Abstract

Clay Pedagogy explores the transferability of ceramic making methods into the context of addiction recovery via a process of pedagogical design. The artist, and author, is a materialist, who utilises the generative and cyclical nature of clay as a system of knowledge production. This practice, or Praxis, navigates nebulous and transdisciplinary collections of data and utilises a set of generative epistemic meaning making methods. The gallery is a space in which pressing social issues can be addressed through utilisation of the generative system of art creation and allows this praxis to thrive.

The design-based approach to pedagogical praxis at play here is reflexive, iterative, and cyclical, allowing multiple voices to construct fitting pedagogical happenings - leaving behind formal and hierarchical notions of learning. Each iterative ‘cycle’, or stage, in the research was informed by the last - mimicking the transformative/cyclical nature of clay as a working medium.

Care is at the heart of this research. Thoughts, feelings, and opinions of all involved in research were given ‘space’, and opportunities for deep epistemic and metacognition for those with lived experience of addiction took place within the safety of a formal addiction recovery programme.

The concluding conceptual, or abstract, idea drawn from this research is of clay as mechanism of driving processes of individual perception and epistemic meaning making within the context of gallery-based pedagogical praxis. The specific way in which creative pedagogical methods, which are rooted in material epistemologies - to facilitate personal growth, have been explicated within the findings.

The new knowledge - the abstract concept, The Cycle of Growth, was created with potential that other pedagogical practitioners may use this as a foundational platform of knowledge within the field, and a springboard for the development of their own material-rooted and hierarchy free praxis.

The systematic construction of the clay-centred pedagogical framework, utilising its life cycle as a creative and democratic framework for knowledge production, was used to design a space for free-flowing and hierarchy-free knowledge-production, seeded from the material's ontological assets.

Concluding conceptual framework:

The Cycle of Growth: A conceptual framework that aims to guide the construction of pedagogical symbiotic environments, which expose clay's generative meaning-making assets for those on a transformational health journey.