Paper short abstract:

What does it mean when the teacher refuses to “teach”? Traditional Japanese apprenticeship demands silence, forcing the student to adopt new strategies for learning. This paper draws on experiences with a culturally informed apprenticeship model centered around silence as pedagogical method.

Paper long abstract:

Silence in the workshop or classroom is not unusual and is often understood as a feature of concentration on a task. This paper, a collaborative engagement between two educators—one a professional boatbuilder, the other an anthropologist—examines the affordances of silence as an intentional method for learning and the knowledge transmission. What happens when the verbal communication between master and apprentice is constrained, when the teacher refuses to instruct but the student still must learn? In its strictest form an apprentice is sometimes forced to steal their master's secrets.

Over the course of two weeks in 2023, a dozen American university students, most with little to no woodworking experience, built a 22-ft wooden Japanese boat using traditional tools and methods. The workshop adhered to a practice common in Japanese craft spaces—the “silent workshop” where observational learning (Moeran 1982; Singleton 1989) and “stealing secrets” (Jordan and Weston 2003) largely replaced verbal instruction and open exchange. Drawing on journals, individual conversations, and visual documentation, this paper argues that the dispositions of apprenticeship can usefully destabilize assumptions about learning and knowledge transmission and generate opportunities to reflect on social science’s own disciplinary field methods. Participants come to appreciate mastery as a process, one that develops hand-in-hand with necessary values of humility, obligation, observation, and imitation. More broadly, the paper highlights the ways a pedagogy of silence offers new avenues for exploring learning and the potential of engaged anthropology within a campus setting and beyond.