Learning in Likely Places: Varieties of Apprenticeship in Japan

Likely places of learning in Japan include folkcraft village pottery workshops, the clubhouses of female shellfish divers, traditional theaters, and the neighborhood public bath. The education of potters, divers, actors, and other novices generates identity within their specific communities of practice. In this collection of nineteen case studies of situated learning in such likely places, the contributors take apprenticeship as a fundamental model of experiential education in authentic arenas of cultural practice. Together, the essays demonstrate a rich variety of Japanese pedagogical arrangements and learning patterns, both historical and contemporary. The volume seeks to displace the current focus on school achievement in Japan with a broader understanding of the social context of knowledge acquisition. The cases demonstrate both the power of formal apprenticeship and the diversity of learning arrangements and patterns in Japan which transmit traditions of art, craft, work, and community. All cases respond to the call for an alternative focus on 'situated learning', an educational anthropology of the social relations and meanings of educational process.