Unravelling the Norms
Introduction
This blog post reflects on the design and proposed implementation of a workshop-based intervention titled Unravelling the Norms, developed in my role as an HPL on the BA Textiles Knit programme at Central Saint Martins. The intervention is motivated by my critical observations of how sketchbooks, a central component in textile education, can unintentionally become exclusionary spaces that reinforce narrow, often ableist, definitions of creativity and productivity. As someone navigating institutional structures while seeking to foster more democratic and inclusive spaces, I am particularly motivated by students who feel alienated by traditional sketchbook formats.
My aim is to centre student creativity through a process-driven, inclusive approach to documentation and making, especially in relation to neurodivergence, mental health, disability, language diversity and socioeconomic background. Informed by intersectional and inclusive pedagogies, the workshop challenges the authority of dominant creative norms and repositions the sketchbook as a multimodal, accessible space for experimentation and ownership.
Context
The workshop is designed for BA Textiles Knit students at CSM, where the curriculum often emphasises industry-aligned, outcome-driven models of practice. Yet knit is a medium of slowness, tactility, repetition, a space of care and labour. And that labour is not neutral: it’s time-, cost-, and resource-intensive, disproportionately impacting students with financial constraints, caregiving responsibilities, or divergent learning styles.
The sketchbook, as a primary assessment tool, becomes a flashpoint for this tension. Many students, particularly those who are neurodivergent or who work across languages and cultures, describe the sketchbook as a site of anxiety. In this intervention, we reframe it as a ‘process-led’, ‘accessible’ and ‘democratic’ space for self-defined exploration.
Inclusive Learning: Rationale for the Intervention
Often, inclusion in textiles education focuses on representational diversity (Ahmed, 2012), without interrogating the pedagogical systems underpinning it. The workshop instead aims to shift the focus from outcome to process and from form to freedom. This ethos aligns with Kaprow’s (1993) call for the development of self through discovery, positioning making not as a fixed route to mastery but as a space for exploration, self-awareness, and reinvention.
The pedagogical approach draws on Freire’s (1970) dialogic approach and inclusive pedagogies as articulated by Gravett et al. (2023), positioning students as co-creators of knowledge. By enabling students to redefine what a sketchbook can be, the workshop challenges ableist and classed assumptions around what counts as ‘serious’ or ‘professional’ work. Instead, it proposes a radically open framework in which process, intuition, and collaboration become valid modes of critical inquiry.
This ethos is also embodied in the practices of artists and educators like Celia Pym, whose visible mending work foregrounds care, time, imperfection, and bodily presence. Her attention to the overlooked or worn-through offers a counter-narrative to perfectionism in design. Likewise, Yinka Ilori’s riotous celebration of colour and pattern disrupts minimalist, Eurocentric design tropes, championing joy, cultural memory, and lived experience. Both figures demonstrate that inclusion isn’t about simplification, it’s about expansion, layered meaning, and generous forms of expression.
The workshop encourages:
-Multisensory engagement- touch, texture, and sound – as entry points to making.
-Alternative annotation methods- such as audio reflections, visual mapping, gesture, and collage.
-Collaborative modes- that decentralise authority and welcome co-authorship.
-Assessment- that prioritises experimentation, reflection, and risk-taking over visual polish.
While tactility is often framed as ‘universal,’ it’s vital to question who this assumption may exclude. Students with sensory processing differences, for example, may find certain materials overwhelming or inaccessible. The workshop therefore treats sensory engagement not as a default mode of inclusion but as a flexible, nuanced approach, one that centres individual choice, lived experience, and agency.
Reflection: Design Process and Feedback
The intervention was shaped through encounters with students and peers, many of whom shared feelings of frustration, uncertainty, and even shame around the “rules” of sketchbook presentation. These aren’t just aesthetic concerns, they speak to deeper issues of legitimacy, confidence, and belonging within creative education.
Students often internalise the idea that they’re “doing it wrong” or that they ‘hate it’ or ‘don’t see the point’. These responses reveal how dominant visual and textual conventions can silence, rather than support, creative growth. One student expressed that writing in their sketchbook made them feel ‘exposed’ while another said, “I feel like I need to make it look a certain way so people take me seriously’. These insights underline that what’s at stake is not just method, but identity and perceived value.
Peer feedback further confirmed the urgency of this work and offered valuable insights for shaping the intervention:
-The reframe of ‘your way is the right way’ is deeply empowering.
-Focusing on tactility levels the playing field—it invites more people in.
-The title gets right to the heart of what you’re trying to achieve.
-The suggestion of ‘ripping out the first page’, as it’s often the most intimidating moment.
