flourishing in precarious times? At once an experiment in answering this question, a study of folk pedagogy, and a model for doing/thinking about creative inquiry, Ward's text is an enjoyable foray into intersections that matter. Carlson Coogler, University of Alabama, USA