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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Joe Makowicz, the author of Learning Skill Trades in the Workplace. This open access book describes and explains a 50 year old woman's process of developing trade competences. Drawing from daily journal entries, photographs, interviews from 10 fabrication shops and online forums about trades, this autoethnography details the author's learning process at Howes Welding and Metal Fabrication where she has worked for over three years. It combines a research driven, derived framework for analyzing scaffolded learning and expertise development with stories of learning how and learning what. This book also gives a view of workplace learning over time and helps researchers and practitioners recognize opportunities for development towards expertise. My guest today is Joe Mackiewicz, a professor at Iowa State University. She studies communication and learning in pedagogical and workplace interactions. She has published four books about writing centers including Writing Center Talk over Time, which won the 2019 award for best monograph from the International Writing Centers association, and an edited collection, Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies which won the 2021 award for best Edited Collection from the Writing across the Curriculum Association. She has also written and co written numerous articles and her book Welding Technical Teaching and Learning Embod Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in May of 22. Joe Makowich, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:44]
C
Thanks so much. Thanks for that introduction.
- [02:46]
B
Yeah. So I think I need to start our talk today by asking you what brought you to welding? Was this always about researching something or was it following a passion?
- [02:59]
C
It's a fair question. It's strange after somebody who's been doing writing studies for lord knows how many years decides to take up welding. It was sort of a personal decision at first. I had an injury and I really couldn't do the things I like to do so well, like ride my bike. So I wanted to do something that was more physical and so on. I wouldn't say a whim because I had visited a makerspace in Duluth and tried mig welding and I liked it. But after the injury, I got serious and I enrolled in a welding diploma at Des Moines Area Community College and started taking one class a semester. So I graduated in 2022 after three years of classes, which for a one year diploma. But because I had parsed it out over so long and it actually ended up being four years because a year off for Covid at the beginning.
- [04:02]
B
Oh, okay.
- [04:03]
C
So it was a long journey.
- [04:04]
B
Yeah. Well, it could be interesting, right? I mean.
- [04:08]
C
Oh, oh, it was fascinating. I mean, that was part of the reason behind the last book too. I got really interested in how my welding instructors were communicating with us and not only the verbal language that they were using, but also the visual language. So I started analyzing gestures for the first time in my research career. I didn't really know anything about that, but that kind of. It was sort of like a two part analysis in that book, which is more like a linguistic analysis of communication. That book is. And then I looked at three other welding schools and looked at the communication between the instructors and the students there too. So, yeah, I. My program was fascinating and it sort of spurred me to do, to connect what I had been doing with writing centers and looking at the discourse between tutors and students and to see if I could apply that, because it seemed to me that I. I could to the welding instructors and the welding students. And so with some modification, I took that sort of framework of tutoring strategies, the kind of like motivational scaffolding, cognitive scaffolding, and instruction that tutors did, and started to apply it to what was going on in welding classes of all sorts.
- [05:32]
B
Of book by describing some of the research on skilled trades and the development of expertise. So tell us a little bit about how this work and your experience Fills in some of the gaps in our thinking about learning in the trades.
- [05:46]
C
Great question. So one of the things that I tried to do in this newer book, which is really kind of almost a story, like almost a personal story of my own journey of learning, is I tried to do something that was a little bit more longitude. So across time, what were the sorts of mistakes I was making in the beginning? What was I doing? What was I able to accomplish at the end when I. And I didn't see a lot of that sort of research to be basic about it being done? The other thing that I tried to do was use, like. Like how I was situated as somebody who, you know, so has some understanding of how learning happens, how, you know, teachers and tutors scaffold students learning and sort of take what I knew from an academic perspective and put it into a trades situation to try to articulate what does it feel like to be a novice, to be an advanced beginner, to be a competent person in some, in some task, in some competence? I. I try to compare it to someone who is a real expert, and that's my boss, Jim Howe, who has been doing welding for well over 50 years and is on the shop for a long time. And I spend a lot of chapter two just describing him and trying to describe what does expertise look like. And I think the big contribution that I'm trying to make and that, like, my, my thinking right now is a lot about is, like, what does it mean to be an expert? And is it. I'm going to say it's not. But how is it that we need both depth and breadth of expertise across different related domains? So, like, in our shop, it's not just about, say, mig welding. You know, every single day we do all sorts of welding. We do machining. You know, there's just this whole wealth of competences going on. I have more competence in some than in others, for sure. And like, almost none in many. So now, like, moving, like, even past this book and thinking about, like, in the future, you know, I've been thinking a lot about, like, if we want to. If we want to train people in trades, what exactly are we getting at when we say train? Are we talking about something very specific, like a depth of expertise in one domain, or do we want more wholly rounded individuals? And you can kind of tell by the way I phrase that what I think.
- [08:50]
B
There's a question that occurs to me from listening to you talk about it that I think I want to bring up right now. Like, you're an accomplished scholar, you Are yourself. Well, you are.
- [09:02]
C
You're not bad.
