Relational Encounters with Folk School Pedagogies: Craft as Creative Inquiry

Recipient of the 2026 Publication Award, National Art Education Association, Ecology and Environment Interest Group

This book explores folk school pedagogies through craft as creative inquiry. Using a study at and inspired by The Clearing Folk School, a continuing education institution located at the northern tip of the Door County Peninsula, Wisconsin, United States, it explores the crafting of teaching practices from learners, educators, researchers, artists, animals, land, plants, and sky. The author shows how such practices function as an antidote to contemporary anthropocentric, environmental, and political crises. Contributing to conversations in posthuman ethics, it engages folk school pedagogies between humans and more-than-humans through thinking, writing, folding, interviewing, collaging, and journaling. Exploring craft as creative inquiry that works against conventional methods of and assumptions about research, it ultimately investigates the utility of folk school teaching practices that highlight relations between beings and things as kin. As such, it will appeal to scholars, researchers, faculty, and postgraduate students working across research methods, arts education, and educational philosophy by taking seriously relational pedagogies and perspectives through craft as creative inquiry.