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Handicrafts With One Hand

22 luglio 2026 di
Inclusion Stories


A Twenty-Eight Year Journey in Education

My master's degree had barely dried on the paper when, as a newly qualified teacher, I drove from the north to the south. It was a hot August evening in 1998. A huge, glowing sun was setting behind the fields. Twenty-eight years have passed since that moment, and my journey as a teacher and as a person has included all kinds of successes and failures. I work as a crafts teacher in a comprehensive school, teaching textile crafts to pupils in grades 3–9. My pupils are between 9 and 16 years old. In addition to teaching crafts, I also work as part of a team that focuses on preventing bullying. Working with school bullying is challenging and sometimes emotionally demanding; nevertheless, it is rewarding and gives my work an additional sense of meaning.

 What are crafts, and why are they studied at school?

My master's degree had barely dried on the paper when, as a newly qualified teacher, I drove from the north to the south. It was a hot August evening in 1998. A huge, glowing sun was setting behind the fields. Twenty-eight years have passed since that moment, and my journey as a teacher and as a person has included all kinds of successes and failures. I work as a crafts teacher in a comprehensive school, teaching textile crafts to pupils in grades 3–9. My pupils are between 9 and 16 years old. In addition to teaching crafts, I also work as part of a team that focuses on preventing bullying. Working with school bullying is challenging and sometimes emotionally demanding; nevertheless, it is rewarding and gives my work an additional sense of meaning.

Crafts is a compulsory subject for both girls and boys from the first grade through the end of the seventh grade. After that, crafts becomes an optional subject. Officially, the subject is called crafts, and it involves working with both hard and soft materials and carrying out complete craft processes that combine the materials and techniques of textile crafts and technical crafts. Since the classrooms are located in completely different parts of the school building and the groups are fairly large, in practice we teach pupils textile crafts for half the year and technical crafts for the other half. There are 2–3 hours of crafts each week, and every pupil in grades 1–7 studies both types of crafts every school year.

In textile crafts lessons, we learn, among other things, how to sew by hand and with a sewing machine, crochet, knit, embroider, design products, make patterns, and sew clothes and household textiles. The aim is to master the entire craft process, from the initial idea to the finished product and its evaluation. All girls and boys also study compulsory technical crafts until the end of seventh grade. In technical crafts, pupils design and work with materials such as wood, metal and plastic, as well as with technology.

Crafts, together with home economics, which is taught in grades 7–9, is regarded as a general educational subject and as an important way of teaching everyday life skills. Having the same crafts education for girls and boys promotes gender equality in the choice of further studies and careers. In the future, there will be fewer traditional “women’s” and “men’s” professions and household tasks. Craft skills are skills not only of the past but also of the future. In a world facing a climate catastrophe, repairing and recycling materials and products will become increasingly important. Craft skills also strengthen the resilience of communities in dealing with unpredictable situations. Schools should develop creativity, problem-solving skills, design skills, perseverance and responsibility towards the environment.

All forms of manual activity, especially in childhood, are important for the development of motor skills and the brain. One-third of the human brain is involved in controlling the hands. Cooperation between the thinking brain and the working hands is a fundamental skill—in other words, an essential part of human development, particularly in childhood. Simultaneous activation of several areas of the brain strengthens neural networks and supports brain plasticity. Making crafts also calms the body, supports working memory, improves concentration, and increases mental well-being and self-efficacy. Despite all the digitalisation around us, human beings will remain hand-using creatures in the future as well.

Crafts is a subject into which it is very easy to integrate a wide range of pupils. Over the years, I have taught, integrated into “ordinary classes”, children with Down’s syndrome and other children with disabilities affecting their cognitive abilities. They have had their own personal assistants with them to support their work. Our school also has special classes for children with intellectual disabilities; whenever possible, these pupils participate in lessons with the mainstream classes.

Our school currently has pupils from 20 different nationalities, and 19 different mother tongues are spoken. Some pupils have arrived in the country as refugees, while others have come through work-related immigration. Immigrant pupils’ previous experiences of school and education can differ enormously. Some have excellent study skills and a history of regular schooling from an early age. Others may have received some form of education in a refugee camp, while everything in the culture of their new home country is completely unfamiliar, and school involves learning very basic, concrete things, starting with how to use a flush toilet.

