Patience Stones: Material Encounters for Slow Currents of Pedagogy

Abstract This article moves across sites in Canada and Japan with the practice of making Patience Stones (Sang‐e Saboor), a biodegradable, dough‐based artistic and pedagogical object that invites artist–teachers and artist–learners into with‐nessing and slow becoming. Drawing through a/r/tography, material encounter and artist–teacher practice, the inquiry approaches pedagogy as an emergent, layered and relational field shaped through wandering, touching, waiting and being‐with. Working with elementary and university students, the making of soft, air‐dry stones becomes a pedagogical companion for thinking through patience, plurality and reciprocal forms of relations. Interweaving and contextualising fragments of narratives, visual documentations, poetic propositions and theory, the article (re)visits and (re)orients inherited understandings of patience in Persian and Japanese contexts, troubling the glorification of endless endurance often expected within education and institutions. Against accelerated cultures of productivity, extraction and educational legibility, the article proposes the ‘slow currents of pedagogy’ as practices of softness, companionship, pliability and shared becoming(s).