Being an apprentice from a sociocultural perspective

Growing up is a process of social learning, and children are expected to develop their cognitive abilities through participation and interaction with

people surrounding them (Rogoff, 1990). Children are, in one sense, apprentices in the process of socialisation. From the day they are born, their apprenticeship starts; they observe peers and adults, imitate their behaviours, interact with them, and jointly solve problems. Imitation in child development

is considered to be one of the most important tools for “enhancing human competence and the strength of attachment among human beings” (Yando,

Seitz, & Zigler, 1978, p. 156). Through participation, imitation and interaction, children learn a language, learn cultural norms, and acquire cognitive thinking

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skills. Events and activities children take part in may be supported and guided by adults; for example, adults may adjust the activities or language they use

to suit the developmental level of children. However, adults do not take the entire responsibility for children’s learning. As Dewey (1916) explains, in order

to play an effective role in the community, a child needs to imitate others’ actions and behaviours of his own will. Although the infinitive “to imitate” may

imply an unconscious aspect of copying the “ends” of actions, Dewey asserts

that one imitates not only to conform to the patterns of others and to be

accepted by the group, but also to voluntarily improve the situations in which actions take place. Thus, child cognitive development is a two-way process in which both participants—children and adults—can benefit from participation,

albeit differently, since this is a lifelong process, and adults are at a higher

stage of cognitive development.

In some ways, socialisation in child cognitive development is similar to

teacher socialisation. Novice teachers learn to teach and develop professional expertise through participation, observation and interaction with

experienced teachers, peers, and pupils. They are apprentices in the teacher socialisation process, learning behaviours and routines, language and norms

appropriate within a professional culture. However, there are some differences between these two socialisation processes that are important to

acknowledge. The major difference between the two processes is that teachers’ participation, observation and interaction have to be based on their

theoretical knowledge basis, which children do not. As Kagan (1992) argues, what distinguishes professional from nonprofessional people is “a stock of

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as a profession, are expected to depend on their professional expertise to plan, teach and evaluate their teaching through an intellectually dialogical

process between theory and practice. Novice teachers, as apprentices, are also expected to acquire theoretical knowledge while trying it out in practice

as a foundation of their professional development, as was already discussed in section 2.2.4.

The notion of “apprenticeship” in teacher education is not favourably accepted, however. Lortie (1975) argues that pupils spend quite a long period

of time in the classroom unconsciously observing how their teachers teach and deal with pupils, the process of which he claims as “apprenticeship of observation”, regardless of whether or not pupils want to become teachers

themselves, and these experiences have a major influence in shaping student teachers’ thinking about teaching and their own teaching performance. Due to

this implicit process of apprenticeship as a pupil, many are likely to enter their

profession with pre-fixed beliefs about teaching, strongly influenced by their former teachers, without critical examination of their models (Almarza, 1996;

Kagan, 1992; Pajares, 1992). Similarly, in many contexts, teacher training has been traditionally considered as “best accomplished by sitting on the job,

watching others and absorbing what they do, and so slowly being inducted into the skills of the craft” (Grenfell, 1998, p. 7), which promotes merely the

implicit process of apprenticeship, even after becoming a teacher. An

apprentice teacher learns to teach through an implicit process of observing expert teachers without critically examining how they teach. Thus, teachers in

a traditional apprenticeship approach are not considered to be fully equipped with either theory to draw back on or critical thinking skills with which they can

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Lortie is not the only author who claims this kind of apprenticeship is

intuitive and implicit. It is implicit in that the thinking process of experienced teachers is often tacit and difficult to observe for student teachers. Therefore,

student teachers may observe and copy what experienced teachers do in practice, which may lead to the acquisition of craft, but may not necessarily

lead student teachers to an explicit understanding of what teachers actually think or how they plan, monitor and evaluate their teaching (Alexander, 2002;

Zeichner, 1983). Wallace (1991) also asserts that imitative and static craft knowledge of teaching do not allow for theoretical knowledge intervention. Student teachers’ beliefs about learning to teach established through this

intuitive process of apprenticeship are considerably strong; as a result, these

beliefs are unlikely to be modified through ITE (Kagan, 1992; Peacock, 2001; Richardson, 1996). As was previously mentioned in this chapter (section 2.2.5), student teachers’ pre-fixed perspectives are difficult to change even

through reflective practices. Thus, the traditional notion of apprenticeship

cannot provide teachers with abilities with which they can critically examine their particular practices and seek improvement in them.

Apprenticeship may carry a different connotation in different times and contexts, however. In some of the more recent streams of teacher education literature, an “apprenticeship” model has been used more favourably. Roberts

(1998), for instance, argues that in the case of a stable society that values seniority and tradition, an apprenticeship may be effective at least for ITE.

Tomlinson (1995) further asserts that apprenticeship can be powerful if mentors can effectively lead student teachers to “experimental imitation”

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(p.48) by supporting student teachers’ observations at every step, from

planning to reflection. Similarly, in a sociocultural approach, the process of student teachers’ learning to teach as an apprentice is not the uni-directional

one from a master/mentor to a student/mentee. They may be still considered

as peripheral participants of the learning community, as Lave and Wenger (1991) would call, but the concept of apprenticeship can be broadened to

focus more on a community of practice in which novice members of the community grow as they engage in social interaction and activities with other

members of the community. Furthermore, emulation can be understood as one mediational activity in this approach, as Dunn (2011) argues in his study

on second language teacher education; in his study, being asked to explain the theoretical concepts student teachers learned in the workshop, they used

the ideas that they discussed with peers during the workshop by connecting newly-learned concepts with their prior experiences, not only simply copying ideas and concepts that they acquired, and he called this as a “creative form of imitation” (p.56).

This newer approach to apprenticeship will be further discussed in the next section. Particularly in ITE in Japan, where seniority and tradition are

more valued, emulation is culturally endorsed in some forms of professional training (Hare, 1996; Ota, 2000). How apprenticeship in teacher training is

conceptualised in Japan, and how teachers try to reduce the disparity

between theory and practice with the help of emulation and reflection, will be also discussed.

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