Experience has taught me that crafts can be practised and learned with very little common language or shared cultural background. Working with one’s hands is something deeply human and universal. It is a fundamental survival skill. Crafts are also a skill and a way of expressing the human desire for aesthetics and the need to shape one’s own environment and identity. Studying crafts is a very fruitful starting point for bringing people together and encountering someone from a different cultural background without a single shared written or spoken word.


For thousands of years, crafts have been taught and learned through the master–apprentice method. I have often felt like a kind of master and the pupils like apprentices, especially in these encounters between cultures where we have worked together without words. The master demonstrates, the apprentice tries and practises. The master demonstrates again and, when necessary, guides the apprentice by hand. At the same time, language is learned: I constantly verbalise what I am doing in my own native language, and gradually the pupils learn the key verbs and concepts related to making crafts.

During the refugee crisis in 2015, new pupils arrived at our school almost every day, mainly young men from Syria and Afghanistan. They were integrated very quickly into the school’s other crafts groups. Once, in the middle of a lesson, someone knocked on the classroom door. Three unfamiliar young men were standing outside. One of them said in poor English: “We speak only Arabic.” That was where we started.

Working with pupils from immigrant backgrounds has been incredibly educational. The work has often been slow and uncertain, and we have completely misunderstood each other on many occasions. Humour has helped in situations where things have gone completely wrong. Like working with one’s hands, smiles and laughter are universal phenomena. I have often been amazed by the pupils’ professional skills, which could be explained by nothing other than having worked as children in a sweatshop in the textile industry. There was no way I could have matched the speed of their fingers.

I had expected that the young boys arriving from the Middle East might not necessarily regard a female teacher as an authority and might consider textile work a ridiculous “women’s job”. I was wrong. The profession of tailor is probably still highly respected as a male profession in many cultures and is treated with respect.

Despite all my experiences of working without a common language or cultural background, I am now going to write about one particularly challenging experience in my career: how do you make crafts with one hand?


Of course, I had noticed the small pupil who stood out from the large group because of her determination. It was obvious that moving around was extremely difficult for her. Despite her difficulties, this little pupil seemed to throw herself wholeheartedly and enthusiastically into every game and activity that interested her.

The pupil had the same class teacher throughout the entire six years of primary school. The teacher is experienced and highly skilled. When she began working with the pupil as she entered our school in first grade, the physiotherapists and occupational therapists had assumed that the pupil would work only with an iPad, because she functioned using only one hand and had poor hand motor skills. Fortunately for the pupil, the experienced teacher questioned the instructions she had been given. Together, the teacher and the pupil’s mother considered that there was an opportunity for development and learning if the right conditions were created. They decided together not to give up immediately, but to try. They agreed to experiment, not to put pressure on the pupil or create expectations, but simply to see what would happen.

At the beginning of first grade, every child learns to draw, colour, form letters and write. Everyone practises, and everyone needs a mindset that does not give up as soon as something becomes difficult. So we all started together, the whole group, learning to write by hand. The pupil had a personal assistant to support her. The pupil’s mother considers the primary school teacher’s role crucial to the success of her daughter’s educational journey. She is grateful for the teacher’s contribution to learning many different skills.

The teacher’s starting point was not that physical limitations should prevent the pupil from doing something, but rather to find ways of working that allowed the whole group to do as much as possible together. The mother says that one particularly meaningful thing was that, at the beginning of the school journey, the teacher and the pupils searched for and found each child’s own superpower—a personal strength that could support their growth and development. The pupil’s superpower turned out to be perseverance. The idea of her own superpower, perseverance, proved extremely important, and it has been needed many times. In her mother’s view, having her own superpower gave the child strength.

Learning to write was, of course, difficult, and a huge amount of repetition was needed. When the pupils signed their names in the lower right-hand corner of their drawings, the pupil’s signature was initially so large that it covered the entire sheet of paper. Gradually, however, the signature became smaller, and writing slowly began to get easier. To be completely honest, handwriting was difficult enough that only her own teacher—or perhaps a long-serving pharmacist—could read it fluently… But the skill had been learned!

