The artisanal pedagogy as educational praxis in traditional popular cultures

Abstract

This article is the result of my researches on the cultural heritage of traditional ceramics and the artisan pedagogy. The main problem faced was the educational praxis of the ceramics craft in a traditional community and the ways of teaching and learning handicraft work in artisanal communities. The study comprised a phenomenological investigation of the daily life of this society, and its aims were to reveal and understand how the knowledge of pottery is shared by successive generations; which are the methodologies that contribute to perpetuating the ancient secrets of the craft; how manual forms of artistic creation coexist with contemporary technologies. The ethnographic basis of the research was the traditional community of Maragogipinho, a small district in the city of Aratuípe, in Bahia, a genuine environment of ceramics handicraft, where, since the 17th century, men and women are daily engaged in the production of clay objects. The data were collected from direct observation, field diary entries, recorded interviews and photographic records between 2012 and 2015. The results obtained evidenced the immensely immaterial collection of individual and collective knowledge that coexist in this village of masters and guardians of the ceramics craft. The pedagogy of master craftsmen, or artisanal pedagogy, based on ancestral values, is effective in practice, transcending it towards the spheres of ethics and aesthetics, in the sense of fostering in the subjects the sense of belonging to a recognized social body, by means of an artistic craft that constantly converses with the tradition and the emergence of modernity.