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Apprentices were particularly aggrieved during “the Pause.” Our hands were quarantined, narrowing our learning traditions to an “asymmetrical focus.” Apprentices learn how to build skyscrapers today, but the way we learn from experts has always been for millennia, “reciprocally attentive and finely tuned towards each other and the developing skill.” In other words, a “different approach to learning.”

Welders, for example, need to learn safe ways to use dangerous technology. They do so standing next to each other in welding booths. Learning has always been face to face, even with helmets on. Consider the fact that peer review strategies accelerate apprentices’ welding skill acquisition, . But in 2020, the ways we would talk to each other were abruptly poured like concrete into frames, into Zoom boxes.

Hence the irony: apprentices are very technically skilled, but our modes of communications (e.g., the Luddites) have never been online, and our culture has always been secretive with the outside world. Using social ICTs has never been part of our tradition, but it is now, and going back seems unwise.

RQ: How can social ICTs strengthen apprenticeship learning in the construction trades?

Case Study

Summary

This case study’s objective was to observe how the organization of online vocational learning changed during the coronavirus pandemic, and whether these changes can benefit learning in vocational schools.

The German vocational education system applies a “dual apprenticeship” model: learning theoretical knowledge at a vocational school, and job-related knowledge at a training company. The Chambers of Skilled Crafts are responsible for producing “Gesellenprüfung,” the examinations that upon passing, elevate an apprentice to journeyman status.

Two school closures occurred in Germany–the first in spring 2020, the second in winter 2020 to April 2021.

The data for this case study came from retrospective apprentices’ assessments, using a a computer-assisted self-interview format, of 103 males (age: 17–44, mean: 20.8, SD: 3.7) and 11 females (age: 17–24, mean: 19.3, SD: 1.9) in southern Germany. These assessments were conducted at several Chambers counseling centers.

For all four RQ’s, apprentices’ ratings improved for the second school closures.

and also refers to the authority of the so-called “Chambers.” (at 3 of 18). In our country, we call them the trades unions. Our national standard for building trades is the Multi-Craft Core Curriculum (MC3) by the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU). It is exactly that, a curriculum of 9 modules (slide 14). It also offers best practices for distance learning. But as to vocational standards, they rest within the conundrum at the beginning of this post: apprentices learn “at the hip,” the standards, it follows, flow from the master craftsman, not a piece of paper.

The closest Regents standard to building trades apprenticeship is the Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS), Standard 3b: “Workplace Cleanup” Activity (p. 263). But almost all of the CDOS Standards are directed towards “professional” as opposed to “vocational” careers.

Rewrite #1

Background

As a trades instructor, “deep learning” is a well established practice I employ when I teach. Teaching apprentices is multidimensional: an apprentice learns how to use tools with his/her body, contemporaneously listening to an expert within his/her zone of proximal development. A carpenter is a constructivist, when making a miter box for example, an artifact. Making a miter box is also problem based and “active learning.” Surely I would have an advantage over most instructional designers when implementing the Understanding By Design® framework. In other words, now facing a “Hard Re-Set,” trades apprenticeship should be uniquely positioned to employ digital migrations of existing trades andragogy as a way, not to restart, but to reaffirm our millennia of deep learning traditions.

And yet, when COVID quarantined our hands, a conundrum arose when forced to employ remote learning for the first time…

fn I have a parallel position as to assessments. For example, Popham rightly identifies the origin of the crisis of applying norm spreading aptitude tests to teacher quality measurement as Binet and Army Alpha. The rest of his chapter logically follows, for “academic” communities. My community, the trades community, witnessed an entirely different trajectory. World War II lead to refining Army Alpha as the Generalized Aptitude Test Battery (GATB). It has been replaced by the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE). Both are used to determine whether a prospective hire possesses the skills for the offered job. Therefore, when Popham asks, “Why would a teacher ever want to teach this?” my immediate answer was that I teach spatial reasoning in my trades classes every year, because the trades entrance exams include spatial reasoning items.

Hence, the context of apprenticeship skews many assumptions and inferences made as to the application of technology into schools.

Case Study

I chose this case study, because its fact pattern most closely reflects my own: a vocational instructor, suddenly, for the first time, during COVID, forced to use emergency remote LMS platforms. This case study’s objective was to observe how the organization of online vocational learning changed during the coronavirus pandemic, and whether these changes can benefit learning in vocational schools.

The research questions were designed to capture dual-apprentices’ learning experiences during two COVID school closures in 2020 and 2021:

1. From the apprentices’ point of view, did the attentiveness of the vocational school improve between the first and second school closure?
2. Did live communication improve from the apprentices’ perspectives?
3. Did the equipment with digital devices improve among the apprentices?
4. Did the apprentices’ assessments of their own digital competence improve?

Analysis of the apprentices’ retrospective assessments found improvements in each RQ. Its findings can be aligned with our readings with the following table:

Critique

The paper notes that during the first closure, “standardized concepts for distance learning did not exist. ” None are mentioned anywhere in the paper. Fullan defines external accountability as “securing much better accountability.” But where does the external authority lie in the trades? Trades standards, apprentice and journeyman exams, professional development, lie within our unions, historically tracing back to medieval guilds, and to ancient collegia. The knowledge/power dynamic is transparent in our learning communities, from the day you swear your oath. Unlike Common Core, NCTM, ISTE, Regents, trades standards reside within each union hall, and are communicated through embodied cognitions, apprentice-journeyman, ZPD.

There are more qualitative standards that innovators can look to in this regime. For example, Slöyd, similar to Arendt’s “Homo Farber,”

is an attitude to work that connects to honesty, determination and even moral and ethical judgements; honesty, because there is no gain in cheating on the material, determination is needed to overcome material resistance, and moral and ethical judgement in knowing what to do and when to do it.

“Digitalizing” trades learning traditions requires us to fundamentally revalue the position of standards in our learning communities. Unique to our traditions and perspectives, we cannot simply “plug in” digital literacy to our existing standards as we have been especially stubborn in keeping our standards, “plugged out.”

What motivates many workers in the trades is an escape from “spiritual dyspepsia” that alienated workers often experience.

The second criticism flows from the case study’s correct observation that dual apprenticeships are highly “context-related learning” and are a “complex, comprehensive learning process.” (p. 2 of 18). And that capturing emotions