Engaging students in hands-on, material experiences can significantly enhance their understanding and appreciation of the ways humans interact with spaces and objects. This essay centers on a college-level course on the early modern culture of tea in Japan (chanoyu) but hopes to reflect on the power of doing and making assignments with applications in a variety of academic and non-academic settings. This naturally includes other humanities and some STEM courses, but also K12 education, outreach programs, community activities, and cultural education events. For this reason, rather than providing off-the-shelf lesson plans, the article looks at the wider theoretical and practical issues we should consider when designing an assignment or an event.

Material Experiences

I started to dream about a hands-on course while still a graduate student at Columbia University. It was around that time that I heard the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Mark Phillipson, say that "the best way to learn is by doing." This motto, which many attribute to John Dewey, dovetailed well with the training I had received in Kyoto at the Urasenke Gakuen Professional College of Chado in the Midorikai Program, where students experience first-hand the dozen or so crafts and materials that make chanoyu possible, such as ceramics, lacquer, wood, water, textiles, and so on. Another motto commonly associated with Dewey is, "We do not learn from an experience; we learn from reflecting on an experience." (Dewey never said any of this verbatim, but that is beyond the point.) With this in mind, I set out to design my course's assignments in tandem, so that each doing and making activity was followed by an opportunity for structured reflection.

Later, I was able to offer the course again at Florida State University and then at Stanford University. The class size varied year to year, but it would be fair to say that, on average, out of twenty students, there were fourteen undergraduates, four MA students, and two PhD students. They were in disciplines from all across campus, music to math, economics to gender studies, religion to computer science.

Every time I offered the course, I tweaked the assignments in response to student feedback. I also drew inspiration from non-academic teaching experiences in a variety of pedagogical settings. Among them were a structured play-learn shop time at the pre-K level, workshops on poetry at elementary schools, and one-on-one practical training for teenagers, as well as, more recently, a not-for-credit study group called "Material Pedagogies for East Asian Studies," in which doctoral students explore material affordances, fabrication technology, and critical design to create hands-on assignments for their own courses (on architecture, on food culture, on literature, and so on). Many of these formative experiences took place in North America, but others in Latin America (where I was born), Europe (where I used to live), and East Asia (where I go for research).

In the same way that I transferred insights from all these different settings to the U.S. college-level classroom, the theoretical model and practical guidelines for doing/making experiences introduced here aim to be of use to anybody anywhere teaching at any level.

Material Literacy

The course examines how the cultural practice of drinking matcha formally in a carefully curated room changed over the centuries. As is common in humanities courses, students are asked to read a lot, in particular about the historical texts and objects that researchers call primary sources, and to come to class ready to discuss these texts from a variety of disciplines and methodologies—sociology, urban anthropology, art history, gender theory, performance studies, literature, and religion.

Because these historical texts and objects were central to chanoyu, one of the main skills the course aims to develop is material literacy. This is, put simply, understanding and appreciating objects. It requires knowing the cultural, social, and political ways in which objects were historically displayed, consumed, collected, and appraised. But also exploring how the objects were made, which networks of craftspeople made them, and how what others have said and written about these makers has shaped our understanding of the objects themselves, their value, and their place in our society.

Material literacy is paramount in chanoyu. Tea masters often emphasize the importance of visually "reading a space," drawing attention to the utensils (dōgu) and the ways they combine with each other to form a curated whole (toriawase); the meal (kaiseki) that precedes the tea service (temae); and the architecture of the garden (roji), tearoom (chashitsu), and preparation room (mizuya). This extends also beyond sight, to embrace incense (kō), the varying soundscape, haptic textures, and even the physical presence of the host (teishu) and the guest (kyaku).

Tea Time

How can a college course teach material literacy? Traditional training in chanoyu can last decades and is for the most part driven by the student's curiosity and enthusiasm. There are no grades and no formal examinations. Early on I was often told that if you want to learn something, you have to work on it at least once a day for the rest of your life. This process is not easily brought to the college classroom. It is impossible to accelerate time or compress years of self-guided learning into a quarter or semester. Yet Jennifer Roberts, an expert in the history and theory of craft and materiality, has successfully experimented with doing exactly the opposite in her art history courses. Roberts argues that "deceleration" (spending an excessive, painfully long time in one place looking at one object) is a productive process that can help students, noting:

It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate. It seems direct, uncomplicated, and instantaneous—which is why it has arguably become the master sense for the delivery of information in the contemporary technological world. But what students learn in a visceral way in this assignment is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.

