On Apprenticeship

A good community provides the resources to realize a new idea.  “But they also provide a constraint.  The idea has to be within the values of the community.  This keeps us focus not on [superficial things], but on things that actually provide value and are interesting and new and dynamic and weird.”  - Hank Green

Several features of maker-centered teaching and learning that have been identified by Clapp et al. (2016) are consistent with literature about apprenticeship learning, especially the broad distribution of teaching roles and active engagement in figuring things out.  In fact, situated learning/cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1984), cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991), and communities of practice (Weger, 1998) can be excellent frameworks for understanding and building on emerging findings in maker education.  Moreover, the maker movement affords a really powerful opportunity to extend theories of learning in practice.  I have just started scratching the surface of the maker education literature, but this is a direction that I think will be fruitful.

Unfortunately, “apprenticeship” is a widely mis-used term in education.  It has been appropriated to apply to all kinds of approaches to learning the thing by doing the thing.  Some purported “apprenticeship” opportunities are vacuous, short-term observations, such as job-shadowing someone for a day.  Others restrict the kind of work that can be considered for apprenticing, or use other superficial criteria to determine what kinds of experience to qualify.  For example, Clarke and Winch (2004) say “Our understanding of apprenticeship therefore covers the situation where a student, though based in a workplace and bound to an employer or group of employers, spends a substantial amount of time in education through a system of block release.” None of this is relevant according to research about genuine apprenticeship experiences.  This is problematic, because literature about apprenticeship has provided some really powerful implications for education.  For example:

• New apprentices get involved right away, but in low-stakes ways.  Lave and Wenger (1991) call it “legitimate peripheral participation.”  An apprentice tailor, for example, might begin by sewing buttons on to an otherwise completed garment.  This is authentic involvement in the practices of the shop.  However, the consequences of making a mistake are minimal.  If a button is sewn incorrectly, the thread can simply be cut and pulled out – and the operation tried again.  Over time, apprentices master basic skills and learn to distinguish quality work, so they can take on increasingly significant tasks.  They might move from sewing buttons, to sewing precut pockets onto a mostly complete garment (followed by the button that holds it closed).  From there they may be given less-and-less complete garments to sew together until they can skillfully join all of the separate pieces.  Then they may learn to cut the pieces from larger sections of fabric, then to create patterns from dimensions, and so on until the develop all the skills needed for the entire process of creating a garment for a particular person to wear.  In so doing, they move from the periphery toward more fuller, more central participation in the practices of the community.  And the learning continues as they continue to take on increasing responsibilities as stewards of their craft. 
• The movement from periphery to center typically proceeds in the opposite direction of scope & sequence schooling.  Apprentices begin by learning tasks that are final steps in creating a finished product and work backward toward the beginning.  As a result, each time they are introduced to a new task, the criteria for doing it well are obvious - because they already know what needs to happen in the subsequent step.  They also see exemplars of the ultimate goal from the outset. 
• Most of the learning in well-established guilds is not directly from master to apprentice.  New apprentices usually have some interaction with whoever is the head of the shop, but most of what they learn comes from interactions with other apprentices – and the ones they interact with most are the ones closest to their own skill level.  Everyone in the shop is a potential source of knowledge to everyone else, but for most apprentices, the most common (and comfortable) source of learning is someone just a little farther along on the learning path. In addition, guilds are often communal, so apprentices in one shop often learn from masters in another (sometimes teaching the master of their own shop things they learned in another).  There is a complex web of learning among members of a community of practice like this, which generally flows from more experienced members of the community to less experienced members – but it flows in all other directions as well.  

Those features of situated learning are echoed in the findings of Clapp et al.  There are other connections to be made as well.

But the literature regarding apprenticeship has its own limitations.  For example, Lave and Wenger (1991) distinguish Situated Learning & Legitimate Peripheral Participation from apprenticeship, but this seems like a “pluto-is-not-a-planet” type of distinction.  They seem to simply accept claims of extant literature to be reporting on instances of apprenticeship without questioning what qualifies them as such.  Their analysis of these studies hit on the powerful concept of legitimate peripheral participation as a hallmark of communities in which newcomers come to authentically and skillfully engage in the community’s shared practice.   However, they were then faced with a problem that key facets of their theory were not present in all of the so-called examples of apprenticeship they considered.  They address this problem by defining a new concept, namely situated learning in a community of practice, which left them at pains to define these new abstractions, because this new construct had to be something other than the most readily available concrete examples (i.e., genuine apprenticeship).  A more straightforward interpretation of their findings would have been to draw into question whether other authors had misrepresented on-the-job or work-experience forms of education as apprenticeship.  In other words, of the 5 studies they discuss as examples in their landmark book, Lave and Wenger could have identified which were better understood as illustrative non-examples.  For example, they identify several features of supermarket butcher shops that are at odds with their concept of legitimate peripheral participation.  Instead of accepting that those butchers had experienced apprenticeship and then trying to define situated learning as a different thing, they could have used all the same features to explain why the butcher shops were not apprenticing new employees.  

This is the danger of an etic perspective.  If outsiders have been studying instances of apprenticeship, then they can only take other people at their word about what it means.  They lack perceptivity to distinguish exemplars from mediocre, poor, or even non-examples.  Much of the literature, likewise, seems to have been in the habit of accepting .  In short, much of what has been represented in the literature as examples of apprenticeship do not actually fit the bill.  

In contrast to ethnographic studies operating in an etic mode, writers like Sennette and Crawford report on their first-hand experiences with apprenticeship.  In addition, numerous memoirists (e.g., Korn, Savage, Cleese, Rogowski, ) also take an emic approach to describing their own learning and development as apprentices.  I don’t mean to suggest the etic representations are without merit, but they clearly do not tell a whole story.  Studying apprenticeship in makerspaces and the maker community might be rich sources of emic perspectives to add dimension to existing theories of learning in practice.

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References:

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Clarke, L. & Winch, C. (2004). Apprenticeship and Applied Theoretical Knowledge, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36:5, 509-521.

Clapp, E. P., Ross, J., Ryan, J. O., & Tishman, S. (2016). Maker-centered learning: Empowering young people to shape their worlds. John Wiley & Sons.

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Holum, A. (1991). Cognitive apprenticeship: Making thinking visible. American educator, 15(3), 6-11.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge university press.