My first iteration (“α”) at building a multimodal research tool on how construction trades apprentices learn is very scattered, but it centers around the following taxonomy:
Labor traditions date back centuries (guilds) and millennia (collegia). The apprenticeship tradition is how one generation shares with a later one, what we know before we retire. These traditions trace back to our earliest writings.
So far, the best way I have found to access multimodalities on ancient craft culture, is via the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage text. “Intangible cultural heritage” includes: (e) traditional craftsmanship.
The “mutation” causing the branch, supra: capitalism, which converted crafted goods into commercial products, and embodied cognition into reflexive, unskilled labor. The Luddite rebellion was not a reaction against novel technologies – in fact most were highly skilled artisans. Why Luddites broke machines was a rebellion against “free markets” gutting community values dating back to the Tudors. Scandinavians artisans annealing bronze a millennium ago could not make it right at the branch. Today, “digitization” is another branch we must bear.
Digitizing construction trades apprentice traditions is not merely reproducing the best way to hold a hammer, turn a screwdriver, saw some wood, – what values must we ensure make the migration from analog to digital? My personal α guides me towards Luddites, Slöyd, and Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Our USA construction trades labor movement perhaps is perhaps upon a crest right now. All the more reason for us to forge relationships with cultural heritage movements. Slöyd is an exemplar of what that could be. It is an imperative that apprenticeship traditions dating back to our earliest writings are respected and preserved as we walk this digital migration.
Thus we must see the years 1811-13 as a watershed whose streams run in one direction back to Tudor times, in another forward to the factory legislation of the next hundred years. The Luddites were some of the last Guildsmen, and at the same time some of the first to launch the agitations which lead on to the Labour Movement. In both directions lay an alternative political economy and morality to that of laissez faire. During the critical decades of the Industrial Revolution, working people suffered total exposure to one of the most humanly degrading dogmas in history — that of irresponsible and unlicensed competition — and generations of outworkers died under this exposure. It was Marx who saw, in the passage of the 10 Hour Bill (1847), evidence that for ” the first time … , in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.” The men who attacked Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds were announcing this alternative political economy albeit in a confused midnight encounter.
Thompson, E. P. (1991). The making of the English working class.
Part III, Section XIV, Part iv., p. 435.