Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Artisan pedagogies: investigating craft experts as educators

Project description

Master stonemasons as teachers

Aspiring artisans learn on the job, acquiring skills and know-how through participation in social settings. Despite research into the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of skilled manual labour, relatively little is known about the process of learning. The EU-funded ARPED project will fill the knowledge gap. Specifically, it will develop the concept of artisan pedagogies, to denote the skills and understandings that artisans develop through the practice of teaching and mentoring novices. It will focus on practice-based learning and take a participatory approach to elicit artisans’ implicit understandings about how novices learn. The project will apply empirical case studies addressing dry-stone masonry in Switzerland and Taiwan.

Objective

How do artisans approach their role as educators? As part of long-standing research on world craft practices and their social, cultural, and economic dimensions, anthropologists have been paying attention to processes of learning: how aspiring practitioners acquire skills and know-how through participation in social settings. The influence of these studies extends well beyond the boundaries of anthropology, to inform research in the social sciences of learning. Within this research, scant attention has been given to the perspectives of artisans, who are not just skilled practitioners but also often skilled educators. To redress this, this project proposes to develop the concept of artisan pedagogies, to denote the skills and understandings that artisans develop through the practice of teaching and mentoring novices. It will do so by taking social interactions in the context of practice-based learning as its focal point of investigation, and recognising that diverse forms of craft provide unique perspectives onto learning. The research develops an innovative and inter-disciplinary methodology, combining sociolinguistics (conversation and interaction analysis) approaches with ethnographic methods (participant observation, apprenticeship as method). It deploys a participatory approach to elicit artisans’ implicit understandings about how novices learn, and implicit work and social ethics. The methodology will be applied to two empirical case studies addressing dry-stone masonry in Switzerland and Taiwan, allowing for a comparative dimension based on exploration of pedagogies in relation to procedures, culture and the environment. The study will lead to re-evaluating key theories and concepts in the anthropology and social sciences of learning, in light of expert practitioners' own understandings and practices.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2020

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 304 724,16
Address
RUE DU GENERAL DUFOUR 24
1211 Geneve
Switzerland

See on map

Region
Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera Région lémanique Genève
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 304 724,16
My booklet 0 0