Craft Education in India: Cultural Sustainability within a Global World

• In Event: Poster session I
  In Poster Session: Poster session 1

Proposal

Craft Education in India: Cultural Sustainability within a Global World
Education is one of the most important cultural commodities in India (Probe report, 1999). However, in the wake of global neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, education at all levels has become increasingly privatized as a market commodity (Srivastava & Noronha, 2016). In this model the goal of education is to prepare students for high-stakes tests that in turn give the most successful students the opportunity to enter competitive and hierarchical higher educational programs in STEM fields. In short, a so-called proper education can be procured through (a) success on high-stakes exams, (b) financial means, and (c) formal education in elite institutions (Tierney & Sabharwal, 2017). The societal result of this form of education is to maintain a hierarchical education structure that primarily benefits those with the means to participate (Boucher, 2017).
In the effort to investigate the impact of and reaction to global market-model education promotion, I identified an institution and a population of students in Jaipur, India who have eschewed the dominant global and societal higher educational paths of STEM fields in favor of tertiary education in traditional Indian craft and design. The working assumption in this sampling process is that traditional craft education is a culturally reifying field of study that places local cultural values and forms over and above globally hegemonic values and agendas (Ladson-Billings, 2014). This does not imply that these students resist all forms of globalization (in fact, preliminary analysis of the ethnographic data collected suggests that the students have a keen global perspective), but through their educational decisions, they clearly reject the dominant globalized preference of educational forms and academic majors that directly contribute to a global knowledge economy (Altbach, 2015; Spring, 2015). Further, their chosen field of traditional craft preliminarily suggests they hold local cultural forms in high esteem and worth preserving and sustaining (Wilkerson-Weber & DeNicola, 2016). This proposed poster presentation explores both the motivations of students to pursue higher education in traditional craft and design fields as well as the role craft pedagogy plays in broader cultural sustainability, socio-economic equitability, and cultural flows in our age of globalization.
To accomplish this research I conducted a qualitative ethnographic study where I conducted class observations, interviews with craft students, content analysis of institutional literature, field observations of craft students working with craft artisans, and contextual interpretation of physical craft artifacts produced by students. The preliminary results reveal that students chose to study craft in the effort to connect with their local cultural traditions while at the same time to sustain the resources and products of Indian craft and design and to promote this culture to global markets. Further, the pedagogical methods challenge the primacy of didactic teaching and rote memorization in favor of a globally conscious, holistic, and hands-on education. There are several studies that have explored hierarchical relationships between craft design students and craft artisans (e.g., DeNicola & DeNicola, 2012), but this research contributes to the literature by exploring student motivations to study craft and ways craft pedagogy and curriculum seeks to sustainably connect all people and resources in the Indian craft sector to local and global contexts.

Author

• Eddie Boucher, University of Nevada, Las Vegas