The Means to Grow Up

Reinventing Apprenticeship as a Developmental Support in Adolescence

Robert Halpern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415960328
• eBook ISBN: 9781135902940
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

In The Means to Grow Up, Robert Halpern describes the pedagogical importance of "apprenticeship"—a growing movement based in schools, youth-serving organizations, and arts, civic, and other cultural institutions. This movement aims to re-engage youth through in-depth learning and unique experiences under the guidance of skilled professionals. Employing a "pedagogy of apprenticeship," these experiences combine specific, visceral, and sometimes messy work with opportunity for self-expression, increasing responsibility, and exposure to the adult world.

Grounded in ethnographic studies, The Means to Grow Up illustrates how students work in unique ways around these meaningful activities and projects across a range of disciplines. Participation in these efforts strengthens skills, dispositions, and self-knowledge that is critical to future schooling and work, renews young peoples' sense of vitality, and fosters a grounded sense of accomplishment. In unearthing the complexities of apprenticeship learning, Halpern challenges the education system that is increasingly geared towards the acquisition of de-contextualized skills. Instead, he reveals how learning alongside experienced adults can be a profoundly challenging and complex endeavor for adolescents and offers readers an exciting vision of what education can and should be about.

I

Theoretical Bases

1

Apprenticeship as a Teaching and Learning Framework

…how many times I observed novices talking to themselves as they took on a new task, or shaking head or hand as if to erase an attempt and try again.

Rose (2004, p. 198), describing cabinet-making apprentices

Apprenticeship is the way we learn most naturally.

Collins, Brown, & Newman (1989, p. 491)

Apprenticeship has lurked in the shadow of thinking about good learning environments for almost a century now. It serves as an implicit model for such foundational thinkers as Dewey, Montessori, Vygotsky, and Bruner and, more recently, as an explicit model for Gardner. It has proven to be a fruitful framework for recent generations of learning theorists. Sociologists and anthropologists have studied apprenticeship as a learning and an economic model (see, e.g., Geer, 1972; Goody, 1982; Lave, 1982; Coy, 1989).¹ A handful of philosophers, most notably Polanyi (1958, 1966), have employed it in reflecting on knowledge and skill.

Recently writers have begun to link apprenticeship to learning in two notable ways. Looking inward they have tied it to findings from neuroscience about how the mind and/or brain works. Human brains appear biologically, even evolutionarily, prepared for apprenticeship. This is illustrated in the role of mirror neurons and the importance of “mirroring”—observing and mentally imitating—in the learning process (Blakeslee, 2006). The predisposition begins early in life. Sheets-Johnstone (2000, p. 344) argues that “certain infant capacities … joint attention, imitation and turn-taking … are at the foundation of apprenticeship.” At the other end of the continuum, writers have argued that learning is essentially a social (or shared) and situated process (deriving from the features of particular settings) and have used apprenticeship as a paradigm for that process (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

While apprenticeship seems to offer an attractive framework for thinking about learning (and teaching), it is not intended as such. Lave (1982, p. 182) captures this incongruity in his discussion of Liberian tailor apprentices, noting that “while it is clear that almost everyone who undertakes apprenticeship succeeds in learning tailoring … it is extremely rare to observe situations in which either teaching or learning is the principle business of an interchange between master and apprentice.” Teaching and learning in apprenticeship are embedded in practice and production. To an extent they are by-products of practice. Th ey tend also not to rely so completely on language and, as implied above, sometimes not at all.

Good Learning Environments and the Foundational Theorists

The foundational theorists articulated themes that continue to be explored, in some cases a century later. They both drew on and adapted each others’ ideas. In most important ways they agreed about learning. They believed, for instance, in learning through doing, through work on consequential, socoioculturally meaningful activities, and in the need for learning through both head and hands. They saw a balanced role for learners and teachers in the initiation of and responsibility for learning, and viewed learning as rooted essentially in a particular community. They emphasized the centrality of motivation, locating it in the task itself, the desire to please significant adults and the values of a particular culture. To differing degrees they worried about schooling. Dewey and Montessori, for instance, recognized that schooling would be the dominant framework for learning in the twentieth century but were critical of its motivational structure, pedagogy and curriculum, and its isolation from the larger life of the society.

