In addition many practitioners have little or no experience of training others and tend to be defensive about their skills. Possibly this is because they are uncomfortable with not knowing how to explain what they do, and maybe also they worry their explanations will over simplify the complexity of their skill.
My experience of working with numerous expert craft practitioners over the last eight years is that this defensiveness needs approaching sensitively, but can be overcome so such craft skills can be recorded and transmitted. The key concept behind my elicitation and transmission strategy is that of bridges across the knowledge gap, which draws on the theories of Michael Polanyi [1] and Donald Schön [2].
The first stage of craft learning is through observation and imitation. Polanyi described this as a process of indwelling: the novice seeks to dwell in the actions of the expert through observing them and taking action to imitate them. However, at an early stage of learning
it is very difficult for a novice just to observe and imitate successfully [3,4]. According to Polanyi, the difference between the skill of the novice and that of the expert is “a gap to be bridged by an intelligent effort” and Schön similarly referred to “an apparently unbridgeable communication gap” between novice and expert.
This is a drawing I have made to represent the concept; it might look like a graph, but it is not intended to be in any way measurable! The x-axis represents some measure of time and the y-axis some measure of skill. The expert has already achieved a high level of skill and the novice is setting out to become at least as skilled, but initially there is a gap between the two where the novice struggles imitate what they observe the expert undertaking:
Polanyi only views this knowledge gap from the perspective of the expert, explaining “Our message had left something behind that we could not tell, and its reception must rely on it that the person addressed will discover that which we have not been able to communicate”. The onus in his terms is on the novice to understand through intelligent effort. However Schön suggested the solution was in “reciprocal reflection-in-action”, implying that the expert needed to make as much effort as the novice in the process of bridging the gap, observing the novice's attempts at imitation and modifying their instruction until accord is reached.
However, as I mentioned earlier, many expert practitioners are not familiar with training novices and are reluctant to engage in a discursive process; simply correcting 'mistakes' at face value rather than seeing them as the novice's way of trying to understand the problem. This is where I come in. My role is as an intermediary between expert and novice, facilitating reciprocal reflection and recording the bridges that are needed to cross the gap.
It is important to note that these bridges are not tacit knowledge made explicit as is sometimes suggested. They are pieces of explicit knowledge enable the novice to dwell in the tacit knowledge of the expert and build their own tacit knowledge. Some might end up as fundamental to their practice, but many will just be stepping stones on the way to mastery.
[1] Polanyi M (1966). The tacit dimension. Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA [1983 edition].
[2] Schön D A (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass, London.
[3] Wood N (2006). Transmitting craft knowledge: designing interactive media to support tacit skills learning. PhD thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, available here.
[4] Wood N & Horne G (2008). The new journeyman; the role of an expert learner in eliciting and transmitting skilled knowledge. Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference, Sheffield, available here.
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