ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the idea of apprenticeship has been associated with the process of skill formation within craft and industrial production and, to a lesser extent, within certain professions. Apprenticeship in these different contexts has usually been characterized by a constellation of both legal and contractual rules and relations governing the status of employment, associated workplace entitlements and a combination of formal and informal educational processes that help to socialize workers into specific workplace and occupational cultures. We have defined these arrangements in a recent article as the ‘institution of apprenticeship’ (Guile and Young, 1998a). Apprenticeship as an institution, irrespective of its workplace context, is also an educational process and like formal education has been assumed to rest on a transmission model of learning. However, unlike formal education, the institution of apprenticeship is also assumed to be underpinned by the dual assumptions of learning by doing and a master as the role model, rather than any model of curriculum or formal instruction. Furthermore, it is also assumed that as a model of work-based learning, apprenticeship will produce different outcomes of learning compared with programmes based in schools and colleges.