Dewey (1902, 1916, 1938) believed that young people were motivated to learn when they had some choice about what to study and some responsibility for how; when they worked on tasks that made sense to them, especially tasks that “really needed to be done”; and when they worked in the context of a community of shared endeavor. Although young people are active agents of their own learning, they are not the sole constructors of it. The curriculum should be organized around longstanding tasks, problems and questions, important social themes, culturally recognized disciplines and activities (what Dewey sometimes called learning through occupations). Moreover because Dewey saw the larger social environment changing rapidly, he believed that young people had to be prepared for an unpredictable future with new problems and new knowledge needs. In that light they had to be prepared to be lifelong learners, experimenters and problem-solvers.

If Dewey’s theme was disciplined experience, Montessori’s was purposefulness (Montessori, 1913, 1948). She argued that children learn best on serious, relatively concrete tasks over which they have some control; that the process of working on a task is itself motivating; and that tasks should echo the real world outside the classroom. She believed that learning should engage different senses and require a measure of exactness or precision. Mastery is, most of all, a matter of practice and repetition. The teacher’s role is to set up the environment so that children can work independently, to observe and guide, intervening mainly when it is clear that a child cannot fruitfully solve a problem on his or her own (Lillard, 1972). In her writings on adolescence Montessori emphasized, in addition popportunity for creative expression (self-realization), experience with producing things, opportunity to choose one’s work, and the design of experiences that addressed adolescents’ need to build, feel part of and find a constructive role in a community (Montessori, 1978). Like Dewey, she believed that young people had to be prepared for a future likely to be very different than past and present.

Vygotsky in turn emphasized that thinking, and by implication learning, are fundamentally socially mediated. The immediate social environment and the culture as whole provide ingredients and mechanisms for both (Vygotsky, 1978; Bockarie, 2002). Yet what begins as a social process nonetheless becomes internalized at some point (or as Rogoff, 1994, would have it, appropriated). A young person’s “potential” achievements, evoked through observation, imitation and in social interaction, are practiced until internalized as his or her own. The adult in some respects treats the young person as if she were more competent than she actually is. Vygotsky argued also for the specificity of learning, that it is “more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 83). Adults have a particularly important role in helping immature learners connect everyday knowledge to the specialized knowledge and skill found in specific technical arenas of a culture.

Drawing on Vygotsky, Bruner has argued for the importance of field or discipline as an organizer and structure for learning. Each discipline has its key questions, ideas, and procedures, a kind of tool-kit that, once grasped, make it easier to learn. Learning can be seen as movement gradually deeper into a discipline, at some point becoming a matter of identity (Bruner, 1973, 1996). Extending Vygotsky’s work on cultural scaffolding, Bruner introduced the concept of teaching as scaffolding.² He points out the value of trial and error in giving the learner a better sense of possible outcomes but notes that novice learners also need assistance. The teacher, or “tutor,” provides such assistance by coaching and modeling, and by “controlling [sic] those elements of the tasks that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate on and complete only those elements that are within the range of competence” (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976, p. 90). The teacher helps the learner recognize when his or her approach to a learning problem is likely to lead in the wrong direction. Bruner has recently emphasized also the value of tangible products, works (“oeuvres”) and works in progress, in providing evidence of learning processes and generally making learning efforts more palpable (Bruner, 2003, p. 171).

In some of his writings Bruner, like his predecessors, explores the motivational basis of learning. He argues that young people are motivated to learn when they have opportunity for “deep immersion [sic] in a consequential activity—not a metaphor, not a simulation, not a vicarious experience” (1966, p. 69). They are motivated to learn when a particular idea, procedure or piece of information is worth knowing for some reason and when it is immediately usable.³ They are motivated to learn also by a desire to emulate valued others and to participate in their culture—to be a part of a web of social reciprocity (Bruner, 1960, 1966).

