Teaching to Repair the World

date: September 22, 2025

The Repair Shop

In Britain, as well as Australia, there is a popular TV show called The Repair Shop. The show is set in a rustic barn, home to a guild of expert artisans. Each belongs to a different craft tradition: woodwork, jewelry making, textile repair, and more. These skilled exponents of different crafts also have diverse identities in terms of race, gender, generation, and sexuality. In every episode, three guests arrive—sometimes on their own, sometimes as a pair—bearing an item that has fallen into disrepair. These possessions have little financial worth, but they have great sentimental value. The craftspeople are not only skilled. They are also personable. They take these artefacts and talk about them with their clients.

In one programme, an elderly man brings in a wooden box that has almost fallen to pieces. He found the box in the corner of his older sister’s attic, he explains, just after she had passed away. When he had opened the lid, he found a piece of paper. He was shocked. It was his adoption certificate. He had no idea he had been adopted. There was more. The person who had adopted him was his grandmother. He had always believed she was his mother. His actual mother, it turned out, was the person he had always regarded as his older sister. When the people in the barn put this battered box back together with all their skill and diligent attention to detail, they are, in a way, also putting his whole life back together. At the end of the programme, when the cover is whisked off the box, and its owner can see it renewed in all its glory, he weeps.

Each item that is brought into the barn is the centrepiece of a larger narrative. An artefact of great sentimental value that has fallen into disrepair is restored by a guild of diverse craftspeople. Their work transforms not just the artefact but also everyone involved, and it casts light on as well as drawing meaning from a significant moment in history. The pandora’s box containing the adoption certificate points to a time just two generations ago when having children out of wedlock was a source of shame that had to be hidden. A broken cross that saved a father’s life when it took a wartime bullet that was headed for his heart provides insights into war and displacement. In case after case, there is a compelling relationship between three things:

An exquisitely skilled, expert practice of impressive craftsmanship.
The people who practise the craft and those who also benefit from the restoration.
The social and historical context that gives meaning to the artefacts and the people to whom they have belonged.

The culminating moment in each programme involves unveiling the restored items to the people who brought them in. The person, the practice, and the broader context that situates them are brought together in epiphanies of transformation.

Teaching as Repair Work

The Repair Shop is a powerful metaphor for how we need to look at teaching. The craft of teaching has many parallels with the craft of repair work. It is about making, doing, fixing, and adjusting practice from a range of available things. And, it is not just a technical craft, but a moral one too that is underpinned by purpose, ethics, and relationships in developing the minds of young people. It would be wrong to say that our students are broken. That would be destructive deficit thinking. Children bring all kinds of gifts and assets with them into the classroom. But undeniably, more and more young people also come to school with damage – by the aftermath of COVID-19, by recent and intergenerational traumas, by digital exploitation, and by the scourge of grinding poverty. One task of teaching is not to pity or care for what is broken, but to repair human damage when it appears before us, to help make people whole again, into improved versions of themselves.

The craft of teaching, like the craft of The Repair Shop is practical, personal, and social. The expert practice of teaching is connected to the people, in the world they experience together. Like The Repair Shop, it consists of three interrelated elements.

The Practice

Fine craftsmanship consists of expert practice. Great teaching requires excellent practice. The more sophisticated a practice is, the harder it is to achieve excellence. Poorly understood project work, cooperative learning, and problem-based learning, for example, have often led to weak learning outcomes (Hargreaves, 2025). In Fix the Past or Invent the Future, Yong Zhao (2026) points out that problem-based learning often fails because it is treated as being too much about the process and not enough about the quality of the product. Yet it is making something that is truly useful to other people, that is the essence of engagement, entrepreneurship, and excellence, he says. Excellent practice always matters.

The People

Attending to the practice alone is not enough, though. Fine craftwork invokes senses of pride and dignity. But in The Craftsman, Richard Sennett (2008) argues that too often, “practical activity has been demeaned, divorced from supposedly higher pursuits”. Manual work has been turned into instrumental activity; “pride in one’s work treated as a luxury”. The same thing happens when we impose evidence-based teaching methods as stand-alone techniques.

