Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Lave Jean & Wenger Etienne

Author:Lave, Jean & Wenger, Etienne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1991-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF MEAT CUTTERS

Our use of apprenticeship as a source of insights for exploring the concept of legitimate peripheral participation cannot be construed as a general claim that apprenticeship facilitates learning-in-practice in some inevitable way. Not all concrete realizations of apprenticeship learning are equally effective. The exchange of labor for opportunities to become part of a community of mature practice is fraught with difficulties (Becker 1972). The commoditization of labor can transform apprentices into a cheap source of unskilled labor, put to work in ways that deny them access to activities in the arenas of mature practice. Gaining legitimacy may be so difficult that some fail to learn until considerable time has passed. For example, Haas (1972) describes how high-steel-construction apprentices are hazed so roughly by old-timers that learning is inhibited. Gaining legitimacy is also a problem when masters prevent learning by acting in effect as pedagogical authoritarians, viewing apprentices as novices who “should be instructed” rather than as peripheral participants in a community engaged in its own reproduction.

The example of the butchers illustrates several of the potential ways in which particular forms of apprenticeship can prevent rather than facilitate learning. The author discusses the effects, frequently negative, of trade-school training for butchers. This study, like other studies of trade schools and training programs in the apprenticeship literature, is quite pessimistic about the value of didactic exercises (e.g., Jordan 1989, Orr 1986, as well as the excerpt from Hutchins). It should be kept in mind that many contemporary vocational education and union-based “apprenticeship” programs implicitly reject an apprenticeship model and strive to approximate the didactic mode of schooling in their educational programs, which inevitably adds to the difficulties of implementing effective apprenticeship.

Butchers’ apprenticeship consists of a mix of trade school and on the job training. [This program was] started by the meat cutters’ union to grant a certificate. The certificate equaled six months of the apprenticeship and entitled the holder to receive journeyman’s pay and status after two and one-half years on the job. . . . To justify awarding the certificate, the trade school class runs in traditional fashion, with book work and written examinations in class and practice in shop. The work follows the same pattern year after year without reference to apprentices’ need to learn useful things not learned on the job. Teachers teach techniques in use when they worked in retail markets that are readily adaptable to a school setting. . . . Most assignments are not relevant to the supermarket. For instance, students learn to make wholesale cuts not used in stores, or to advise customers in cooking meat. Because these are not skills in demand, few students bother to learn them. . . . Apprentices are more interested in the shop period, where they become familiar with equipment they hope to use someday at work. But the shop, too, has tasks useless in a supermarket. One of the first things learned is how to sharpen a knife – a vital task only in the past.

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