This PhD project aims to answer the following main questions: How is making learned and taught in educational workshops and how can patterns of teaching and learning making be made explicit, including embodied processes and material knowledge? The research employs, parallel to historical groundwork, a mixed ethnographic approach, to research the material-human workflows in different workshops of art academies, specifically Minerva Art Academy in Groningen (NL). While ethnographic studies into craft production, workplace studies and laboratory studies have thus far traced the production of particular artefacts or processes, Curious Hands in Educational Workshops studies the educational workshops to understand how to make and create as such. It studies how tacit knowledge is made explicit and how materials, movements, language, physical and social interaction, technology, emotions, spatial settings, sensory input (sound, smell, touch) all come together in teaching and learning how to achieve not one particular outcome but how to learn making in general. In order to research this rather complex simultaneity of action, dialogue and experience, Curious Hands in the Educational Workshops combines participant observation, participant making, visual ethnography, and interviews. It is grounded in actor-network theory in order to understand how materials, objects, technologies and human beings form constellations pertinent to making. The need of this research for a detailed understanding and methodical inventory of how making is learned and taught, comes from the aspiration of the overarching NWO-project Curious Hands to move making and its benefits from the fringes to the core of education.

Our embodied existence, our relationship with the world and the embodied learning processes and materiality in the arts are considered the most important contributions to STEAM education. Not because art is expressed in material - it materializes - or because artistic processes are creative, to the contrary, it is precisely the fundamental materiality of the arts that is the most important contribution to STEAM education. Art does not 'end' in matter, it begins with matter. And artistic processes do not run from a concept to materialization, but rather from a 'confrontation' with material through a process that uses materials to 'think with' to a material product. Rather than being the 'illustration' of scientific outcomes, the creative process in the arts takes up a fundamental research position in STEAM education.

The aim of this research is to increase 'materiality' during learning situations at the intersection of art, science and technology for the benefit of student development. And in general, we want to contribute to the reevaluation of 'making'.

Together with a research team of various educational professionals, we have conducted educational design research into their educational practices for several years. This collaboration resulted in a design tool, which is available on this website.