Teaching is also a source of pride, dignity, and fulfillment when it connects with teachers and learners as people. You don’t switch teachers on and off, like digital devices. Good teaching is not just about precise practices. It’s about people and relationships too.

Most teaching also involves identity work – understanding and responding to the distinctive identities and unique personalities of the people in a class (Shirley and Hargreaves, 2023). Teachers have identities that they bring into work with them too. Showing who you are, where you’ve come from, and what you care about, is a big part of being a teacher. The people that teachers are, lend meaning to the practices that make up their work.

The World

Last, let’s not forget the wider world. Mounting problems of mental health and increasing rates of special needs mean it’s essential to be pedagogically inclusive. It would be untenable to teach classes including students from ethnically diverse backgrounds without responding to the nature of racism in society. If students are refugees from war-torn countries, trauma-informed approaches are also essential.

The world outside is not just a collection of problems and challenges either. When educators talk about preparing young people with global competencies for the future, they need to have an informed sense of what that future might be, so they can consider the opportunities, as well as the risks.

A World in Disrepair

Schools and classrooms should be more like The Repair Shop – places where expert practice is expressed and experienced by the people involved in a historical moment and surrounding society that they inhabit together. What makes this approach to teaching and learning so critical now is that our world is manifestly in a state of great despair and disrepair. The task of education and educators is not just to help young people cope with that world. It is also to equip them to transform it; to craft it into something better.

The first place that schools can start to fix this world that has fallen into disrepair is in schools themselves. Consider two examples from our LEGO Foundation funded project on developing play-based learning in the middle years after COVID-19 (Hargreaves & Jones, 2024; Hollweck & Hargreaves, 2025).

Building Trails

Mitchell Hemphill “grew up in a village.” He knows rural children and “can relate to them.” As principal of Bath Community School in potato farming country, New Brunswick, he worked in a community near the McCains French Fries factory, where 70% of the school’s 130 students lived around the poverty line.

COVID-19 hit Bath’s families hard. Children were confined at home, cut off from supports, and often absorbed in gaming for hours. Mitchell, by his own admission a “very emotional person,” was shaken by the lingering effects on his students and broke down more than once while recalling them.

His leadership was deeply personal. Alongside administrative duties, he taught for over two hours a day, four days a week. He built relationships with troubled children, arranged rides for parents to distant medical appointments, and organized grocery drop-offs. He secured donations of bikes, tools, and equipment from local groups. For him, teaching and leading blurred into caring and advocating.

The school’s project centered on building woodland trails. Students had been “stuck inside” with too much “screentime.” Outdoor learning, Mitchell argued, was “what’s been missing for a long time.”

He recalled three Grade 6 boys: one from a group home, another scarred by trauma with his father, and a third struggling to connect with school. Out snowshoeing, they discovered a deer trail and a freshly shed pair of antlers, still streaked with blood. Their excitement and joy, Mitchell said, were palpable: they were “just loving it.”

Megan Munro, the science teacher for Grades 6–8, saw this excitement ripple across the school. Passionate about the outdoors, she wanted her students to leave their screens, take risks, and discover new capacities. They planned routes with ozobots on paper, then hiked, mapped, and built. They constructed bridges, calculated slopes, and posted signs naming trees and animals. They expended energy outside, returning to class “better able to focus” and “settle down.” They collaborated, supported peers with disabilities, solved problems, and achieved more than they believed possible. Students who were initially reluctant soon asked daily, “Are we going on the trail today?”

Outdoor learning at Bath was connected to the people who provided it and the people it was for. It boosted wellbeing, sharpened focus, and connected curriculum with the living world beyond the school walls. By building the trails, everyone rebuilt themselves in the process.

Into Deep Water

More than half of the human body is water. For Indigenous peoples, water is inseparable from land, identity, and spirituality. Ensuring universal access to safe water and sanitation is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #6. So, when the playful learning team at St George Elementary School in the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) focused their project on water ecosystems and clean drinking water for all Canadian communities, they were venturing into deep water—in the best sense.

The OCSB had already been working with Michael Fullan’s New Pedagogies for Deep Learning network (NPDL)( Fullan, Quinn & McEachen 2018) and its new water project integrated our project with NPDL and with the Board’s mission of nurturing students as “thoughtful, well-rounded citizens”.

