Craft and the Becoming of Agency: Developing EMBER-S³ to Illuminate Pedagogical Potential

Craft has long served as a profound mode of learning and becoming. This thesis investigates how craft pedagogy shapes what I conceptualise as ‘the embodied becoming of agency’, with a central analytic focus on the cultivation of executive functions (EFs) within sensory modal–spatial engagements in situated craft practice. It introduces EMBER-S³: Embodied Multimodal-Based Experiential Research (Sensory, Spatial, Situated), as a bespoke hybrid framework designed to illuminate these embodied dynamics in ways that are analytically visible and pedagogically meaningful. The study was situated within a specialist Further Education SEND provision in the UK, focusing on a green-woodworking session involving a student and an experienced craft practitioner (tutor) whose guidance formed an integral part of the pedagogical interaction. Adopting an interpretivist stance, the study develops and validates EMBER-S³, integrating phenomenology, multimodality, ethnographic resources, and affordance theory. The framework is applied in an ethnographically informed case study centred on a green woodworking pole-lathe (a body-powered device that spins wood back and forth so it can be shaped with hand tools) session, combining sensory-first multimodal matrices, annotated video-still storyboards, and sensory–modal density circles, triangulated with stimulated-recall interviews. This design enables fine-grained analysis of gesture, gaze, posture, movement, materiality, and spatial arrangements, and their orchestration toward increasingly complex actions, practices and EF capacities (e.g., working memory, initiation, self-monitoring, inhibition). Analysis shows the workshop environment functions as an active pedagogical space rich in affordances, scaffolding autonomy and EF development through iterative body–material space feedback loops. Student–tutor interactions leverage multimodal cues (gesture, gaze, rhythm, haptic guidance) to foster initiation, confidence, and agency. Student–material engagements reveal tactile, proprioceptive, and auditory feedback as real-time regulators of performance, supporting EF capacities, including: planning, initiation, working memory, inhibition, self-monitoring, and problem-solving, during skill acquisition on the pole lathe. Collectively, the study positions craft as a multimodal, embodied, and agentic practice, illuminating the pedagogical potential of craft to cultivate EFs and agency in inclusive education. Methodologically, the thesis offers EMBER-S³ as a transferable tool for agency-centred pedagogy, capable of illuminating otherwise invisible sensory–modal–spatial dimensions of learning in craft and other body-based educational or therapeutic contexts. Substantively, it articulates the pedagogical affordances through which craft fosters executive functioning and agency, advocating a world-centred, embodied education that challenges outcome-driven models and supports person-centred flourishing.