Artisan pedagogies: investigating craft experts as educators

How do artisans approach their role as educators?

As part of long-standing research on world craft practices and their social, cultural, and economic dimensions, anthropologists have been paying attention to processes of learning: how aspiring practitioners acquire skills and know-how through participation in social settings.

The influence of these studies extends well beyond the boundaries of anthropology, to inform research in the social sciences of learning.

Within this research, scant attention has been given to the perspectives of artisans, who are not just skilled practitioners but also often skilled educators.

To redress this, this project proposes to develop the concept of artisan pedagogies, to denote the skills and understandings that artisans develop through the practice of teaching and mentoring novices.

It will do so by taking social interactions in the context of practice-based learning as its focal point of investigation, and recognising that diverse forms of craft provide unique perspectives onto learning.

The research develops an innovative and inter-disciplinary methodology, combining sociolinguistics (conversation and interaction analysis) approaches with ethnographic methods (participant observation, apprenticeship as method).

It deploys a participatory approach to elicit artisans implicit understandings about how novices learn, and implicit work and social ethics.

The methodology will be applied to two empirical case studies addressing dry-stone masonry in Switzerland and Taiwan, allowing for a comparative dimension based on exploration of pedagogies in relation to procedures, culture and the environment.

The study will lead to re-evaluating key theories and concepts in the anthropology and social sciences of learning, in light of expert practitioners' own understandings and practices.