own self-directed learning or from the periods of work rotation or visits to other theatres.
Getting the balance right between these forms of support is crucial for a number of reasons.
Each practice field in the theatre has a specific texture of its own and is also intimately
connected to other practice fields. It is essential, therefore, that apprentices understand this
relationship theoretically and practically because decisions about appropriate course of action
in one field presupposes an understanding of the consequences of that action for people
working in another field. Seeing connections between work areas and anticipating the
implications of one’s actions for other presupposes the development of a mode creative
insight that is totally foreign to the thinking which informed the development of the NVQ
frameworks. Developing such creative insight, as the Rep has recognised, presupposes that
apprentices have regular opportunities to boundary cross between different practice fields in
order to appreciate the way in which a directors’ vision inevitably influences the deployment
of vocational practice.
Transfer for employability
Two very different notions of transfer were, as we saw earlier, built into successive
apprenticeship frameworks one based on the principles of behavioural psychology and one
based on the principles of cognitive psychology. In the case of the former, the consultants
responsible for designing NVQs advanced a two-fold argument that NVQs constituted
evidence of the ability to transfer skill. They maintained that human beings are, in effect,
sentient creatures who primarily learn through imitation and repetition; and that work consists
of different levels of routinised tasks. Thus, it follows that what was accomplished on one
context could easily be accomplished in another context. This assumption led the consultants
to adopt an agnostic stance towards workplace pedagogy, that is, the learning environments,
processes and relationships in which people developed requisite forms of competence. In the
case of core/key skills, their introduction into apprenticeship framework was the result of a
long-standing article of faith on behalf of some researchers (Oates) and policymakers (DfES)
that generic skills such as literacy, numeracy and the ability to use IT to retrieve and filter
information are transferable across different work-contexts and constitute the basis of
learning at higher levels. The basis for such assumptions is found in the way in which ideas
from cognitive psychology have been appropriated to justify the value of generic skills
(Prawat, 1991, p. 3). The proponents of generic skills have claimed that these skills are
abstract, universal and unproblematic in nature and rely on basic cognitive processes which
we use in our daily lives as much as at work or in education. From this perspective, the ‘trick
is to figure out a way to teach them effectively’ so that people can transport between contexts
(Prawat 1991, p. 3).
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