MUSCLES, MORALS AND MIND: CRAFT APPRENTICESHIP AND THE FORMATION OF PERSON

ABSTRACT: 

The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts – like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities – are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as ‘intelligent’ is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprentice-style learning within our Western systems of education.

A working apprenticeship can be a microcosm of almost every affirming principle of human life, a conservatory for the great existential struggle of our teens and twenties . ... [Unfortunately, however,] the standardisation of education [in the West] ... often fails to answer individual need. (Frank Wilson, 1998 (neurologist and author))

Keywords:

• apprenticeship
• linguistic theory
• embodied learning
• craft knowledge
• situated learning
• embodied communication
• modern apprenticeships
• ethnographic method

9. Acknowledgements

Fieldwork in Yemen was supported by a Research Student Fellowship from the School of Oriental and African Studies; fieldwork in Mali was supported by the British Academy and the School of Oriental and African Studies; and my current study with woodworkers in London is supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellowship RES-000-27-0159. I would especially like to thank all the craftspeople who have shared their lives and skills with me.

Notes

1  An earlier draft of this paper was delivered as a keynote speech for the Annual Conference of the Society for Educational Studies held on 8 November 2007 at the Institute of Physics in London. I thank the reviewers for their useful comments in preparing this published version.

² I offer more detailed accounts of my research and theory on embodied communication in Marchand, 2007c; and forthcoming publications. My theory of embodied communication builds upon Dynamic Syntax theory (Cann et al., 2005) with theories of motor cognition (i.e. Jeannerod, 1994) and new neurological findings (i.e. Arbib, 2005).

³ Note that in some instances haptic senses are also involved in the parsing of a fellow practitioner's movement.

⁴ Vision likely includes a multitude of Fodorian first-order modules that process different types of information including object description, spatial relations and movement (Fodor, 1983). In observing grasps, gestures or skilled actions, representations generated by these modules would seemingly interface with motor cognition and inform relevant aspects of motor-based understanding and performance.

⁵ Motor mirror neurons – located in the Broca's area of the brain and activated when both performing and observing an action – are seemingly responsible for this (see Arbib, 2005).