Water became a theme for multiple forms of exploration. Biologically, students used ozobots to trace the journey of water through the body. Spiritually, an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper sang and taught about water’s sacred role and the importance of the Ottawa River to First Nations. Scientifically, older students joined in to test local water for acidity and pollutants, and to design and build filters. Digitally, Minecraft provided a platform for constructing wastewater treatment plants that were then critiqued with input from city environmental staff. Through the application, Scratch, students created cardboard arcade games to draw the community into discussions about water and sustainability.

Connections extended outward. Using our project’s virtual network, St George partnered with a school in an Inuit community to learn about clean water challenges in the North. After thoughtful exchanges about inequitable water access, the students at St George raised funds for a charity tackling this very issue. Students also engaged in dialogue about Inuit culture, played Indigenous games, and built friendships rooted in mutual respect and shared purpose.

The project gained a public identity when students, trained by a social enterprise partner, branded their work as Every Last Sip—a campaign offering “a splash of hope” and calling for clean water “at the turn of a tap” for every Canadian.

A review of the OCSB’s systemwide involvement, observed that as students went deeper into their water project, “they got better at communicating, collaborating, thinking critically, and solving problems creatively” (Fine and Mehta, 2024: 2).

The playful learning at St George was “serious play”: an integration of science, Indigenous knowledge, outdoor activity, digital design, and real-world problem solving. The project linked students with peers both near and far, with the local community, and with cultures beyond their own.

Repairing things—whether ecosystems, communities, or relationships—is not just about fixing damage. It’s about restoring hope and creating purpose by transforming the world around us.

Conclusion

What might the idea of teaching as repair work mean for you?

Great teaching is about crafting excellent practice. It is not about following mandated practices handed down by other people. Nor is it about improvising innovations with no concern for their quality.
Great teaching does not treat pedagogy as a standardized script. It engages the passions of teachers and reaches down into the diverse identities of students to engage all of them fully (Shirley and Hargreaves, 2021).
Great teaching needs to involve all students more in creating and fixing things and solving problems that matter – especially with the shortening of global supply chains and the movement of more manufacturing closer to home.
Great teaching taps into teachers’ and students’ experience of the world, connects with it and makes sense through it. There is also a moral obligation to help develop young people so they can play a part in the world and try to change it for the better.
Great teaching also comes from working collaboratively – not just in quick-fix, task-based data teams, but as guilds of skilled craftworkers who build better practice together.

Teachers must build wherever they can. They must also repair wherever they must – not patch up and make do, but truly transform and renew their students and the world by crafting inspiring teaching and learning together. The ultimate builders of Canada’s future are our teachers and our students. Let’s make it easier rather than harder for them to do that work.

References

Fine, S & Mehta, J. (2024). A “Big Tent” Strategy for Systemwide Change, Toronto, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning.

Fullan, M., Quinn, J., & McEachen, J. (2018). Deep Learning: Engage the world to change the world. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Hargreaves, A. (2025) The Making of an Educator: Living Through and Learning from the Great Education Shift, Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales: Crown House Publishing.

Hargreaves, A. & Jones, C. (2024). Leading Innovators: How leaders can respond to the global crisis in the teaching profession. Australian Educational Leader, Term 2, 2024.

Hollweck, T & Hargreaves, A. (2025). Canadian Playful Schools Network: Final Report. Ottawa. University of Ottawa. https://www.andyhargreaves.com/uploads/5/2/9/2/5292616/cpsn_final_report_hargreaves___hollweck_2025_apr23.pdf

Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press.

Shirley, D. & Hargreaves, A. (2024) The Age of Identity: Who do our kids think they are…and how We can we help them belong. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Shirley, D., & Hargreaves, A. (2021). Five Paths of Student Engagement: Blazing the trail to learning and success. Bloomington, IN. Solution Tree Press.

Zhao, Y. (2026) Fix the Past or Invent the Future, Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Meet the Expert(s)

Dr. Andy Hargreaves

Professor, University of Ottawa

Andy Hargreaves is an author or editor of almost 40 books, Hargreaves has received 10 outstanding book awards. Andy is an education adviser to the First Minister of Scotland, and for the Minister of Education for New Brunswick.