There is, therefore, an inevitable tension between an idealised, static, ‘objective’ view of quality, and the actuality of a particular piece of work, which may, even if it appears not to be perfect, do the job perfectly well. If practice is systematically subordinated to the idealised perspective, then practice will quickly become restricted, and practitioners will be deskilled. Second, the particular take on time and


mastery that is essential to the craft attitude implies that apprenticeship is a long drawn- out process and that its completion is only achieved, and arguably not even then, by attaining the status of ‘master’ as judged by peers. The modern idea that apprenticeship finishes when you start work or when you gain your licence to practise is completely at odds with this. So is the modern practice by which apprenticeships within a particular craft are all the same length and contain the same content. Apprenticeship, from the craft perspective, cannot be embodied solely in a formal course of instruction with a fixed length: that is a mass production, rather than a craft model. We will explore the implications of this for teachers a little later. Sennett highlights the learning process itself, and, in particular, problematises the tendency of our formal education system to divide and separate the intellectual curriculum from the practical:


Skill is trained practice; modern technology is abused when it deprives its users precisely of that repetitive, concrete, hands-on training. When the head and hand are separated, the result is mental impairment.


Once again, we see that ‘craft’ is not a concept that should be restricted to thinking about ‘vocational’, ‘practical’ skills and occupations: this is a deformation of its true meaning. The craft attitude requires the intellectual and ‘practical’ to be integrated, as each is impaired without the other. Third, the idea that you can make


craftworkers produce better work, or work more efficiently, by setting them quantitative performance targets is clearly at odds with the craft attitude. Sennett connects this with the promotion of competition over collaboration as the dominant feature of practice. Again, this tendency arises from the mass-production model of work, and the desire of external authorities to control production and practice. If the craft attitude outlined above is


applied to teaching, a number of implications emerge, under each of the six aspects of craft I have discussed: I present a few here for discussion. Under quality, we would see a confident


move towards professional self-regulation by a teacher-controlled body. Self-regulation within the community of practice is an essential aspect of the craft attitude. This


doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t be accountable: the issue is that they should be accountable to students first and foremost, and to their own community of practice. Bureaucratic attempts to measure the quality of teachers through a standardised framework and through counting qualifications would be abandoned as expensive, misleading, and damaging to practice and learners like. Teacher training and development would foster ‘contempt for shoddiness’. Teachers would be empowered to distinguish between unimaginative work that satisfies technical standards, and sustained high-quality work. Teaching would be celebrated as a moral and sustaining activity rather than an industrial and technocratic one. Under practice, we would see a much


greater emphasis on professional develop- ment through work, with policy attention shifting towards an enabling framework for supporting CPD rather than the present major focus on initial teacher education. There would be a much greater emphasis in the curriculum of teacher education, along with skills and knowledge, on developing learners’ capacity to judge the quality of work, through collective qualitative evaluation of collaborative projects. Under teaching and learning, all


experienced teachers would be involved in initial teacher education (ITE) for pre-service trainees and in mentoring new entrants to teaching. This teacher-education work would be completely integrated into their role and practice as teachers. Teachers would be seen as new entrants for at least five years after their initial training. Under the workshop: organisations employing teachers would be ‘expansive’ rather than ‘restrictive’ in relation to the learning of their staff. In relation to time, it would be recognised that there are ‘no short cuts to mastery’, that experience confers expertise that cannot be achieved any other way. And, finally, any vestiges of mass production practices and procedures in teacher education would be eliminated: learners would not be expected to be standardised outputs, and would not be measured as such. Variations of practice would be welcomed and encouraged if they served quality, as would be the integration of intellectual and practical skill and knowledge. Efficiency and effectiveness would be measured by qualitative judgements rather than in solely quantitative terms. All of these implications of adopting what


I have called the craft attitude to teaching seem to me to be highly desirable: a great many of them are supported by research as well. The argument against mass production approaches to educational systems is made, for example, by Ken Robinson (Robinson, 2010) on the grounds of its anachronism in the twenty-first century. Very many teachers, moreover, already have this attitude, and struggle to maintain it, and the quality of


their work, in a technocratic system which tends in many ways to deskill them. If teaching is craft, learners are the material


teachers fashion: they are the artefacts of teaching. However, learning is also work, it is work done by learners, with guidance from teachers. This suggests that we should see the work of teaching as helping learners produce and develop themselves, as individual mathematicians, plumbers, philosophers, nurses, etc, rather than standardised factory- output versions of practitioners of those disciplines, ‘like so many pianoforte legs’, as Dickens has it. At the same time, reflective teachers are continually producing and developing themselves as teachers. So the craft attitude to teaching sees it as a contribution to the collective work of being and continually becoming human; and, at the same time, as holding off, resisting, and repairing the social, cultural and political damage done by the dominant ethics of mass-production.


Jay Derrick has worked as a teacher, manager and consultant researcher in adult, further and higher education. He currently teaches and tutors on generic post-compulsory teacher training courses at the Institute of Education


Further reading


Brown, P., Lauder, H. and Ashton, D., 2011, The Global Auction, Oxford: OUP


Evans, K., Hodkinson, P. and Unwin, L. (eds), 2002, Working to Learn, London: Kogan Page


Fuller, A. and Unwin, L., 2008, Towards Expansive Apprenticeships, London: Teaching and Learning Research Programme


Gove, M., 2010, Speech to the National College for Leadership of Schools, 17/06/2010: http://www.michaelgove.com/ content/national_college_annual_conference


Hayes, J., 2010, Speech to the RSA, 26/10/2010: http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/ speeches/john-hayes-skills-and-their-place


Sennett, R., 2008, The Craftsman, London: Allen Lane


Robinson, K., 2010, ‘Changing education paradigms’, RSA animated lecture: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U& feature=player_embedded


de Waal, E., 2011, ‘With these hands’, Financial Times, 11/03/2011, at http://www. ft.com/cms/s/2/8f50d924-4b63-11e0-89d8- 00144feab49a.html#axzz1H9ksDxWZ


Whitty, G., 2008, ‘Changing modes of teacher professionalism: traditional, managerial, collaborative and democratic’ in Exploring Professionalism, Cunningham, B. (ed), London: Institute of Education


Wilby, P., 2011, ‘The awful truth: education won’t stop the west getting poorer’, The Guardian, 01/03/2011


APRIL 2011 ADULTS LEARNING 11


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