Video from UCTV - Jean Lave on situated learning

Last week was a quiet re-start to work for 2014. I fitted in catch up reading and video watching between tidying up a rejected journal article and starting 3 other articles. One video on my list was of Professor Jean Lave providing background on 'everyday life and learning. The video is one of a series from University of California TV and archived on youtube. There are several videos from UCTV to catch up on and I will summarise the relevant ones to vocational education as I work through them. 

First up, social anthropologist Jean Lave argues that all theoretical problematics across the social sciences include assumptions about learning, whether explicitly or not. She says that learning is integral to conceptions of knowledge, inquiry, revolution, and changing practice, to name a few. Accordingly, social scientists have substantive stakes in the issue -- historical, cultural, spatial, political, and social.

Began with saying each book she has written, seems to explain things in previous books. Connects this to her study of Via and Goa tailors where apprentices work with the whole garment before eventually learning how to draft and cut cloth to make the clothing.

We are always learning as we go through life. Learning is complex and multi-dimensional. We are apprentices to our own changing practice.

Apprenticeship still associated with low tech, developmental world practice, operating in informal economies. Apprenticeship contributes to craft work learning mainly associated with manual skills and labour.

However, ethnographic studies of craft practice has provided many conceptions on how we learn.  Providing rich resources for understanding the processes (developmental, social) provides for learning.

Instead of studying technology, development and cognitive, but study the relationships between craftsmanship, song and imagination. Making is thinking. What is the process of making concrete things reveal about how we understand ourselves.

Knowledge cannot be separated from how knowledge is used and produced. Kavale 1997 categorises bureaucratic or pragmatic relations of theory and practice in research training, research activity, theory of knowledge. Bureaucratic involves schools, methodology, facts and rules and technical rational. The pragmatic is about apprenticeship, craft and art, situated knowing and social practice.

Provides explanation of how her research approaches started to lean towards understanding everyday knowing in context as opposed to decontextualized general knowledge. Uses the learning summarised in the book ‘apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice’ to explain of how she shifted to studying learning where it was situated.

She tells the story of how two sessions of field work was required for her to change her preconception of learning as having to be formal. Eventually, she started to realise how apprenticeship’s embodied curriculum revolved around learning by doing. Not through formal show and tell but apprentices observing and participating in authentic work tasks. Apprentices were not just learning how to sew buttons or cut cloth, but turning themselves into master tailors.

A similar thing happened when she tried to test tailor shop maths with formalised math based methods. She realised she had never observed tailors actually using maths in a school based algorithmic approach.

Learning is therefore changing relationships between people in an ever changing world. The task is not to investigate individuals, but the context and participatory practices as they are enacted. Our artisan selves, are involved in continued search for ways to solve everyday practices and beyond.

At the end, she made a pitch for ‘slow science’, to adopt the dispositions of artisan, apprenticeship and craftsmanship to do research, to resist the commodisation / commercialisation and politicising of research. 

In all, a good overview and revision for the principles presented and discussed in her book ' critical ethnographical practice''

Sums and sentences - learning practical maths

Yesterday evening, attended the session on practical maths for hospitality presented by Cheryl Stokes (bar skills tutor) and Neil McInnes (chef tutor). The sessions focused on strategies used by food and hospitality tutors to embed numeracy in practical work based teaching sessions.

In cookery maths concepts include weight, volume, length, fractions, cost/ price, addition and subtraction. In
cocktail making cost/ price, ratios, volume, fractions, addition and subtraction are required.

Previously maths was mostly simulated learning in theory sessions and there was a separation of theory and practical. For students maths anxiety was high.

In cooking,  maths sessions now completed in 3 hour practical classroom. Students are in chefs uniforms using normal kitchen equipment and real ingredients to work through maths concepts which are integrated into practical session workbooks. Icons or a logo (calculator by ingredients) identify the maths sections in handouts and workbooks and signal calculations are required. Activities include using real life examples like how to share customers tips between staff  - requiring the accurate calculation of percentages.

In cocktail making, there is the need to follow a base formula, add ingredients together and create a visual pie chart of the ratios of each component in the cocktail. Cocktail equation of spirit base plus modifier liqueur plus accents in the form of fruits, herbs food ingredients. Constructivist learning experience as students learn by trying, obtaining feedback, correcting mistakes.