Powerful Learning Environments

The work of the foundational theorists is echoed throughout the literature on learning and instruction. Although one would not know it from the persistence of the “curriculum wars” (see, e.g., Ravitch, 2000), there is substantial agreement among learning researchers about the attributes of good learning environments— those that are motivating and absorbing; in which youth actively seek understanding and mastery; in which they feel productive and develop a genuine, grounded sense of efficacy; and in which they develop a sense of affiliation with the setting, its goals and activities.

A good learning environment is, not surprisingly, one in which subject matter and tasks are interesting. That is most likely when learning content and tasks are anchored; that is, when they reflect problems encountered in actual work in a discipline or out in the world, and when the reason for work on tasks is immediate and more concrete than abstract. Tasks are more interesting when they are relatively novel, moderately complex and demanding and when, to the extent practicable, there is no pre-determined solution, rather a measure of uncertainty and risk (Pye, 1968; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995).⁴

Learning is more interesting when knowledge and skill are used in an integrated way, rather than in isolated fragments. Tasks invoke different faculties, head and hand, different modes of representation and different parts of the self (Eisner, 2002; Abbott & Ryan, 2001; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Gardner, 1991). Learning is more engaging when young people can connect it to their own lives and when, through it, they can connect themselves—their beliefs, questions, thoughts—to the larger world. It is more engaging, in other words, when tasks have value, whether personal, aesthetic, practical, civic or other.

A good learning environment is discipline-driven. There may be one or more than one discipline at hand. But each provides what Resnick (1989) calls an organizing structure for learning. This includes the distinctive repertoire of concepts, language, core understandings, questions, problems and ways of thinking of a discipline, as well as its distinctive procedures, tasks, tools, materials and products. It may include the dimensions or phases of work within the discipline, for example research, design, rehearsal, composition, layout, blueprint, template, rough draft, and so forth. It may include a curriculum of sorts, a learning sequence, with more complex tasks incorporating and building on what was learned in simpler ones. And it includes means for the learner to adopt the identity of one who works in that discipline, even if temporarily.

As important as a conceptual framework, and complementing it in important ways, is a social framework: the community created to support learning. In good learning environments the community is defined by a sense of safety, of shared responsibility and of interdependence. Learners feel safe to take risks, raise questions, venture opinions, disagree, and express enthusiasm. There is a sense of jointness (Tharp, 1993). Participants agree on the work of the setting—what they are trying to do. They learn and produce, think, solve problems, and generally work together. More experienced learners share knowledge and experience with newer ones. The latter nonetheless have a role in contributing to the work and the life of that community, of practicing—and contributing to—the work being done. The products of new learners’ work are shared acknowledged, valued and celebrated (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Rogoff, 1994; Cambourne, 2002; Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 2002; Head, 2003).

In the context of these conceptual and social structures, good learning environments afford plentiful time and opportunity for learners to work their way into the discipline at hand (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Bereiter, 2002). Learners can devote sustained attention to their work. They have plentiful opportunity for the trial and error, practice and experimentation that solidify emergent abilities (Pye, 1968). New learners have opportunity to observe more experienced learners and experts at work. They may work on simpler tasks but they can observe complex ones, so as to begin to develop “a conceptual model, or cognitive map” (Berryman, 1995, p. 196).

Gradually growing skill and experience set the stage for gradually deepening involvement with a discipline and growing responsibility for one’s continued learning and learning products; what Rogoff (1994, p. 209) describes as the “transformation of participation itself.” As learners gain skill, they need and want more opportunity to regulate their own effort, to control the direction and outcome of that effort. They may, nonetheless, have to be encouraged to use what they are learning in their own way, to generate their own hunches, approaches and solutions, to use their own knowledge, prior experience and personal strengths to address learning tasks or problems.

