Reading :: Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace

 Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace

By Jo Mackiewicz

On p.1, Mackiewicz provides this book’s goal:

How do people develop competence and even expertise across knowledge domains? This chapter introduces the goal of the book: to relate my journey toward the breadth as well as depth of competences required by work in a repair and metal fabrication shop.

As Mackiewicz points out, workplace studies — and certainly workplace writing studies — have tended to focus on white-collar work. But people also learn, communicate, and write in the trades. Unfortunately, very few workplace writing studies focus on the trades (I can think of just three off the top of my head, including this one). But this is real work, using real communication practices, involving real learning with real consequences. So I’m really glad to see this book.

The book is an autoethnography. That is, Mackiewicz describes her own experience joining a culture and community by joining a fabrication shop as a part-time welder. (Her previous book, which I haven’t read, describes learning how to weld in trade school.) By reflecting on her own experiences and connecting them to the literature of situated practice and communities of practice, Mackiewicz helps us to understand on-the-job learning practices at this shop. Different chapters examine the learning context, practicing, mistakes, health and safety, tech drawings and shop genres, and how gender affects engaging in the learning community. Throughout, Mackiewicz draws on many, many stories — both her own and those of others she interviewed — to make her points. 

Through this work, I gained a better understanding of what it means to be a welder, to learn to solve problems like a welder, and to apply learning abductively to different challenges. The fabrication shop involved wildly different problems and constraints, so constant problem-solving and expertise pooling are paramount. Consequently, regular routines and fixed procedures take a back seat to improvisation. 

So I think the book is a real contribution. But it does have drawbacks as well.

The first is, I think, inherent to autoethnographies. Autoethnography is a tough genre because the writer is a sort of stand-in for a broader set of people who enter into the learning community. It’s easy for an autoethnographer to slip into “me-search,” i.e., just talking about their own experiences as if they are inherently interesting, making themselves the main character. To her credit, Mackiewicz doesn’t fall into this trap. But she avoids it by instead making the hero the shop owner, Jim Howe (she uses the owner’s real name and real shop name throughout). This is an understandable move, but it puts her in the position of not being able to critique shop practices in a thoroughgoing way. Consequently, she spends a lot of time talking about her own mistakes, which she owns, and how Howe patiently corrects them. Reading her account, however, I perceive a different story: Howe is a good man and a skilled welder, but not necessarily a skilled supervisor, instructor, or business owner. In many cases, Mackiewicz decides to try completing a job without bothering Howe for guidance, then makes mistakes, then is grateful for Howe’s patient correction. After the third or fourth such story, I started to think more about the community of practice (CoP) Howe had set up, one in which all of his welders (not just Mackiewicz) were reluctant to bother him with requests for guidance. This CoP yields more unclear tasks, more mistakes, more work and materials in remediating these mistakes. Did it result in better learning? Or did it result in more uncertainty and set welders into a dynamic in which they had to own any mistakes, but attribute any successes to Howe and his training? I wanted to see a more textured treatment of the CoP, but since Howe’s real name was used, I don’t think that more textured treatment would be possible in print — it would be potentially damaging and certainly ungracious to Mackiewicz’ host. Caught in this trap, the book ends up shying away from a more insightful diagnosis of the shop — or at least that’s my reading. 

The second drawback is a story problem. Qualitative research write-ups, and especially ethnographies and autoethnographies, are typically stories. But those stories have to coordinate two story lines: What happened and what it meant. Here, Mackiewicz prioritizes what happened: She selects specific topics (e.g., the learning context, practicing, mistakes, health and safety, tech drawings and shop genres, and how gender affects engaging in the learning community), makes them the chapters, then tells stories within each topic, applying theory as she goes — which localizes what it meant to each chapter. The result is fragmentary, making theory local to each chapter; we get a series of drive-by citations to theory rather than an overarching theoretical story with broader development that we can apply to other cases in the trades. Typically such studies have an early chapter that lays out the theoretical framework so we can understand how each chapter contributes to this overall theory story, with a conclusion that pulls everything together; here, we don’t get the early chapter, and the conclusion summarizes rather than providing a unified framework. So, in the end, the book felt episodic rather than like a complete story. 

I’ve spent some time on what I think are the book’s drawbacks because as I read it, I was trying to articulate what it was missing. But those drawbacks should not obscure what the book achieves: a rare study of learning in the trades, a study with a great deal of lived detail. If you’re interested in how people learn in communities of practice, and especially in the trades, and even more especially with a writing focus, you should definitely pick up this book.