Overall, good examples of how 'mundane maths' is used to provide examples of maths strategies for students and the move towards making greater use of situated learning to embed numeracy into pre-trade trainining.

Apprenticeship in critical ethnographical practice - Jean Lave's new book

The new book by Professor Emerita Jean Lave and Professor Thomas P. Gibson  called 'Apprenticeship in critical ethnographical practice' (2011) is a wonderful read. It traces Lave’s journey as an ethnologists. Her initial studies of apprentices have contributed to a better understanding of how learning occurs in the real world. This book details her research of Vai and Gola tailors’ apprentices in Liberia in the 1970s. Threaded through the book is the practice of ethnography, the many facets of becoming a researcher through doing field work. Usual preview via Google books.

There is a recorded presentation at Universidad los Andes in Colombia– assumptions about how people learn and how work by anthropologist and social psychologists overturns some of these assumptions and suggests other approaches - summarising some of the concepts in the book.

I first found the book at the CPIT ebook library. However, it was frustrating to try to read the book at the office due to interruptions and the usual meetings interspersed through my work day. I then accessed the book at home on my ipad but had difficulty accessing the wifi in bed. So I had a look at Amazon and found the ebook at a reasonable price (NZ$15.12) so it is now on my ipad Kindle app and I have been able to dip in and out of it over the last two weeks. Each reading brings new learning. One Kindle feature is that the book shows up sections highlighted by other readers. I turned this off at the first skim read but for the current, more in-depth read, I have created and shared my own highlights and also paid some attention to what others have highlighted. As with all ebooks, the ability to bookmark and annotate is also a great advantage.


There is much in this book to absorb and reflect on. Lave’s passion for her work shines through every page in the book. She writes of her commitment to the task of critical ethnography and how doing research through praxis, involves also changing one’s whole ways of doing, thinking and being. In so doing, the researcher is continually transforming their identity, just as the participants they are observing grow as they learn and develop. Of importance is the ‘critical’ aspect. The critical ethnography researcher needs to be mindful of the impact of their fieldwork and to use their findings to help improve opportunities for their participants.


Chapter one is very much a deliberation on how research apprenticeship has also involved the researcher is undertaking an apprenticeship in critical ethnography.


Chapter two is an overview of Lave’s original work in Liberia, when she undertook to study the mathematics learnt through ‘informal’ learning. There are vivid descriptions of the tailor’s district and the apprenticeship system as practiced 40 years ago in West Africa.


Chapter three ‘becoming a tailor’ details the ways in which tailors learn their craft and how many of the skills learnt were also about ‘being a tailor’. The beginning of learning to be a tailor, involves entry points both into the trade/apprenticeship and into learning tailoring. The emergence of the well quoted ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ conception is described and substantiated with observations of how novice tailors enter the trade and begin tailoring by firstly learning how to sew on buttons. This not only provides a 'simple' task to master but the opportunity to examine the finished pair of trousers through 'tailors' eyes and hands'.


Chapter four goes into ‘testing learning transfer’. Here Lave describes a series of experiments she carried out with tailors, to find out if ‘school based’ type mathematics or algorithms would be similar in a workplace situation. The chapter also details much of Lave’s reflection on the effectiveness of this form of research method. A must read chapter on how embedding numeracy practices needs to be based on real-world practices and not just ‘school based’ learning couched into a different format.


Chapter five titled ‘multiplying situations’ goes into Lave’s strategies to improve on the work described in the previous chapter. Having found out that work-based mathematics was vastly different from school-based approaches, she describes in this chapter, her work at unravelling the salient structures that underlie work-based and real-life practical mathematics, what Lave calls ‘mundane maths’. The example used to explain the ideas learnt are apt. It is a record of a tailor, negotiating the best price from a customer, using quick calculations to ensure that he gained a reasonable profit, while the customer drove the price down with aggressive bargaining. How did apprentices learn this skill? And could such a skill have been learnt in a school-based system?


The last chapter ‘researching apprenticeship, research as apprenticeship’ links back to the discussion in chapter 1. I can relate well to how doing research via completion of PhD is very much a research apprenticeship. This brief chapter also lays out the foundational premises for situated learning so that the transfer of learning between school and real-world application is narrowed.


The references contain a wealth of anthropological literature to explore further. Many are pre-1970s to support the work as reported in the book but there are a substantial number of newer references I am not familiar with which will need following up.