Midwives, Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Nondrinking Alcoholics

Text Exploration

Lave and Wenger, writing in 1991, argue that popular culture views apprenticeship negatively. When compared to traditional forms of education, apprenticeship is viewed as limiting and less intellectual than didactic learning. Higher-education still embraces traditional lectures, and students lose much of their ability to gain entry into the community of a given practice. Project-based approaches to early education, however, have changed this perspective, and hands-on learning is now considered to be a legitimate way for younger students to gain core skills and larger concepts. This learning is still embedded in the context of traditional pedagogy and students gain little by way of proximal participation, but project work is a gesture towards immersive skill acquisition rather than knowledge distribution.

Apprenticeship in crafts where work can be considered project-based has long been viewed as a way into a given community, and other examples illustrate how performing activities under the direction of a more established guide has various levels of educational efficacy, although not necessarily in the same manner as with the trades.

Midwives in the Yucatán area of Mexico experience what might be considered an apprenticeship form of learning, and on the surface, this apprenticeship seems to include no identity of a teacher or of teaching. Instead, younger women learn the specialized knowledge and practice of midwives throughout their everyday life experiences. Over time, the apprentice begins to almost organically take on more of the work, and finds themselves in a more masterful role. Quartermasters learn through a similar style of immersion, although theirs is bounded by their experience in the organization of the Navy rather than their entire childhood. While Yucatec midwives learn by working largely independently, Navy Quartermasters learn by observing experienced leaders and then doing under their observation, moving slowly from less critical activities on the ship to more fundamental tasks and roles.

Butchers also experience a sort of apprenticeship, although with few of the real benefits of entering a new community of practice; the entrance of a butcher into a meat cutting community is more akin to learning assembly activity than gaining real engaged and embodied experience. The authors state that that the “curriculum” has not changed, although technology has, and it is implied that the butchers are then learning outdated skills and abilities. It’s unclear, however, why these outdated skills are not considered effective or “first-class” aspects of entering into a community and forming an identity. Other disciplines—like architecture—largely consider that learning the repetitive nature of craft is fundamental to entering the community of practitioners even if those skills are not used anymore.

The last example provided by the authors is unique in that the context is not a trade or paying job. Alcoholics enter and grow in a community through many similar qualities as those experiencing a traditional apprenticeship. A great deal of their “hands on practice” comes through understanding and then sharing stories, and starting to move into more established and respected roles as they simultaneously grow their skills of sobriety and refine their narratives. The authors note that “talk is a central medium of transformation,” where the storytelling appears aimed at others, but in fact is a way of an individual learner gaining entrance into a community through peripheral participation while simultaneously building a related identity.