A huge amount of fine motor development and new neural connections supporting hand–eye coordination had taken place. Despite digitalisation, handwriting is still an important skill that promotes equality among people. All important documents are still signed with a pen on paper. Thanks to the wise teacher and her mother, the pupil will one day, as an adult, be able to sign her employment contract and mortgage documents with her own unique signature.

Five years ago, an enthusiastic group of nine-year-olds arrived in my crafts classroom for the first time, including this pupil and her assistant. I decided that we would simply start working, get to know one another, and gradually see what we could and could not do. I had no previous experience or training in working in a situation where physical limitations made fine-motor craft activities so difficult.

There are certainly technologies and computer programmes that we could have made much more use of in designing, working and documenting our projects. The reality of everyday school life, however, was that I did not have the time or enough personal interest in digital skills to learn completely new ways of working whose actual use with young pupils would ultimately have been quite limited.

From an outsider’s perspective, everyday life in a crafts classroom can look chaotic: there are many different small tools and materials, noisy machines, pupils moving from one workstation to another, talking while they work, and often quite a lot of mess. It is controlled chaos. The teacher needs effective routines and must have the process under control for the objectives to be achieved. Pupils often need a lot of help; I have sometimes compared teaching crafts to teaching piano to fourteen players of completely different skill levels at the same time.

Neither the classroom nor the school building had been designed with a pupil with a physical disability in mind, although the sixteen-year-old building is accessible, with ramps and lifts. Using them in everyday life proved cumbersome. The crafts classroom also had no assistive devices to make working easier. Cutting with ordinary scissors worked for a short while; practically all the other small craft supplies and tools were too small and difficult to handle. Attaching pins would have been impossible, and even using a ruler was very difficult.


When you have two fully functioning hands, you do not even stop to think about how many tiny, slippery objects there are in a crafts classroom. Fortunately, the pupil’s superpower was perseverance! We soon discovered that sewing with a sewing machine worked very well with the assistant’s help. Pupils love sewing with a sewing machine; for young children, it has just the right amount of speed and a sense of danger. The pupils whizzed away at their machines, making soft toy frogs, and things seemed to get off to a good start.

The following year, the rest of the group began practising yarn crafts: knitting and crocheting. Neither of these can really be done with one hand, no matter how strong your superpower of perseverance might be. So the pupil continued with the sewing machine while the other pupils worked on tasks requiring two obedient hands.

I was completely occupied with the rest of the group. When you are teaching a dozen children to knit on your own, there is a constant queue of pupils needing help. I began to notice, however, that the pupil’s motivation for crafts was declining. She was quite happy to take things a little too easy and let her assistant do tasks that she could have done herself. There was obvious frustration and underperformance.

I even began to wonder whether crafts made any sense for the pupil herself. Would it be more motivating and a better use of her time if, instead of crafts lessons, she studied something that supported her existing strengths?

A couple of times, I had an occupational therapist join me in the crafts lessons, and I had high expectations. However, I had to realise that our perspectives on the situation were very different. I was thinking about the meaningfulness of the activity, the feeling of belonging to the group, and motivation to work, whereas the occupational therapist naturally focused more on the therapeutic dimension of the activity and strengthening physical functioning.

Encouraged by the occupational therapist, we began needle felting. In needle felting, tufts of sheep’s wool are repeatedly stabbed with a felting needle, gradually causing the wool to felt into the desired shape. The first felting project was enjoyable, but when I offered the pupil one felting project after another, I realised that we had now reached the very bottom of the motivational pit.

I understood that an intelligent young person is not rewarded by repeatedly poking a piece of wool with a felting needle, no matter how beneficial the activity may be for developing motor skills. An intelligent young person is rewarded by being able to feel that they belong to the group, to design and make exactly the same projects as their friends, regardless of whether they are able to carry out the actual technique themselves.

I realised this at the bottom of that motivational pit. I decided that we would climb out of it by trusting our intuition and, above all, trying to read the child’s own feelings about the activity.

From a robot moving the needle to the leader of the process

The last two years in the crafts classroom went quite well. We decided that the whole group would work on the same projects. The pupil would do everything she was able to do herself, and whenever a concrete task was impossible or too difficult, she would become the person in charge of the process and the work, while her assistant carried out the actual practical step.

