The overarching goal of a Handshouse Making/History project is always the same: to remake the historic object as accurately as possible using only the tools and materials that would have been available to its original makers. This method leaves participants with challenging questions that require research into a wide range of subjects. “You tricked me into loving history!” This beloved jest made by long-time Handshouse participant Emily White attests to the value of employing curiosity to motivate individual learning experiences. Studying history, math or any other subject becomes easier when curiosity is awakened and fuels inquiry. What Rick and Laura, along with Handshouse leaders, have learned is that combining curiosity with a clarity of purpose for why the subject matters give individuals the strength and tenacity to enter educational realms that they may not have previously enjoyed. Time and time again, offering students the opportunity to become part of an ambitious collective goal empowers them to engage in remarkable ways, allowing them to discover and develop their own skills and talents to overcome all kinds of complex challenges All the while they are contributing significantly to the success of the project as a whole..
We Make the Object
Participants then begin hands-on exploration informed by our research of historical precedent. Through physical experimentation — drawing, making models at different scales, and actively exploring tools, materials, and processes — we literally start putting the pieces together.
In transforming curiosity into action, we stimulate our neurological network, connecting our big brains to our complex sensory experience of the physical world. At Handshouse, we have found that encouraging people to let their curiosity drive playful experimentation of theories-in-action engages instinctive ways of learning and reactivates natural creativity. I would venture to guess that any carpenter, ceramicist, dancer, or motor mechanic would attest to the experience that when the body leads an investigation, a kind of spontaneity and fluidity of discovery results from the interplay of sensory observation and the imagination. We begin making connections that are only available to the intellect of the body.
We also start making intangible connections. This kind of creative atmosphere combined with the ambitiousness of the goal attracts attention. Experts from all kinds of tangentially related disciplines start showing interest. Leading scholars and master craftspeople invited to share some of their knowledge about the world of the object are often swept up into the enthusiasm and begin carving out time from their professional lives to join the investigation. Upon entering this collaborative learning environment, students, leaders, and experts all have permission to not know yet. Everyone is welcomed to the proverbial table in a way that invites everyone to feel ownership in the work, to make new discoveries, and to pursue the highest quality outcome. As Rick Brown so often proclaims, “Everyone contributes, and everyone learns.”
The level of commitment has participants showing up long past any perceived obligation, determined to see a project through. Further, this contagious curiosity invigorates people to travel great distances to live and work together in field studies or at immersive workshops, often overlooking unglamorous room-and-board for the chance to be a part of it all, especially when theories start to be tested through full-scale object reconstruction.
These immersive, interdisciplinary learning environments enmesh diverse groups of people together, stimulating the kind of dialogue from different perspectives that cultivates connections cutting across skill levels, ways of thinking, and language barriers, as well as generational, ideological, national, and cultural divides.
A sustained investigation toward the
reconstruction of an object also permits us to venture into the mindset of its original makers
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