The Creation of a Bowl, a Spoon, a Placemat, and a Community

Kelly Maynard, associate professor of modern European history, had a “very circuitous route into academia.” Before going to graduate school for history, she was a bassoonist and a ceramicist. Those experiences were primarily kinesthetic, which shaped Maynard’s perspective on traditional humanities courses. “I feel like there’s a lot more that our bodies know than is normally associated with being in classes,” she says.

As a professor, Maynard wanted to find a way for her students to engage both their bodies and minds in learning and “to really have people explore the kinds of knowledge that come from doing things and touching things.” So, she designed a course, Introduction to Material Culture Studies, that explores three materials — ceramics, wood, and textiles — through discussion, studio work, and journal reflections. In the process, students create a bowl, a spoon, and a placemat. She says she feels the power of this combination most in “those little moments of your fingers and your touch recognizing things that you could read about but not learn in the same way.”

Post-Disciplinary Thinking

This course could not be taught from the perspective of history alone. “We’re already blowing up the notion of what happens in the classroom by touching stuff and learning. I don’t feel that behavior belongs to any one discipline,” Maynard explains. The course instead combines aspects of art history, archaeology, museum studies, literature, craft studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and history. “This class forces folks, no matter what their major or intended major, to think more broadly, more cross-disciplinary, maybe post-disciplinary,” says Maynard.

Thinking post-disciplinary is difficult. Maynard says, “It’s not easy to come to a syllabus and see archaeology and a YouTube video and a museum review and a piece of poetry and a memoir and put all those things together and see why they’re there together because it’s precisely not disciplinary and not an obvious choice.” But she continues, “Students are absolutely rolling with it.” And the result is much more nuanced and powerful ideas.

It helps that the students are as diverse as the content they are studying. “I decided there could be something really instructive and useful for everybody in the class to be working with people from different levels and different disciplines. And that has totally proven to be true,” says Maynard. Anthony Schwindt ’25 explains what this looks like in the studio: “Everyone is coming in with different levels of experience, and some people obviously are going to be better at one thing but maybe not as good at another. So, everyone works through and tries to help people and explain things to them.”

Being Humans Together

Isabelle Jacqmotte-Parks ’24 explains how this dynamic has helped build a strong sense of community, “[We are all] learning from each other, building off each other in a way that makes it feel a lot more communal as a class.” Schwindt echoes this sentiment. “I’ve just really felt connected to the other students in my class,” he says.

Maynard is often learning alongside the students, which only adds to the sense of community. “I’m comfortable doing the clay part, but I don’t know anything about wood or textiles. So, I’ve been able to lean on local knowledge and local expertise,” she says. Chris Bair, environmental and safety coordinator, guides the woodwork, and Lee Smith, who is on the Grinnell Area Arts Council Board of Directors, guides the textile work. As a result, “[Maynard] was carving a spoon right alongside us and learning from Chris, asking questions of Chris,” remembers Jacqmotte-Parks.

For Maynard, the sense of community is the most important aspect of the course. “Above all, we are working together as a community to learn, to push each other, to respect each other, to empathize with each other, and to be humans together,” she says. Schwindt agrees and says he is now “trying to build those similar relationships in even larger classes.”

Enjoying the Meandering Journey

For a course that is centered around a bowl, a spoon, and a placemat, the products themselves matter very little. “Whether our bowls crack, whether our textiles shrivel, whether our wood splits, this is about process and about thinking together and about being together,” says Maynard.

This approach has been transformative for Jacqmotte-Parks. In creating her bowl, she discovered that “You’re shaping the clay, but the clay isn’t going to do things it doesn’t want to.” With that understanding, she began to relinquish some control, release her expectations, and focus on the process.

Introduction to Material Culture Studies teaches the value of enjoying the journey, however meandering it may be. Maynard says, “That willingness to embrace the nonlinear path through life and to explore the side eddies of the river of life, that is part of what the institution seems to embrace and also what this class is trying to do.”