We had some wonderful moments when the pupils in the class designed and made flags from textile materials for countries they had invented themselves. They made flags whenever they had a spare moment, almost throughout the entire school year. Around the imaginary countries and the flags representing them grew a whole shared imaginary world created by the pupils.

In their play, the pupils were at the heart of creativity: developing something new and unique together. Most university-educated engineers and designers could have learned something from the pupils’ creative, interactive and egalitarian teamwork. Under the guise of play—and almost by accident—the pupils experienced what the workplace of the future could be like at its best.

Seventh grade, and at the same time the final year of compulsory crafts, was the culmination of our shared journey. The pupil was assigned a young assistant who had just graduated from upper secondary school. Despite lacking formal training, the assistant knew exactly what she was doing. The pupil and the assistant clearly clicked, and with the assistant’s encouragement, the pupil was able to work to the best of her abilities.

The pupil herself said that the assistant always made her try first, and only when she saw that the pupil could not manage did she carry out the task herself. At the same time, however, she required the pupil to read and understand the instructions and to take responsibility for directing the work.

The goal in seventh grade was to design and make a hoodie from sweatshirt fabric. The stages of the process included design, taking measurements, drawing the pattern, cutting the fabric, reading the instructions, and assembling the hoodie by sewing it with a sewing machine according to the instructions. The hoodie was decorated with a self-designed print using fabric-printing colours.

The cooperation between the assistant and the pupil worked like something out of a textbook, and the whole process was incredibly impressive. According to the assistant, the pupil’s motor skills developed significantly during the school year. It is reasonable to assume that her self-efficacy developed alongside them.


I recently talked to the pupil about her thoughts on studying crafts now that almost a year has passed since compulsory crafts ended. She herself feels that textile crafts was the subject throughout her entire school journey that required the most perseverance.

She said that at times it would have been tempting to replace the whole demanding textile crafts subject with another subject, or with technical crafts, which had always been somewhat easier because the tools and working methods were more manageable for her.

Now, however, she feels that it was really good that she spent five years doing crafts, even though it was difficult at times. Above all, she has the feeling that studying crafts went surprisingly well considering what had been expected. My own feelings, as well as those of her mother and her primary school class teacher, are very much in line with hers.

The pupil, whose superpower of perseverance was identified at the very beginning of her school journey, enjoys physical education at school, is going to upper secondary school, and dreams of a career as a para-football player or professional esports player.

She said that she has never really been bullied at school any more than the other pupils, something her mother is especially happy about, as being bullied had been her greatest fear concerning her child’s school experience. The pupil feels that, basically, everything is going quite well.

Of course, now that she is in lower secondary school and every lesson takes place in a different part of a three-storey building, she is often completely exhausted by the end of the school day. The assistant she had in seventh grade also identifies a sense of humour as one of her superpowers. It has helped her get through long, demanding school days and tasks that were difficult to begin with.

I have learned a great deal from these years, including the fact that crafts can be done not only without a common language but also with one slightly unsteady hand.

It required supportive and open-minded parents, a skilled and appropriately demanding primary school teacher who laid the foundation for learning. It required trial and error, as well as the courage to make pupil-centred decisions that focused on belonging to the group, mental well-being and maintaining motivation.

It also required a little bit of good luck—in this case, in the form of a brilliant young assistant.

And above all, it required the pupil’s own superpower:

perseverance.

Significant Change 

1. Identify Domains of Change

Based on the narrative provided, this story fits the following domains:

  • Systemic & Classroom Inclusion: Moving away from exclusionary, separate digital tasks toward full participation in a standard curriculum alongside peers.

  • Student Motivation & Agency: Shifting from underperformance and a "motivation pit" to taking complete ownership of the learning process.

  • Teacher Innovation & Professional Growth: Overcoming a lack of prior specialized training by adapting instructional methods based on student- centered intuition rather than strictly clinical guidelines.


2. List Observable Changes

  • Initial Intervention Refusal: The primary school teacher and mother rejected

    the therapists' recommendation to restrict the student entirely to an iPad.

