Apprentice+Learners

Apprenticeship in learning builds from the traditional notion of the apprentice/mentor relationship. Brown et al. propose that teachers must strive to produce students who are eager and self-motivated to learn. By accomplishing this, the authors argue that students will become learning experts or //apprentice learners//. These students may lack specific content knowledge but would be better equipped with the skills and resources necessary to acquire it, ultimately enabling their entry into a wide variety of “practitioner cultures”.


 * 1) Brown, A et al. (1993), "Distributed Expertise..."

A novice in a field or discipline who is learning from an expert/mentor.

Lave, (1988) describes the hierarchy that exists in a scientific community of practice and compares it to an apprentice tailor. At first, the tailor performs menial tasks like ironing, preparing him/herself to participate in more "authentic" tasks.

Often, the term //cognitive// //apprenticeship// describes the relationship described here, because it is not referring to the acquiring of physical skills //per se// but rather skills of the cognitive domain (Collins, Brown and Newman 1989).