Welcome to Crafting Readers
Welcome to Crafting Readers, a digital exhibit that displays crafted objects in connection with literary texts. Crafting Readers emerged from students’ final projects for English 482: Community-Engaged Learning and Public Humanities at the University of Victoria.
This course immersed students in critical crafting, a research method that uses hands-on crafting to deepen researchers' knowledge. Students chose a literary text to study and reflected on how their analysis deepened across a series of hands-on workshops facilitated by community experts (on lino printing, decollage, paper quilling, rag rugging, embroidery, sewing, and handpress printing).
The exhibit displays students’ crafted objects, offering a range of creative engagements with craft practices; their rich reflections (both written and audio) on the connections between their crafted objects and literary texts; and short summaries of their literary texts.
English 482 is a capstone course for University of Victoria English majors. This iteration of English 482, Crafting Literacies, was taught in fall 2024 by Mary Elizabeth Leighton with assistance from Kalea Furmanek-Raposo.
We are grateful for the generous support of the following wonderful academic and community experts who made this course possible: Judy Bishop, Bill Blair, Martha Burd, Allison Fulton, Lynda Gammon, Matt Huculak, Andrea Korda, Virginia MacLeod, Jacob Maddison, Samantha MacFarlane, Rich McCue, Lisa Surridge, Christine Walde, and Vanessa Warne. Huge thanks, too, to the amazing staff of UVic Special Collections—Heather Dean, John Frederick, Michaela Morrow, and Lara Wilson—and to UVic’s Community-Engaged Learning Office for an Experiential Learning Fund Grant that supported this course’s development and our learning.