Enculturation and Apprenticeship

Experience is a necessity

Each of us have a goal, whether it be to become a doctor, an actor, an artist. Whatever that may be it is impossible to be able to reach that goal without having extensive training in that field. However training is not the only thing that is necessary in order to be able to be successful in any field there is also this idea of enculturation and apprenticeship that James Paul Gee brings up in his article “Literacy, Discourse, And Linguistics: Introduction”. Gee also brings up the term Discourse, which in the simplest terms means being successful in your field of work.

Gee claims that:

“Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction…but by enculturation (“apprenticeship”) into social practices through scaffolded and supported interactions with people who have already mastered the Discourse”(7).

Though this article was written more than 20 years ago, it most definitely applies to modern times.

Today many fields are incomprehensibly competitive. In order to be able to land a job after graduation it is expected that you have already had multiple internships as well as many extracurricular activities throughout your school life. Without these ‘pre-requisites’ it can be nearly impossible to find a job in the field of your choice.

It is so important to have this experience with internships. As Gee said, it is the only way to enter a Discourse. To be in a Discourse is to truly be in that field, to know what to do at all times and to understand what is going on around you. Internships are the only way to get the hands on experience that is necessary to be truly called a doctor or an artist or whatever it may be. A student can study medicine for years or look at art for weeks at a time but if that student only reads about it then when the times comes for them to act they will not be capable of the action necessary. The student cannot truly be called a doctor until they have cured patients and actually performed what they have learned under the supervision of some person already in the Discourse of being a Doctor.

Eliza

This idea of enculturation and apprenticeship being a necessary aspect of any field is also present in an article by Christina Haas’ article “Learning to Read Biology”. Haas observes a girl, referred to as Eliza, for the four years of her undergraduate studies in the field of Biology. When Haas is analyzing how it is possible that Eliza’s learning and reading developed in the way that it did she comes up with a few possible factors. One of those factors is “mentoring in a sociocultural setting” (77), which is essentially equivalent to apprenticeship. Without the apprenticeship Eliza had not been truly exposed to the field of biology. Of course she had been studying out of books and reading about biology, but none of that is equivalent to actually being in the field. ​In this article Haas says :

“Theorists like Brown et al. (1989) have postulated ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ is one mechanism by which students acquire complex skills”

These complex skills that she is referring to are skills are most definitely necessary in the field. These complex skills are what is necessary to have in a job interview after graduation.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 5–17. Print.

Haas, Christina. Learning to Read Biology” Written Communication 11.1 (1994):43–83. Print.