You start to question which student is truly learning when you see them arranging LEGO figures on a table to map out their understanding of identity or staring blankly at a semiotics reading. For decades, David Gauntlett, a British media scholar and professor who focused much of his career on that particular question, maintained that it was the second student. Making something tangible requires a type of thinking that is rarely required by passive reading, not because tactile work is simpler.
Gauntlett’s most talked-about book, Making is Connecting, which was released in 2011, made the main point very clear: creativity is not a pastime or a skill exclusive to artists. It is how people form communities, interact with the world in meaningful ways, and comprehend difficult concepts. His research connected the act of creating things with more widespread social participation, drawing on everything from DIY media production to craft culture. When the book came out, YouTube was changing who could be a creator, and Gauntlett appeared to have some insight into this change before many organizations did.
In reality, though, he was questioning a fundamental structural tenet of formal education, which is that knowledge moves from text to the brain in a single direction and that the body has little bearing on the process. For universities, it’s a comfortable assumption. It also happens to be one that has been subtly complicated for years by an increasing amount of research in science education.
The reaction has been remarkably inconsistent in American higher education. Gauntlett’s ideas were almost immediately assimilated by some design schools and art programs because creating things was already ingrained in their identities. Instead of always using the term paper, some forward-thinking undergraduate programs started introducing maker-style projects that required students to translate theoretical frameworks into tangible or visual form. According to the majority of instructors who tried it, the results were unexpected: students who had trouble explaining Foucault in an essay could frequently illustrate the idea with startling clarity when asked to construct or organize something.
However, the general public remained doubtful. It’s possible that institutional inertia had more to do with the resistance than pedagogical disagreement. Measurable, comparable written outputs are the foundation of American university assessment systems. A registrar’s database does not neatly accommodate rubrics for a LEGO reconstruction of media theory. Additionally, faculty members, especially those in the humanities, quietly worry that their tactile or creative assignments will be viewed as less serious, rigorous, or defendable during tenure review. As a result, Gauntlett’s framework rarely completely changes how the majority of courses are actually organized; instead, it is frequently mentioned in curricula and footnoted in educational studies.
This is not just an American issue. The Writing in Creative Practice community and numerous conferences on genre in art and design education have demonstrated that British and European institutions have struggled with similar conflicts. Even though instructors support Gauntlett-style approaches, their widespread adoption feels politically complex due to certain aspects of the American academic environment, such as the weight of standardized outcomes, the expense of higher education, and its transactional logic.
There is a sense that Gauntlett’s ideas continue to emerge just a little bit ahead of institutional willingness to implement them as all of this has developed over time. In the early 2010s, K–12 education saw a surge in interest in the maker movement. For a few conference cycles, the term “hands-on learning” became popular. The LEGO was then placed back in the cabinet as the assessment apparatus reasserted itself.
Gauntlett recognized that creating something is not an enjoyable addition to critical thinking, which American education has failed to fully address. He once described it as “a longer stretch of thoughtfulness, a different gear of cognition that written analysis alone cannot fully reach.” It’s genuinely unclear if that concept will ever become the norm rather than the exception in American classrooms. However, the debate is still ongoing.