  • Signature Progression: The student's hand-written signature adapted from covering an entire sheet of paper to a functional, smaller size.

  • Behavioral Decline (The "Motivation Pit"): When restricted to repetitive, low- complexity motor tasks (needle felting), the student began taking it too easy, letting the assistant take over, and displaying visible frustration.

  • Role Transformation: The student transitioned from a passive "needle-moving robot" into the active "process owner and supervisor" of complex tasks.

  • Independent Trialing: Supported by a new assistant, the student began attempting every technical step first before allowing the assistant to step in.

  • Independent Project Completion: The student successfully designed, measured, cut, and machine-sewed a personalized hoodie.


3. Suggest Candidate MSCs

• The Shift from Task Execution to Process Ownership: The most significant change occurred when the teacher stopped trying to adapt the physical action of crafting for one hand (which led to isolating, unrewarding tasks like endless needle felting) and instead adapted the cognitive and managerial role of the student within the standard project framework. This redefined what "doing" crafts means, transforming the student from a disengaged participant into a collaborative leader.

4. Stakeholder Mapping

  • Student: A determined pupil with hemiplegia/limited single-hand mobility, whose recognized superpower is perseverance.

  • Author/Crafts Teacher: Pauliina Impiö, an experienced textile crafts educator and anti-bullying team member.

  • Primary School Teacher: An experienced, highly professional educator who taught the student for grades 1–6 and established their foundation for learning.

  • Mother: An active, supportive parent who collaborated with teachers to push past physical limitations.

  • Assistants: A primary school assistant, followed by a highly effective, encouraging upper-secondary graduate assistant in grade 7.

  • Clinical Experts: Occupational therapists and physiotherapists who provided functional assessments and recommendations.




Change Ripple 

Review the significant changes in this 'Change Ripple' infographic. Click image to enlarge


 Reflection Prism

The narrative illustrates a powerful practical application of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, mediated beautifully through an instructional assistant. Initially, the teacher fell into a common trap: confusing physical task differentiation with meaningful cognitive engagement. The breakthrough occurred when the pedagogy shifted from modifying outputs to modifying agency. By transforming the student into a "process supervisor," the educator engaged high-order executive functioning—designing, planning, and instructing. This shows that inclusive education thrives when teachers look past clinical limitations and trust instructional intuition to maintain high expectations for all learners.

This story highlights the vital link between authentic belonging, self-efficacy, and emotional resilience. When restricted to repetitive, simplified therapeutic tasks, the student experienced a deep motivational collapse driven by a threat to their autonomy and a feeling of alienation from peers. Shifting the focus to group-aligned goals restored the student's sense of identity and value within the classroom community. By treating "perseverance" as an intrinsic superpower rather than a medical deficit, the educators built long-term emotional resilience, protecting the student from the isolation and vulnerability to bullying that frequently impacts neurodivergent youth.

From a sociological perspective, this narrative documents a successful shift from the medical model of disability to the social model. The clinical advice initially sought to pathologize and isolate the student via a separate, digital-only curriculum. By resisting this and altering the social architecture of the workshop, the school dismantled systemic barriers to participation. Inclusive craftwork became an equalizer, fostering a collaborative culture where peer interactions were built on shared creative play rather than pity or difference. The student was not merely integrated; they were granted full status in the classroom's social fabric.

The narrative underscores a critical human resource insight regarding the strategic deployment of paraprofessionals. Initially, the classroom assistant's presence risked fostering learned helplessness and underperformance. The organizational breakthrough occurred when the assistant's role shifted from a task executor to a facilitator of student agency—requiring the student to attempt physical steps first and step into the role of a process supervisor. For school leaders, this emphasizes that inclusive success relies less on the mere volume of support hours allocated, and far more on deliberately training staff to cultivate cognitive independence, leadership, and true systemic belonging.

Furthermore, a potential operational disconnect is revealed between the school's educational goals and external medical services. Clinical experts prescribed exclusionary, digital-only pathways or isolating, repetitive exercises that triggered a motivational collapse. School leadership must bridge these multi-agency gaps, empowering frontline educators to trust their pedagogical intuition and push back against clinical directives that prioritize physical therapy over peer socialization and student well-being.