Publications

Barato, J.N.
Vocational training: the knowledge of leisure or the knowledge of labour?

Montevideo: Cinterfor, 2005
226p.

ISBN 92-9088-191-7
US$ 15.00

(Full text available only in Spanish in pdf format)

 

Some "biographical accidents" mentioned by Jarbas Novelino Barato explain aspects that stand out in this book on vocational education. The author, a son of a mason, grew up amongst civil construction workers who, in the fifties, were still close to the Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards who had introduced technical changes in masonry into Brazil. Jarbas tells us of the personal pride felt by these workers regarding work well done: on Sundays they would take their families to see what they had done, in a "lay liturgy of occupational celebration". Living with those workers was what prepared Jarbas to "react with indignation to the belief at that time that workers were rough and unqualified people".

Thus predisposed, Jarbas began a career as an educator which he developed in a vocational training organisation, the SENAC Sao Paulo. The question that appears as a subtitle to his new book, knowledge of leisure or knowledge of labour?, arises from the high esteem in which he holds learning by doing, i.e., learning preceded by doing, learning how to do. Many people reduce learning by doing to mere skills or mechanical executions and value learning to know, the learning which goes from theory to practice. Jarbas argues that it is a mistake to subordinate practice to theory and skills to knowledge, that it is an indicator of an epistemological belief that causes limitations and must be overcome. "I make an effort to demonstrate that learning to do is as or more demanding, intelligent and worthy than learning to know," he says. The author focuses in a polemical and critical manner on issues that are evident in business management and in education for work, such as performance, knowledge, competency, error, information and activity. And he always does so in his own peculiar way, built up by a theoretician who is aware of the importance of practice and the precedence of the latter over theory.

Table of Contents

Prologue. Learning, adventure and construction
Gabriel Kaplún

Introduction

Re-reading the interventions that participate in the structuring of the learning of techniques
What is soon to come
Knowledge of labour

Chapter 1

Peasants, masons and educators: explanatory limits of theory and practice Corporate learning and vocational training
Restating my interests

Chapter 2
Theory and practice in the beauty parlour

Insufficient explanation of antithetical matches
Knowledge-ability: another limiting match
Reflection of two kinds of learning?
What is the problem?

Chapter 3
The virtues of an esoteric text: the Merrill taxonomy

Guidance for process teaching
Prescription for process teaching
Specificity of process learning
Overcoming the theory-practice dichotomy
Unregulated learning of processes
Knowledge and competence
Expulsion of the ghost of the machine
From Merrill to Ryle: a clarifying event

Chapter 4
Trade secrets in the beauty parlour

The incommunicability of technical learning
The challenge of the particular dialect of Itautec Jr's Basic
The difficult agreement with technology which is, supposedly, the daughter of science
Vocational practice in beauty parlours
Experience of teachers in the West of Sao Paulo
The nature of learning by doing

Chapter 5

Components of technique learning
What is performance?
What is knowledge?
What is information?
Returning to the beauty parlour

Chapter 6

Characteristics of learning by doing
The nature of representation
How to check
Dynamics
Equivalence of inter-components
Methods of representation

Chapter 7
Other characteristics of performance and knowledge

More performance characteristics
More knowledge characteristics

Chapter 8
Other characteristics of information

Information of educators
Information produced by apprentices

Chapter 9
Errors of execution and learning

Error in learning physics
Error in learning foreign languages
Error in learning techniques
A first didactic approximation
Errors that do not contaminate performance
The marbles game
Lessons from errors in learning techniques
Research on probable errors
Errors that work

Final considerations

Learning how to do and activity theory
Components of activity theory
Levels of an activity
Activity theory and methodological re-orientation of technique teaching

 

 

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