Roberts asks her students to spend three hours at a museum looking at one painting, and to take notes on their evolving impressions, observations, and speculations. The excessive time span and unfamiliar setting are meant to helpfully remove students from their everyday distractions. In Roberts's view, which is informed by research on both Early American and global contemporary art, patience can be empowering:

The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us.

Roberts's call for us to think carefully about the pace and tempo of learning experiences is a crucial contribution to a course that aims to expose students to chanoyu outside of its traditional pedagogical setting in the tearoom. Key to this approach is the acknowledgement that learning is best understood as a process rather than in terms of specific expected outcomes, which is why making and doing experiences are so important.

Experiential Learning

The power of experience in learning has long guided research-based pedagogy. I am thinking more immediately of the work of Jean Piaget or Lev Vigotsky, as well as John Dewey, but the list of contributors is quite long. A pragmatic, helpful attempt at synthesizing some of their collective findings is in David Kolb's approach to learning as "the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience." According to Kolb and his predecessors, knowledge is continuously created and recreated, rather than something that can be transmitted by the instructor and acquired by the learner, or a linear journey from less to more. In Kolb's theoretical model, the creation of knowledge cycles through four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.

In traditional chanoyu pedagogy, this cycle is always at work, in no particular order, and happens pretty much spontaneously. For example, sitting quietly in the tearoom is a concrete experience that allows for the reflective observation of a more experienced student making tea, as informed by the abstract conceptualization mobilized by memorized maxims or pedagogic poems, and shaped by one's active experimentation of the role of host or guest. In the classroom, by contrast, assignments need to be carefully designed to harness the pedagogic potential of an experience and regulate the tempo of the process.

Experiential Assignments

Field trips and other hands-on assignments that engage on- and off-campus resources that in many cases are unavailable to the general public tend to be received with enthusiasm during the semester and mentioned as course highlights in student evaluations. These are some of the hands-on experiences of the course:

• A museum visit. Some museums will even let students into their backrooms to see items not currently on display. Most curators will not want students to handle objects directly, but it doesn't hurt to ask. During the week before the visit, it is helpful to demonstrate safe handling practices (elbows on the table) and etiquette (rings off).

• An in-class viewing of teabowls (chawan) and other dōgu owned by the instructor is a good substitute when there are no museums nearby. This has the advantage of allowing students to handle the objects and explore their textures, balance, and general haptic feel. When I offered the course in Florida, a colleague from art history visited the classroom with his private collection of chawan by contemporary artists.

• An abridged tea gathering (chakai), in which a local chapter or a private teacher from a school such as Urasenke or Omotesenke gives students a chance to sit together in a tearoom or a living-room with traditional mats (tatami) and drink a bowl of tea in a way that resembles the last quarter of a fully formal chanoyu event (chaji). Taking students to a chaji is out of the question, as they are expensive affairs that require years of training, last four hours, and can only accommodate a very small number of guests at a time.

• A flower arrangement workshop. While the style of flowers for chanoyu (chabana) is different than that of the more popular and elaborate style (ikebana), people trained in one will usually be able to speak to the other and easily guide students as they pick a vase (hana ire) and arrange dry or live flowers in it.

• A ceramics workshop, in which a professional ceramicist shows students how to hand-build a chawan tea bowl to be fired in a kiln. (Low-fire is closer to the traditional raku pottery style, but high-fire makes the bowl dishwasher safe.) Many campuses have kilns for studio majors, and most cities have at least a handful of professional pottery instructors, who tend to be happy to open their shops for a fee. This workshop needs to be scheduled early in the quarter to allow enough time for the potter to let the student's pieces dry, be bisque fired, then glazed, and finally fired again. Once the students get their finished chawan, it is fun to have another whole-class viewing session, this time of the student's own works. A possible variation is to have students make vases instead of teabowls to then use in the flower arrangement workshop.

• Composition of haiku poems on seasonal motifs. This assignment is ideally led by an active poet or a professional haiku instructor, but it can be approached more informally as well.  There are plenty of books and online resources on how to compose haiku in English, such as the Haiku Foundation or the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society.

• A visit to a Japanese garden (Nihon teien) or, if none is available, a walk around campus led by someone knowledgeable about flowers and plants, such as staff in the Facilities, Grounds, or Food & Agriculture departments.

• A tea tasting, in which students make tea for each other using two or more types of matcha. In this, it can help to bring tasting notes for each different type of tea, which are available from makers such as Ippodō and Kōyamaen (both of whom sell their products online). This is a great way to wrap up the course on the last day of class. If the students are able to use the chawan they made, this can also become a viewing session.

