Bryan Keeland and the author

Our boss Bryan Keeland learned to make pots at SDC. Once himself an apprentice there, he has first-hand knowledge of what an apprenticeship at SDC means. Keeland grew up in a small Arkansas town not far from the northeast Missouri/Arkansas border near Branson; he and most of his siblings found their first jobs at SDC. He first took a job in SDC’s print shop printing souvenir WANTED posters, and later worked in the tintype shop costuming guests in 1880s-period dress and making their portraits. Unhappy with his university computer science program, and finding himself back at SDC for another year, he decided that he could dedicate time working at the park to developing an advanced skill. He considered apprenticeships in several craft shops before settling in on the pottery. After two weeks proving his interest to the potters by joining them daily after work to practice, he got a job there and has worked as a SDC potter for over a decade. My first summer was his first season as the new boss.

Today, Keeland’s brilliant throwing skills allow him to make anything he

imagines at the wheel. Nothing seems too big. So it tickled me to hear about a time when he struggled like I did with his mugs. As Keeland described, his boss could only help him so much:

It’s kind of like learning to swim when you are a kid. They throw you in the water and say, “Okay, swim,” and that’s pretty much how he did it. If I was really struggling with something, he would come up, and he would show me how to make it. And of course, somebody can show you how to do anything, but until you sit down and do it over and over and figure it out for yourself—that’s really the way you learn. (Keeland 2002A)

All the apprentices agreed with Chandler and Keeland that learning requires constant practice. This practice, in turn, must be repetitive. This is why Chandler

spent a part of each school-day turning out a board full of identical one-pound vessels. At SDC, the production schedule—fueled by customers’ high demand for wares like pie plates, spoon rests, and mugs (i.e. Chandler’s “one/two pound vessels”)—builds in that practice naturally. When I came to SDC, I still struggled with one pound of clay, so most of my early pieces—mugs, and more mugs—ended up on the seconds shelf and sold for half price. My second summer, I started

working with one and a half pounds to produce dozens of another high demand piece—a jack-o-lantern—that broadened my skills because it had a round shape, a lid, and required special finish work. During his years of apprenticeship, Keeland made them too:

My first month, I think all I made was mugs, and every once in a while I would slip in a little pot or a little vase or something just to break the monotony. But for three months, that’s all I did—mugs. Then I slowly branched out into other things. I remember one winter (I think it was probably my third winter here) all I did was make jack o’ lanterns for most of the winter (the small ones and the big ones both), and I was so mad because, you know, I came here to make pottery. I didn’t come here to make jack-o’-lanterns. But it was actually pretty good for me because working on jack-o’-lanterns all winter—‘cause that shape—I mean, it is just a round shape, a round jar shape—so by doing that over and over and over, I got to where I could do that shape really well, and it really improved my other pots. That was something that maybe I didn’t want to do, but it turned out to be really good. (Keeland 2002a)

The beginning apprentice spends most of a summer making one pound mugs for the shop. With time, the workload expands to new shapes: the large bulbous cylinder for candle lanterns; the round, lidded jars for jack-o’-lanterns; and the high- lipped plates for pie plates. After producing board after board of these shapes, the apprentice’s skills grow. The work shows progress as the pots improve; they have more lift to their shapes, use less clay, and thus feel lighter. With repetitive practice,

the apprentices begin to produce pieces that look almost identical when they set this as the goal.

Fourth on the list of

learning modes, the SDC potters also learn by critiquing each other’s work; such assessment often follows the model of the “class critique,” a learning model frequently utilized by university ceramics programs. In Katherine Chandler’s ceramics classes at her university, the days a kiln load came out, the class convened to talk about each other’s pots. Chandler sought this kind of critique from her boss at SDC:

I went up to Bryan, and I said, “Look, I want to get better. I want to be able to throw larger things better, so tear my stuff apart, and tell me everything that is wrong with it, and show me how I can make it better because, you know, basically, I’d say that I’m 99% down here because I want to become a better potter.” (Chandler 2002b)

Apprenticeship in the shop involves critique even when not expressly

solicited. As I learned to throw mugs, Bryan Keeland would periodically review my work, once even slicing one of my mugs in two to show me the thick part of the wall