As the costume designer for our Strange Crochet video production, and taking inspiration from Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes, teacher as bricoleur, I gathered old materials and brought them together in new ways. Working with these new media, in a different scale, I was clumsy in something that had felt natural to me before. I was forced to make the intuitive explicit, like thinking about breathing. Building new connections left my hands sore the next day.

Process: I took old fabrics that I had no use for and tore them into strips, making big balls of fabric-yarn. Some were hard to tear up, they felt precious, and a friend helped me find courage. I hated it and loved it in many stages of in-between, and I fought the immobilizing power of perfect and not-perfect, embracing the forever becoming.

Designing for online and blended learning requires so much more planning, and yet also requires an openness to shift and pivot as needed. We work to plan the ways our learners interact with the content. We use our imaginations to foresee possible future outcomes and accommodate them, but each human experience is delightfully unpredictable and our learners will inevitably transcend the bounds of our constructed universe. Part of our job, of course, is to rein them back in as needed, but we must also leave room for the spontaneous happy accidents that bubble up so easily in a physical classroom. How do we create a sandbox, and not an obstacle course?