Assessment is interwoven with learning, practice and experimentation. Performance is assessed routinely. Mistakes are viewed as part of the learning process, rather than as evidence of failure. Feedback is immediate and misconceptions are corrected quickly. In formal assessments learners are asked to put their understanding to work, “explaining, solving a problem, building an argument, constructing a product” (Perkins, 1998, p. 41). Assessment emphasizes the processes leading to a solution and the lessons derived from it, as much as whether it is precisely right or wrong. Learners, then, have opportunity— and receive support—to reflect on themselves as learners and on the learning process.

The Role of the Teacher

The teacher obviously has substantial responsibility for creating and maintaining the conditions of learning described above. S/he embodies the discipline at hand and holds its full complexity for the learner. In a complementary vein, s/he establishes the tenor for the learning community being built. The teacher helps the new learner learn how to address tasks and problems in discipline-specific ways. Teachers “lend” learners their expertise, insight, and motivation. They do not hide their thoughts about the problem at hand but join in with novice learners. They model, through use, the language of a particular discipline; they demonstrate, make visible, the mental, physical, and affective processes involved in addressing the tasks of that discipline.⁵ They demonstrate their own interest in and commitment to the material to be learned.

In his or her scaffolding role the teacher may help the learner get started with a task or project, by focusing the learner’s attention, helping with a first step, or talking about process. S/he identifies promising elements to build on and controls those elements of a task that are beyond a learner’s capability (Bockarie, 2002; Wood et al., 1976). Good teachers encourage learners to think more deeply, and to be active in their work, for example, to predict what might happen next, to identify rules, to link the immediate material to prior or associated material, to reflect on what and how they are learning. To be useful, scaffolding requires the teacher to know the learner well. S/he should have a sense of how a learner is best motivated, where and when that learner is most easily frustrated, what the obstacles are to moving ahead. S/he should be able “to generate hypotheses about the learner’s hypotheses” and “a theory of [that particular] learner” (Wood et al., 1976, p. 97).

Parallels with Apprenticeship

There are correspondences with apprenticeship in almost every dimension of good learning environments described here. Learning in apprenticeship is rooted in a discipline. It has many sources: the teacher, other apprentices, specialized language and tools, the setting itself, and the demands of specific tasks and projects. Learning is experiential in the deepest sense. A young person is doing what he or she is supposed to be learning. Apprentices working on a mosaic mural learn how to choose and arrange tiles (and about the qualities of different types of tile) as they try to use them to realize a design. A community organizing mentor tells Larson and Hansen (2005, p. 16), “a lot of things with organizing you can’t teach, you have to experience it …” A sustainable agriculture apprentice is simultaneously learning about plant growth and using that information to plant, care for and harvest vegetables.

Because of the obvious connection between knowledge and its use, the reason one is learning something in apprenticeship is self evident (Gardner, 1991). Youth sometimes have opportunity to connect the learning and work of their apprenticeship to their own lives or those of family and community. One young African American woman, for instance, joined a research project on cardiovascular disease in minority populations (AAS, 1997). Another young woman had an opportunity to clean up and restore a river that is an important part of her community but which had been viewed—and used—for decades primarily as a place to dump garbage.

Task Structure

Tasks in apprenticeship are involved and involving, with multiple steps. Before even starting work on a display case, wood-working apprentices have to identify key sections, determine dimensions and make multi-dimensional drawings of each, and make lists of needed materials and tools. One apprentice enumerates 125 steps—distinct procedures—in constructing the cabinet (Rose, 2004). In producing a “design package” for the electric service of a silver analysis laboratory, a young man has to “gather [sic] information about power requirements” for various kinds of equipment; apply that information to the design and choice of circuits, wire, circuit breakers, switches, etc.; create and present drawings and schematics for electricians to use (Hamilton & Ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Bases
• Part II: Cases
• Part III: Reflecting on Apprenticeship
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index