Reimagining #HigherEd like Kintsugi (inspired by @nicolapallitt)

Have you ever heard of Kintsugi? This is a Japanese art/practice, where they fix broken or cracked pottery/teacups using gold – they do not recreate the piece back to its original form, but sort of “embracing flaws and imperfections, [to] create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art.” This can be such a good metaphor for higher education right now: the pandemic situation caused some cracks in our education systems, and in the process of putting it back together, perhaps rather than trying to recreate it as it used to be, or be positive like nothing happened (toxic positivity), we should be looking at how to embrace what we learned from the journey, what we learned from the flaws of higher education as it used to be, and take it forward to create something new more beautiful, and stronger, with maybe some golden practices we’ve discovered along the way.

Thanks to Nicola Pallitt @nicolapallitt who reminded me of this practice (which I’d heard about before in a novel) and inspired me to think of how it’s such a good metaphor for #HigherEd

This is a very brief video, and while watching it, I was inspired to think of how I could use it in class – can students think about scars they’ve developed along the way during the pandemic and how they can embrace them and not “hide them” (the speaker talks about how scars should not be hidden/covered) – and I think it is also interesting that this practice takes TIME. It is not just because putting the item back together takes time – it is not like putting glue and letting it dry for a few minutes or hours – this takes months, before the dusting of gold can be placed. It fits the higher ed metaphor or a more psychological metaphor, because it also implies that our scars take time to heal before they can be recreated into something beautiful. We should not rush it.

This video also explains it quite nicely, but I prefer to use the one where Japanese speakers are explaining it, above:

Featured image Bison Kintsugi by Ars Electronica from Flickr with CC-BY-NC-ND license (I rotated it to be horizontal, which I assume still fits the ND aspect of the license, I hope!)