The Scholarships International Studentships project will develop an interdisciplinary approach to the study of apprenticeship and skilled work by capitalising upon anthropology’s fieldwork tradition and focus on social interaction, and the expertise of educational studies in vocational learning. Scholarships International Studentships As a model of learning, apprenticeship has been resilient over many centuries throughout the world, providing the framework for teaching and learning in occupations spanning traditional crafts and trades and occupations in journalism, medicine and law. In their seminal book, Situated Learning (1991), cultural anthropologists Lave and Wenger employed case studies of apprenticeship to argue that people learn through purposeful participation in ‘communities of practice’. Their deliberate focus on apprenticeship legitimises forms of learning and knowledge that lay outside formal educational institutions, and celebrate ‘skilled’ work as a practice which combines different types of knowledge (codified, tacit, personal), judgment, and creativity.
Scholarships International Studentships In the past decade, there has been a newfound interest in craftsmanship. The recent global economic crisis, increased awareness of the need for more sustainable patterns of consumption and economic growth, and acknowledgement that making/ creating and mending are, for many people, deeply satisfying activities, have highlighted the need to recognise the importance of craftsmanship, albeit redefined for the contemporary age. The Scholarships International Studentships aim of this project is to develop the basis for a robust cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary comparative analysis of apprenticeship as a model of learning for skilled work in non-Western settings and to use this to take a fresh look at the evidence from Western countries.
Scholarship Application Deadline: 31 May 2011
Further Scholarship Information and Application
