Making It Matter: Why Process, Creativity and Co-Creation Belong at the Heart of Education

We talk about making sense of things. About making a life. Making friends. Sometimes, even making do. We make amends. We make time. We make a point—or a complaint. We make an effort. We make progress. We make history. We make plans. And when things don’t go to plan, we make something up.

From our earliest years, we are all instinctive makers. We draw, stack, shape, and imagine. Making is how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Yet somewhere along the way—especially in schools—this urge to inquire through making becomes sidelined. In place of inquiry and exploration, passive reception. Instead of imagination, regurgitation and repetition. Knowledge is given, already formed, and delivered to be memorised, not questioned or remade.

But if to make is human, then denying that capacity is to deny a part of our humanity.

The Making Meaning Project in the School of Education used student-staff collaboration, maker sessions, virtual galleries, and discussions to develop new assessment methods and criteria that integrate creative artefacts as a more inclusive and authentic evaluation method. The project began with a simple but powerful belief: making is an educational act that matters. And that through the arts and creativity, we not only make sense of the world—we make a difference to it.

I’m not alone in this perspective. Scholars like Daisy Fancourt (2019) show how the arts can shape health and wellbeing. Maria Rosario Jackson (2008) maps their impact on place, identity, and community. Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013) reminds us that making is about relating, engaging, and thinking with our hands and our bodies in a way that is relational and deeply thoughtful.

To this end, making aligns beautifully with educational movements that seek transformation. At the University of Exeter, the Curriculum for Change initiative recognises this, embedding inclusive design that aims to break away from rigid disciplinary silos. In this context, the educational importance of making is not an ‘extra’—rather, it is essential to how we learn, connect, and evolve.

So, what did we learn from working alongside students in the Making Meaning Project? One thing we discovered is that true co-creation means giving up control. It involves an educational gesture toward something of interest or importance (Biesta, 2002) and then holding space for the learning subject to emerge through a developing process of sense-making. It’s about dialogue, openness, and responding, in an informed way, to the surprising and unexpected.

The success of this work prompts us to reconsider how we evaluate learning. If students are to authentically make meaning, then we need ways of validating and valuing that process. Not just a summative snapshot of the destination, but a full understanding of how the road was travelled. The risks taken. The revisions made. The feedback absorbed. The ideas that sagged or stalled—the ones that flew, and the justification of why some ideas are worth pursuing over others.

Assessing how meanings are constructed requires more than traditional testing. It calls for the creation of varied spaces, the design of diverse opportunities, and a rethinking of what we expect learning to look like—how it is evidenced, and why it matters.

What this project revealed is that the learning students experience through active making is often not immediately visible in the final artefact. Instead, it is embedded in the unfolding moments of creation and captured through critical, personal reflection on the process. It affirmed that making meaning can be slow. Messy. Ongoing. It is also plural and dialogic: students arrived at meanings that sometimes aligned with, and at other times diverged from, those of their peers. Yet these differences did not make the meanings any less real. Rather, they collectively offered a more honest representation of the world’s complexity.

Making space for this kind of learning demands that we, too, remain open—to new forms of assessment, to ambiguity, and to the evolving nature of learning as a creative process. It asks us to stay responsive, to allow for experimentation, and to embrace the idea of making things up as we go—together.

Further Reading

Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. WHO Regional Office for Europe.

Jackson, M. R. (2008). Art and cultural participation at the heart of community life. In Understanding the Arts and Creative Sector in the United States: Revised Edition (pp. 92-104). Rutgers University Press.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055

Biesta, G. (2017). Letting art teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys. ArtEZ Press.

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