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Crafts CouncilLearning

Make First


In Partnership With

Dive straight into making with Make First, our craft education pedagogy


In Partnership With

  • Craft education
  • Craft educator
  • Teaching resources
  • Young Craft Citizens

Make Your Future workshop at Central Saint Martins

Make First is the Crafts Council’s craft education pedagogy, or method of teaching. We’ve examined our work with learners, teachers and maker educators to pinpoint what’s special about craft learning and packed it all into the Make First approach.

In Make First, learners dive straight into making. They use materials to develop and test ideas—they tweak and tinker based on how the materials respond.

Make First embraces repetition, starting again, leaving a piece of work to come back to later, or working on several things at the same time.

Make First is driven by learners’ own interests. They make their own decisions about how to shape their work, giving them the opportunity to develop their voices as craftspeople.

Learners will fail and try again. They learn that failure is part of the craft process, build their resilience and become braver makers.

At its heart, Make First is about the joyfulness and pleasure that comes from making—the excitement of new possibilities and the satisfaction of creating something.

Make First is accessible and beneficial to our very young, learners for whom English is not their first language, and those with special educational needs. By embedding hands-on learning into classrooms, we provide a counterbalance to the increased use of screens by children and young people, as well as an opportunity for our younger learners to develop key fine-motor skills that will aid dexterity throughout their lives.

Key elements of the Make First approach are outlined below.


  • School students taking part in collaborative clay workshops at Central Saint Martins. Photo: © Caroline Heron

  • Keith Brymer Jones from The Great Pottery Throwdown giving a Make Your Future careers talk. Photo: © Caroline Heron

Risk-taking and innovation

Taking creative risks and learning through failure, experimentation and self-reflection are key craft learning skills. Students of craft are encouraged to build resilience and explore the potential of their ideas by dreaming big and failing often. Craft can be a safe space to allow for failure and encourage learners to grow from it. Developing ‘learn to learn’ proficiencies within craft will naturally feed into other areas of learning. Make First is therefore a pedagogy that can be used across the curriculum, as part of metacognition or ‘learn to learn’ classroom practices.

Reflective making practice

Craft allows for creative exploration and personal connection to materials, making and the environment. It can help foster the development of reflective making practices for learners, encouraging them to explore themselves as makers, and reflect on personal, local and global experiences in their work. Developing learners' voices as makers, artists and designers requires the learner to adopt a flexible practice that is influenced by their personal environment and histories. This can be achieved by encouraging and providing space for learners to identify themselves, their communities and their histories in their craft outputs, and using these as touchstones for inspiration and evaluations.


  • Students weaving using recycled materials. Photo: © Caroline Heron

  • Weaving using chair legs as a loom as part of Make Your Future workshops. Photo: © Caroline Heron

Social justice

Craft and social justice are closely entwined, and we seek to bring this relationship into the classroom. Making is central to the human experience; craft therefore provides an important vehicle for decolonising the curriculum and engaging learners with artists, makers and designers from a range of global communities. Learners should be given the opportunity to explore through research, interaction with craft objects and through their personal heritage and that of their community/communities. Historically, craft has often been a form of protest; it can also provide learners with an opportunity to discuss, question and find their own perspective on historical and contemporary social issues. Craft provides a means of self-expression for learners who struggle to communicate in other ways, helping to build confidence and self-esteem.

Environmental Sustainability

When we begin our work with an understanding of materials—those found in nature and their scarcity or renewability; manmade resources that can be reused and repurposed; and the new materials being invented to lessen our impact on the environment—an understanding of sustainability follows. Materials exploration offers the opportunity to make tangible the sometimes abstract issues that we must understand in order to tackle the global climate crisis. Embodied learning and haptic engagement connects us to the physical world, balancing an over-engagement with screen-based learning.


  • Make Your Future workshops at Central Saint Martins. Photo: © Caroline Heron

  • Final sculptures air drying in the studio at Central Saint Martins. Photo: © Caroline Heron

Joy

Make First centres playfulness, joy and the sense of achievement that comes from creation. Perhaps one of the most important elements of making is the impact it has on our health and wellbeing – a growing concern for schools. That ‘magic’ that happens when one is absorbed in making (alone or in a group) is down to the gentle mechanism of action, ‘the effort involved in ‘making something’, the multi-sensory engagement, repetitive actions and anticipation of satisfaction from the rewarding final product are related to release of neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine, that promote joy and well-being, while also reducing stress hormones like cortisol.

Get in touch

For more information on Make First and how Crafts Council can support your learners, please contact our Education team.

  • Email education@craftscouncil.org.uk
  • Join our Craft Educators Facebook Group for regular updates

Finished pieces from ceramic tile workshop with Jo Veevers. Photo: © Caroline Heron

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