Lave and Wenger Chapter 3
From WikEd
Lave and Wenger provides examples of apprenticeship to expound upon the concept of legitimate peripheral participation. These examples show that learning and work practice and inseparable. Again Lave and Wenger point out why they do not focus on schooling. Schooling does not allow researchers to employ a historical/cultural approach, thus Lave and Wenger look at cases of apprenticeship to explore learning-in-practice.
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[edit] The Case of Apprenticeship
- Cases differ culturally and historically
- People have not paid much attention to the importance of apprenticeship as a means of producing skilled persons because it is not in line with functionalist or Marxist views.
- Apprenticeship has been seen as irrelevant and has been examined using a narrow view.
- The stereotypical view of apprenticeship involves feudal craft production and imitating routine tasks.
- Thus, Lave and Wenger sought to reexamine apprenticeship and illustrate that learning or failure to learn may be accounted for by underlying relations of legitimate peripheral participation.
- In the US, apprenticeship has been viewed as a “form of control over the most valuable, least powerful workers.”
- In West Africa, apprenticeship is relatively egalitarian.
Lave and Wenger posit that learners must be legitimate peripheral participants in ongoing practices in order to become full participants. Situations where newcomers and forced to work, overworked, and have unfavorable relations with their bosses can have a significant impact on learning in practice.
[edit] Five Studies of Participation
Lave and Wenger provide details of aprrenticeships from among midvives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and alcoholics.
- Yucatec Mayan midwives
- Engage in healing and ritual services using herbal remedies, massage, ritual procedures, and techniques of birthing
- All women
- Usually daughters of midwives
- A way of life and part of faily life (observes mom, hears stories, runs errands, bears children)
- Does not really involve teaching
- Tailors
- Involved in craft production using scissors, needle, and thread
- Family negotiates with master tailor (usually a close relative) to take in newcomer
- Quartermasters
- Use high technology, including alidades, radio telephones, and maps
- Leave home and join the Navy and have instructors and officers
- Enter training programs and receive certificates
- Butchers
- Utilize cutting tools, plastic-wrapping machines
- Newcomers join a union and attend trade schools, on-the job training
- Wage laborers
- Non-drinking Alcoholics
- Join the group, attend meetings,
- Come together to cope with alcoholism
[edit] The Apprenticeship of Vai and Gola Tailors
Vai and Gola tailors’ apprenticeship starts and finishes with a ceremony which makes it more formal compared to the midwives. Goody (1989) has some claims about the history of apprenticeship in West Africa. According to him, apprenticeship started there as a result of the diversification of the division of labor. He states a transformation in which a child learned some skills from the same sex parent at home, to learning of some skills about an area, and then to learning a job from a specialist master at his household. In West Africa, people started this process by including their children into productive activities with themselves, then including their kin, then integrating with nonkin people and finally separating the labor from the household. Currently many shops are located in commercial areas, and master’s house is not where production takes place anymore. Goody also mentions that the transformation in the practice of labor has affected the interactions between the learner’s and their communities. Initially children interacted with their own families which can be considered as a general socialization. This was then changed when children were exchanged between families for labor and opportunity to learn different skills, in which case it is called ‘contrastive general socialization’. Finally, at the level of apprenticeship the focus is more on specialization, and household socialization is less relevant. Shortly the apprenticeship in West Africa started because of the two reasons; the need for supplementary labor and the desire of people to learn skills for different occupations. These two reasons historically originated from ‘increasing diversification of the market and of the division of labor’. This movement from the domestic production to the apprenticeship is similar to the process of moving from the peripheral participation to the full participation in communities of practice. The apprenticeship in Vai and Gola lasts approximately five years and a newcomer learns the whole process of making garments and finished products from the masters, journeymen, and other apprentices. The apprentice goes through a process which starts with informal child cloths to formal cloths such as suits, which acts as a kind of curriculum to be a master tailor. However, apprenticeship has a more detailed structure than learning to make the whole cloth. The tasks are divided into subcategories such as cutting the garment, sewing by hand, or pressing the cloth. However, there is a reverse sequence in the learning of these processes. They start with the finishing stages of a cloth, such as adding buttons, then go on to learn sewing, and finally to learn cutting of the fabric. This way the failures of the newcomers are eliminated or at least minimized. This curriculum of tailoring also involves two stages at every step; “way-in” in which the apprentice observe and make a prototype of the garment, and “practice” in which the apprentice reproduces a part of the job down to its complete details.
[edit] The Apprenticeship of Naval Quartermasters
An ethnographic study by Hutchins has examined the learning process of the new quartermasters who start from peripheral tasks then move on to more important tasks by collaborating with others. Hutchins highlighted the “importance for learning of having a legitimate, effective access to what is to be learned”. Quartermasters begin with small tasks and processes and move on to more complicated ones when they have enough experience to do them, which takes about a year. Although some of the quartermasters attend school prior to joining a ship, nearly none of them has any experience. Hence, they learn their rating on the ship by participating into collaborative activities with more experienced others. However, in this case there might be several problems which would reduce the efficiency of the learning environment. The way tasks are divided between the quartermasters, the nature of tasks and of the shared tools in terms of their openness to observation are some of these factors which could dramatically increase of decrease affect the efficiency of learning.
[edit] The Apprenticeship of the Meat Cutters
Not always does the apprenticeship lead to effective learning. The apprentices may have some difficulty to integrate into an experienced practice community. The apprentices can not learn much when they are admitted as ‘a cheap source of unskilled labor’. Some masters are very authoritarian over apprentices, which in turn prevents learning instead of increasing it. Vocational education and union based apprenticeship programs favor the use of didactic learning over apprenticeship, which also causes some problems for effective apprenticeship. Butchers’ apprenticeship is composed of trade school and job training. Trade school includes traditional instructions such as book reading and written exams and practice in shop. Unfortunately the trade school includes irrelevant tasks such as advising customers in cooking meat or sharpening a knife which is not done by butchers any more. On the job part of the learning process, apprentices meet some difficulties as well since they work for profit oriented companies. For example, a supermarket meat department manager does not want his journeyman to spend time with apprentices since that decreases journeyman’s efficiency. The physical layout of the work is also important for effective apprenticeship as apprentices learn a lot by observing and being observed by experienced others. For example, some meat departments employ apprentices at the wrapping machine, hence they do not get to observe the journeymen while cutting meat, and hence they can not learn such an important aspect of their job.
