Reflections on Hands-On
Reflections on Hands-on Teaching and Learning
Hands-on in the Making and Knowing Project
Since 2014, the Making and Knowing Project (M&K) at Columbia University has been teaching hands-on history of art and science as a way to engage with and investigate an unusual historical text, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. This compilation of artisanal recipes, technical notes, and observations about daily life in Renaissance France is a rich historical source, but it is a text that is better enacted than read from start to finish. Through low-stakes making activities and project-based learning, M&K students have learned to interpret historical texts—and history itself—through material experiments. M&K integrates laboratory and archival research to cross the science/humanities divide, exploring intersections between artistic making and scientific knowing.
Art and Science
Today, artistic making and scientific knowing are seen as separate realms, yet the sciences’ empiricism and observation originated in the creative labors of Renaissance artists and in the empirical methods pioneered by sixteenth-century artists and humanists. During the Scientific Revolution, the collaboration and experimentation of craft workshops became integrated into the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, as the new sciences became academic disciplines, these shared origins were obscured, and the divisions between science labs, art studios, and humanists’ archives grew ever wider. Studying the pre-modern workshop provides a bridge between these realms.
M&K employs “hands-on history”—reconstructing techniques of the past—to illuminate the continuous and universal human striving to investigate and understand nature. Such reconstructions offer first-hand glimpses into craft workshops to see artisans using constant experimentation to manipulate natural materials that allows us to understand how “making” can be a form of “knowing.” Reconstructions also raise historical questions that would otherwise remain inaccessible and inconceivable outside of hands-on engagement with materials.
Why Hands-on Learning?
Hands-on experimental history and experiential learning does not need to be expensive or exclusive. It can be scaled for various levels of learners, and it can be accommodated in a range of research spaces: labs, studios, classrooms, libraries, museums. Some of the outcomes we have witnessed in our own classrooms: students who believe they are “no good at science” can experience laboratory experimentation and dissolve preconceptions about science, and science students can gain a more robust and expansive understanding of the history of their disciplines.
By proposing a shift from textbooks and tests to hands-on work and process, M&K aims to stress the importance of other ways of knowing—making, experimentation, hand-skills, collaboration, and failure—to foster cross-fertilization between the humanities and sciences, and engage all levels of learners with first-hand experience of how human beings transform natural materials. This aim can be carried out in kitchens, studios, and laboratories, from elementary school through higher education, and we believe it can promote a new kind of material and scientific literacy, not of the content of science, but of its essence as exploration and experimentation with nature.
The Making and Knowing Laboratory
The Lab Video Playlist
Tour the Making and Knowing Laboratory from The Making and Knowing Project on Vimeo.
- Direction and Editing: Lan Li
- Production: Tianna Uchacz
Reflections on Hands-on Learning
Tips for Hands-on Teaching and Learning compiled by the Making and Knowing Project.
A Recipe for Recipe Research: The Making and Knowing Project, The Recipes Project, 2016.
Around the Table: The Making and Knowing Project, The Recipes Project, October 2020.
Science and Art in a Sixteenth Century Workshop: Hands On History in the Making and Knowing Project from The Making and Knowing Project on Vimeo.
Pamela H. Smith discusses hands-on teaching and learning in the Elizabeth B. McNab Lecture in the History of Science, McGill University, 2021.Hands-On History: Reconstruction in the High School Classroom
Sofia Gans, PhD, speaks about her experience teaching high school European history through hands-on reconstruction of historical techniques.
From Watching to Working: Incorporating Making and Knowing Activities into History of Science Courses
Monique O’Connell reflects on her experiences using the Making and Knowing Project’s Hands-on Lesson Plan for stucco-making in a history of science course at Wake Forest University.
Christina Neilson, Ingenious Making in the Early Modern World from The Making and Knowing Project on Vimeo.
Christina Neilson and Heather Galloway speak about their experience using the Making and Knowing Project's Hands-on Lesson Plans in a class at Oberlin College.Knowing by Making
An episode of the Refashioning the Renaissance Podcast with Sophie Pitman and Pamela Smith.
Refashioning the Renaissance Team: Imitation Amber & Imitation Leopard Fur
Sophie Pitman is interviewed about the importance of working across art/science and living/non living boundaries, as part of the Outre: Encounters with Non/living Things exhibition (2021).
Remaking Objects in the Classroom and the Museum: A Panel Discussion
A panel discussion between scholars, curators, and creators including Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Center), Johnathan Tavares (Art Institute, Chicago), and Tracy Drier, Distinguished Master Glassblower (UW Madison) about how reconstructed objects and remaking methods can be used in innovative museum exhibitions and classroom teaching. Chaired by Sophie Pitman, curator of Remaking the Renaissance.
Mechanochemistry: The Science of Crush Digital Exhibition
Science History Institute Online Exhibition (hosted by Google Arts and Culture), 2021, featuring a video about the Making and Knowing Project’s collaboration with Refashioning the Renaissance that highlights the importance of hands-on engagement with materials).
Experiential Learning
Lifecasting in the Making and Knowing Lab
“Lifecasting” is a central preoccupation of the anonymous author-practitioner of Ms. Fr. 640 and he filled almost 30% of the manuscript with records of his trials in lifecasting plants and animals. The Making and Knowing Project intensively and iteratively researched and reconstructed the processes recorded in these manuscript entries for making molds from (dead) animals and plants, into which metals and other materials were cast.
For more on Making and Knowing lifecasting
Lifecasting in Ms. Fr. 640
In Pursuit of Magic
Molding Grasshoppers and Things too Thin
Molding a Rose
Molded Roses in Sixteenth-Century France
Molding, Modeling, Repairing
Molding Fruits and Animals in Sugar
Animals Dried in an Oven.
Weaving Knowledge
In July 2017 and January 2019, Pamela Smith and the Making and Knowing Project worked with Nussara Tiengate and Annapurna Mamidipudi to mount a Weaving Knowledge Workshop at Ban Rai Jai Sook in Chiang Mai, Thailand. These two workshops provided a two-week immersion in traditional Thai weaving for international PhD students. Over two weeks, participants experienced a full immersion in Lanna weaving with help from expert weavers and textile scholars. In 2019, the Making and Knowing Postdoctoral Scholars participated in the workshop.
Participants used indigo, turmeric, stick-lac, and jackfruit bark to dye cotton, prepared and warped their looms, and practiced a variety of techniques, including plain weave, tapestry, and “chok” – a way of creating supplementary patterns which involves the use of a porcupine quill. Visits to Lua and Karen communities near Mae Chaem gave insights into indigenous weaving practice and its context, as well the challenge of articulating embodied craft knowledge
See the videos created by Lan Li
Weaving Knowledge: Banraijaisook
Weaving Knowledge: The Looms of Banraijaisook
Weaving Knowledge: Thinking, Feeling, and Making