Search

The research study focuses on the phenomenon of informal learning and teaching, as it materializes through the quiltmakers’ engagement in idiosyncratic community practices. The present study considers the construction of craft knowledge from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on social and material mediation, and embodiment as a form of meaning-making for quiltmakers. The ethnographic data were collected from two quilting communities in Aotearoa New Zealand and in total 66 quilters volunteered to participate. The fieldwork extended over an eight-month period with data consisting of interviews, observations, fieldnotes and reflective diaries including the visualization of interactive happenings in situ. Chronological content logs were created, and data were analysed by qualitative content analysis. The primary interest was on the verbal (i.e. social), non-verbal (i.e. embodied) and material (inter)actions that were central to the quilters’ meaning-making processes. This praxis and process of informal learning usually make it invisible because it is a ubiquitous element embedded in the quilting community context. Identifying different aspects of multimodal making foregrounds how the quilters’ learning is socially interactive, with ‘hands on’ and ‘minds on’ processes tied to their bodily experiences and material world. This study demonstrates the significance of the ongoing communicative (inter)actions for meaning-making, highlighting the role of the body, mind and environment in shaping quilting practices and appropriating craft knowledge.

This article discusses the informal learning processes of a quilting community, located in Aotearoa New Zealand, as participants engage in a collaborative textile project. Few studies have investigated everyday quilters’ collective learning processes, even though communal quiltmaking has been undertaken over the centuries. The concept of zone of proximal development (zpd) is extended as a ‘collective zone of proximal development’ where people are doing something together. This ethnographic study views quiltmaking as a sociocultural activity, and emphasizes the situated nature of knowing within a community-based setting. Research methods reveal the explicit and tacit dimensions of the quilters’ meaning making. During the fieldwork, flexibility and reflexivity are required to overcome ethical issues as they arise. The guided participation is revealed through the quilters’ interactions as they participated in their collaborative activity. Learning sequences present episodic details of the way these interactions are constructed and developed. The quilters actively seek to increase opportunities for learning and for sharing skills and knowledge through participation partnerships involving multi-way collaborations.

This chapter discusses “doing” educational research with two quilting communities located in Aotearoa New Zealand. The ethnographic inquiry explores the phenomenon of informal learning and teaching as they materialise through the quilters’ communal practices. Collective quiltmaking is often marginalised by non-quilters as a “granny” activity bounded by rules, thus restricting creativity. However, far from being fringe dwellers, the quilters reveal the creative chaos, multi-voicedness, and tacit complexities within their practices of “quilting together”. Building upon sociocultural models of apprenticeship learning, it is necessary to move beyond perceiving quilting communities as stable conservative entities. Rather, the quilters value their leisure activity as an educational pursuit and become border crossers, initiating creative research strategies, which transform their practice, activities, and material objects with the generation of new knowledge.