When the course was offered at resource-rich universities in large cities such as New York and San Francisco, I could rely on sizable financial support from my department, museums such as the Met, spectacular tearoom complexes built by Urasenke, and the lavish gardens at Hakone and Golden Gate Park. In Tallahassee, I was lucky to count on the help of the local Chan temple and a tea master who owns the historical tearoom complex Gyokusen-en in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) and who visits the area every year to see her grandchildren. Since that tea master is also a professional haiku poet, the one time I offered the course in Japanese she helped my students compose and critique poems. One year, when I realized too late I couldn't count on departmental funds, I asked each of the students to pay $30 if possible and covered those who couldn't afford it from my own pocket. (An experience that taught me the importance of proper budgeting and planning in advance.)

The Experiential Cycle

It is possible to incorporate experiential assignments into the course in a number of different ways. Here I am putting forward one configuration that has worked well for my students. It consists in structuring the experiential activity as the middle step in a three-step process. The rationale behind this approach is that it is often hard to make sense of first-time experiences and that to maximize their impact it helps to give students both a heads-up and a chance to reflect after them.

The first step will be an assignment designed to mobilize what Kolb calls abstract conceptualization ("think"). The second centers on a concrete experience ("do") or an opportunity for active experimentation ("make"). The third asks students to reflectively observe ("think over") how the first step shaped their experience of the second step, with emphasis on how "think" and "make"/"do" assignments are different approaches to a holistic phenomenon.

The week before the museum visit, for example, I ask students to watch the film Rikyū (1989) by director and ikebana grand master Hiroshi Teshigahara 勅使河原宏 (1927–2001).  There are many other good options but this film in particular is of interest because the producers got permission to use historical dōgu from museums and private collections. For this assignment we use a digital platform designed for asynchronous collaborative annotation, in which as students watch the film, they can markup passages as interesting (or confusing or problematic) as well as write brief comments that then pop up when we review their reactions in class. A week after the museum visit, students submit an "object biography" in which they narrate the trajectory of a historical artifact from its creation and initial context of use, through its different owners and shifts in cultural meaning, up to its acquisition by a museum and confinement to a glass case. Students chose objects from large repositories at major museums including celebrated medieval items (meibutsu), early modern crafts such as chawan with inscribed poems by Ōtagaki Rengetsu 大田垣蓮月 (1791–1875), modern artifacts such as scoops (chashaku) made by Korean or Taiwanese tea masters during the colonial period, and contemporary experimental ceramics.

Analogously, the week before the chakai, students read an academic article on the phenomenology of tea gatherings, a journalistic account by a foreigner learning chanoyu in rural Japan, or a guide to seasonality in the chashitsu. And a week after the chakai, students are asked to curate a toriawase selecting different dōgu for an imaginary tea gathering hosted for a person they care about (significant others and grandparents are the most popular choices). The students are provided with links to online repositories of famous works in national museums such as the MET or TNM, but encouraged to think also about local collections (such as in a campus museum or gallery) as well as objects not immediately connected to Japanese tea practice. They can submit a list of objects with an accompanying essay, where they explain briefly their choices in connection to their experience of the chakai and the readings they did before it. But they can also paste the different images together to show how the objects would look when placed side by side in the tearoom and show their work as part of a "poster session." As before, this "think over" assignment asks them to discuss their choices in connection to how the "think" and "make"/"do" activities can come together.

Challenges of Experiential Learning

A course with a significant experiential component will pose specific challenges. One of them has to do with accessibility. The usual efforts of instructors and standard policies of institutions to ensure students with diverse learning styles and needs feel welcome in the classroom are different from those needed when students go into the field. Sitting still for long periods of time in the traditional Japanese style (seiza), for example, tends to bring discomfort to most, and is potentially harmful for some if they suffer from back, knee, or hemodynamic issues. A related issue is conditions such as spinal-cord injuries, MS, or paraplegia, which in the classroom are less noticeable or even able-passing but make negotiating spaces such as tearooms and gardens very difficult. Students experiencing anxiety, vision impairment, and hearing difficulties will likely have received accommodation letters from the university, but those letters are usually meant for the regular classroom and seldom offer enough guidance for less predictable environments.

What I have heard from my students is that it helps if the physical aspects of the experiential assignments are both described in detail in the syllabus and discussed during the first class, while they are still able to shop for other classes. An open invitation to the whole class to come by office hours during the first two weeks to introduce themselves will similarly give anybody with concerns or who is feeling on the fence a chance to ask questions and make requests.