Several colleagues reflected on their own educational journeys and design training, offering useful contrasts and ideass:
One shared they didn’t use sketchbooks at all as a professional designer: “Process was there, but recorded differently.” Another asked: “Isn’t it more about unpacking what ‘process’ is or can be?” A question that has since become a guiding principle for this intervention.
In response to my microteach session, one peer noted that bypassing fixed ideas of “good” and “bad” outcomes enabled more embodied and exploratory making and that thinking through materiality before even getting to the machine was valuable in itself. There was strong consensus around the workshop’s emphasis on ‘play’, which I could bring in to the intervention and position the sketchbook as a space for experimentation rather than performance. With a peer who partook in the session sharing that “Normally I focus on the outcome, this approach helped me let that go.”
Another critical point was raised about the institutional context “Remind them they’re in education, not industry. They’re here to learn, not monetise ideas. That means they’re allowed to fail, to take risks, to not know.” This is particularly resonant given how often second- and third-year students speak of “what the industry wants” as an invisible but powerful force shaping their creative decisions.
One peer asked a pivotal question ‘Where does the history of this process come from and how can we include the variety of cultural practices?’ This was an essential prompt. The sketchbook, as a concept, has historical roots in European art education, particularly the Renaissance and 19th-century institutional models. Yet other cultures have long recorded process differently, through oral histories, embodied practice, textiles, storytelling, or repetitive making. This intervention seeks to honour and include these multiple knowledge systems by opening up the sketchbook as a flexible, culturally responsive space, not a one-size-fits-all solution.
This feedback also surfaced broader questions:
-Can this intervention support students through to final year?
-Can we open dialogue with other tutors about their own definitions of ‘process’?
-How might this support quieter, international, or uncertain students? Could autoethnographic or peer-to-peer methods create new understandings?
These insights have helped sharpen the workshop’s aims. The sketchbook is not just a container of ideas, it reflects power structures, visibility, and voice. To reframe it is to redistribute who gets to feel like they belong in design education.
To that end, the workshop includes:
-Co-design with students to avoid a tokenistic or overly prescribed “alternative.”
-Prompts that value messiness, failure, and experimentation as central to learning, not just side effects.
-An ongoing feedback loop, to ensure it adapts to real student needs and doesn’t become another rigid model.
Crucially, this isn’t about offering an alternative format as another standard. It’s about expanding the very idea of what a sketchbook can be, so students can shape it in ways that align with their own cultural backgrounds, values, and modes of thinking.
Action: Implementing the Intervention
Although there is no dedicated budget, the workshop can be embedded within an existing timetabled session, using found or low-cost materials. Students would be invited to bring in objects, scraps, or audio clips, and share their documentation strategies. Tutors could model openness by sharing their own imperfect processes.
The intervention forms part of a possible evolving inclusive practice toolkit hosted on Moodle which evolves in dialogue with students. It could include examples of tactile, digital, and non-linear sketchbook formats and reframes assessment language to value reflection and experimentation over final form. Designed to seed a cultural shift toward process-led pedagogy and foster a community of shared practice.
With a broader ambition is to challenge the pipeline model of education that positions students solely as future industry workers. As students increasingly question an industry that doesn’t reflect their identities or politics, education must become a space to rehearse alternatives, not reinforce the status quo. As bell hooks (1994) reminds us “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn.”
Evaluation of Process
This process has deepened my understanding of intersectional teaching (Crenshaw, 1989) and the institutional barriers that shape student engagement. It has affirmed the value of critical hope (Zembylas, 2017) and discomfort (Boler & Zembylas, 2003) as catalysts for change.
If implemented, evaluation could include:
-Student reflections and feedback.
-Observations of engagement and participation styles.
-Evidence of alternative sketchbook formats in assessment submissions.
Success would be indicated not just through uptake but through increased confidence, risk-taking, and sense of belonging among students.
Conclusion
Unravelling the Norms is a small but intentional intervention to redistribute power in the classroom. It centres process over product, accessibility over standardisation, and student voice over institutional prescription. My own positionality, working within the system while pushing against its constraints, informs the desire to reframe what matters in education.
As hooks (1994) reminds us, “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” This intervention is a step toward realising that possibility by centring joy, embodied learning, and creative autonomy.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Boler, M. and Zembylas, M. (2003) ‘Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding difference’, in P. Trifonas (ed.) Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Justice. New York: Routledge, pp. 110–136.
Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp. 139–167.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Gravett, K., Taylor, C. A., and Fairchild, N. (2023) Inclusive Education in Practice: Pedagogical Possibilities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Kaprow, A. (1993) ‘Education of the Un-Artist, Part I’, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 106–110.
Zembylas, M. (2017) A Pedagogy of Critical Hope: Educating for Academic and Lifelong Success. New York: Springer.