Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground

4. Thinking and Doing: A Twenty- First Century Pedagogy for Preserving the Historic Architectural Artifact

57 In colonial urban America, craftsman was a badge of hierarchical achievement and status. Following centuries of European tradition, the American master craftsman exercised power over the proliferation of skill and product. He controlled the means of production as well as the ends. The master craftsman was responsible for providing room, board, and training to indentured apprentices and oversight and wages to journeymanlevel crafters. He set prices and the quality of finished goods and colluded with fellow master craftsmen to share secrets and to assure barriers to entry to the trade. A moral life was predicated on being useful to the self, the family, and the community. Work was the path to a moral life. The craft work ethic included “moderation, integrity and industry.” Craft was generational and the material and moral output of the craftsman class was understood and expected by the community. The craftsman conceived, fabricated, and assembled the architectural artifact that serves as symbol of America’s cultural heritage. During the American revolutionary period, Enlightenment philosophy became laced with the ideology of American republicanism. As Enlightenment humanism took hold in America, the principle of individual freedom deconstructedthetraditionalclasssystemofapprentice-journeyman-master. Apprentices were free to explore any opportunity, journeymen were released from their traditional career path, and masters were free to shed the costly patriarchal role to perpetuate their craft and hire cheap wage labor. The result was a paradoxical perpetuation of a class system where a new economic structure predicated on self-development replaced the former class system symbols for what development meant. The upward mobility of journeymen (to accumulate capital to become masters) was destroyed in the new system and created a permanent wage-earning class. The master craftsman alternatively sported a new badge of self-achievement; “the masters assumed heavy responsibility of reminding both their own craft Robert W. Ogle 4Thinking and Doing: ATwenty-First Century Pedagogy for Preserving the Historic Architectural Artifact 58 P R E S E R V A T I O N E D U C A T I O N communities as well as society as a whole of the central place that artisans occupied in the founding and maintenance of freedom and republicanism in America.” The journeyman’s new badge of self-worth and expression of a moral life became the roots of the organized labor movement during the nineteenth century. Another unintended consequence of the deconstruction of the traditional master-journeyman-apprentice class system was the void in training and education created to perpetuate craft principles and embrace the new learning needs necessary to support complex machine innovation and factory production. For more than two hundred years the breakdown of this structured education and training system has created tension between the skill sets needed for advancing technology juxtaposed against a burgeoning American sensibility for conservation of the intrinsic and associative values of the historic architectural artifact. Public policy makers and scholars exacerbated the gap in training left by the deconstruction of the former system by continuous debate over the merits of liberal arts versus technical education in meeting American societal needs. This chapter explores the historical American educational models that were designed to resuscitate the skills requisite of the craft tradition that are critical to preserving the architectural artifact and why they failed. It then reviews the recent revival in interest in historic preservation and how certain colleges and universities are addressing student and market demand . Finally, a conceptual pedagogical and curricular model is offered to demonstrate how educators may connect thinking and doing within their preservation and related disciplines. Contemporary pedagogical and curricular strategies mirror the panoply of “professional disciplines” that evolved as a result of rationalist theories on the efficiencies gained by the division of conceptualization and execution of work. The more tasks are segmented, the less knowledge and skill are needed to receive or deliver training. This theory can be applied to any profession or discipline, including academia. Unfortunately, the successful preservation of the historic architectural artifact requires a skill set that combines the empiricism of the workplace with visualization of an entire process. Education Experimentation The master craftsman was responsible for training the individuals who would perpetuate his skill, trade, and worldview. In nineteenth-century America, two forces disrupted this mechanism. First, American republi- T H E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E C T U R A L A R T...