Another challenge that comes with experiential assignments is that there are no straightforward or generally applicable guidelines for grading. This is compounded by the multiplicity of types of learning they engage, which range from embodied, haptic, and kinaesthetic, to conceptual, procedural, social, and affective. Similarly, it is difficult to determine with precision what these experiences are teaching. At a high level of abstraction, Matt Ratto's notion of critical making (RATTO, 2011) helps clarify some of these issues. With this term, Ratto refers to a pedagogy strategy that brings together critical thinking (conceptual, linguistic) and physical making (goal-based material work). Yet the serious trouble begins as we attempt to operationalize and assess making and doing experiences in concrete and measurable terms.

For this reason, in the grading guidelines for the course I try to find a trade off between the fairness of an explicit rubric with the freedom of an open prompt. This is not simple, as each institution and each assignment will call for a different approach. Students from different parts of campus are likely to react differently to what they might perceive (in part correctly) as arbitrariness. Students in highly competitive fields tend to experience intense pressure to get top grades, and will often want to discuss grading policies in detail at the beginning of the course. Building a campus-wide reputation as a fair grader through student word-of-mouth is perhaps the only practical solution, but this takes years and luck even for the best and most committed instructors.

Finally, experiential assignments tend to mobilize forms of engagement that can be problematic. We don't want to encourage students participating in a chakai, for example, to see it as an opportunity for casual ethnography. This is to some extent inevitable, because material literacy is a sensibility that is part knowledge, part experience, and part curiosity, and curiosity involves exploring what feels puzzling and seeking insights about it. But cultural curiosity can swiftly turn into gross orientalistic and colonialistic generalizations about whole populations.

Additionally, we need to be clear about how we are presenting these experiences, which while deeply connected to premodern and traditional practices are still inevitably of our own present moment. Do we want to focus our students' attention on the premodern practices that the experiential assignments are designed to reactivate? Or do we understand experiences such as a chakai themselves as objects of study on their own, and enquire into what they reveal about the place of chanoyu in a globalized, capitalistic, digital world?

Go Make Tea!

Tea masters often decorate their tearooms with a hanging scroll that reads kissako 喫茶去, "Go drink tea!" This injunction is generally attributed to the ninth-century Chan master Zhaozhou Congshen 趙州従諗 (778–897), who is said to have used it to both puzzle and encourage one of his disciples. One of my teachers, when I was a student in Kyoto, glossed it as a reminder that, at its heart, the study of chanoyu requires focusing on the concrete and the immediately present—that which is currently in one's hands.

The title of this brief essay is a variation of this expression, a neologism I made up by swapping in "make"—ten cha ko 點茶去, "Go make tea!" It aims to encapsulate the significance of making and doing in learning. That is, that if you want to know something, you have to go and make it yourself, and that there is joy in the process.

References

Kirshner, Hannah. Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town. New York: Penguin, 2021.

Kolb, David, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2015.

Kondo, Dorinne. "The Way of Tea: A Symbolic Analysis." Man 20, no. 2 (1985): 287–306.

Ratto, Matt. "Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life." The Information Society 27, no.4 (2011): 252–60.

Roberts, Jennifer L. "The Power of Patience: Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention." Harvard Magazine (November-December 2013), unpaginated.

Sasaki, Sanmi. Chadō: The Way of Tea. A Japanese Tea Master's Almanac. Boston: Tuttle, 2002.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kritika Yegnashankaran (Center for Teaching and Learning), Craig Milroy (Product Realization Lab), Dan Somen (Room 36), Danielle Raad (Archaeology), Caitlin Murphy Brust (Philosophy of Education), Jacqueline Lee Fong (Management Science & Engineering), and Kelda Jamison (Stanford Humanities Center) for fascinating conversations and feedback on early drafts, as well as the many students who over the years made this course better with their insights and enthusiasm. Also Nancy Hamilton (Urasenke), Mindy Landeck (Austin College), and Lindsay Stirek (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) for reviewing the manuscript and offering suggestions.

To cite this page:

Stilerman, Ariel. "Go Make Tea! (ten cha ko): Assignment Design for Material Literacy and Critical Making." Teaching Tea: History, Practice, Art on Japan Past & Present. 2025. https://japanpastandpresent.org/jp/projects/tea-culture-history-practice/resources/go-make-tea-assignment-design-for-material-literacy-and-critical-making