- [09:04]
B
So. But okay. But an instructor yourself. And you. You know, you. You've had a career at Iowa State, and I'm wondering the. The sort of reversal of position of having to put yourself in the shoes of a student. And, I mean, I always approach. When I teach public speaking or. Or whatever it is, I always approach it in the spirit of, like, look, if the situation were reversed, right. And I needed to know something about any number of things. Right. That my students would be in a position of having to teach me something.
- [09:35]
C
Right.
- [09:36]
B
But it just so happens that we're here to learn X, and so I'm the person to. To teach X.
- [09:41]
C
Exactly.
- [09:42]
B
And I'm wondering, like, how that informs. Like, how do you bring that attitude back into the classroom of, like, understanding the position of being the student in the. In the classroom.
- [09:54]
C
I'm glad you asked this, because I think about it all the time, and I was thinking about it a lot this fall as I was teaching, editing. It's one of the classes that I teach, like, every year, and I've been doing it for a long time, and I feel like I've got that class down, right? And then it's really easy to lose the perspective of somebody new. So we've been talking about this forever, like, you know. You know, the sort of, like, beginner's mind or whatever. But, yeah, it's this. The last. It's going on four years now at Houzz. It's made me, I think, I hope, more empathetic.
- [10:38]
B
Okay.
- [10:38]
C
When I encounter students who. I feel like when my. My brain says, why aren't you getting this? You know? What. What. Why is this so difficult for you? You know? And I think about all of the days at Houzz, and they are innumerable, it seems to me. I know they are numeral, they're finite. But it seems innumerable where I feel him looking at me with the same sort of astonishment that, like. And he covers it. He's a night. He's a great person, but I can see it in his face, like, what the hell is wrong with you? You know? And I make mistakes that are. I mean, I talk about them in the book, but there are times when you just feel like you've done something so dumb. I mean, dumb on a really. On a level that's really, really astonishing. So I. I feel like, yeah, I have more empathy for students now, and I. I thought I did before, but I think I've learned a whole new level of what it Means to. And how frustrating it is.
- [11:55]
B
Yeah.
- [11:57]
C
To not understand something or. And where it feels like a wall and you can't figure it out and to have somebody standing over you kind of looking at you like, what's your problem? So I'm really trying to be better about that, given my own experience, because it is, if not daily, I mean, it's pretty weekly where I feel like, why am I not getting this?
- [12:27]
B
So let's. You've already brought up your boss.
- [12:30]
C
Yeah.
- [12:30]
B
Let's talk a little bit about the environment that you were working in and introduce us a little to that person. This was all very new to me. So could you tell us a little about the spectrum of production work, the place in it that Houzz represents and a little bit about your boss?
- [12:48]
C
Yeah, of course. So I work at Houzz Welding and Metal Fabrication in Ames, Iowa. I work part time, obviously. I have a full time gig at the university. I do put in a lot of hours, though. I mean, as many as I can. I work, you know, I go in in the mornings, I go to the afternoons, I go in on the weekends. So, yeah, it's a. It's a pretty busy schedule when I'm in Ames. My boss is. So the, the shop is a. It's a repair and fabrication shop. So it's one of sort of a dying breed, for lack of a better word, but a dying type of shop where we're doing repairs on items that are broken and also sort of one off, like fabrication. Sometimes that means, like we might mean we might make six of something or four or something, but it's not like large scale, thousands of productions. Like you would find a John Deere or quality manufacturing of these big guys. So that means that every day is a new problem to solve. And very often it is something that you have never done before and you have no idea how to do it. So it's interesting and it's actually the reason that I started hanging around Houzz is because I've got a lot of faults, but I recognize this as something special. Like when I first walked in there and saw, you know, he was talking to me a little bit and I saw what was going on. I thought they're doing all sorts of things here. It's not just like one kind of production. And I just thought this is a great place to learn because everything is so specific and individualized. So for example, like last week I went back to Ames. I'm in Wisconsin right now, but I went back to Ames and worked for a couple Days at the shop because I was there and I was repairing a bale spear frame, carbon aring the old sockets for the spears off and then repairing the frame itself, like the holes in it, and adding flat bar and such and then re welding or welding a new socket to the frame. Now, before that day, I didn't know what a bail spear was. Right.
- [15:21]
B
Or so I'm not alone that it.
- [15:24]
C
Was not even a thing to me when I saw it. I even like wrote about it after that day, my first day on it. And I called it a forklift. Like, that's because it was what it looked like to me, except it was pointier. And I figured, well, there must be a reason for it. I don't know. But yeah, and then tell. Jim explained, my boss explained what exactly it is and what I was doing. But every day, I mean, some tasks take a few days or a week, but every day is sort of like that. There are many days when I don't know what I'm working on. Like, I have to ask. A week or so ago, Jim asked me to repair a. It's like it was a cover for a chain on a tiller. Now, I. I thought it was a cover of some sort, but I had no idea of what it was covering. And you know, in that process, I sort of learned how to do this sort of repair. When something has bolt holes, how do you make sure that the holes end up in the same place as they were before? So, yeah, that's what this shop is. It's like one off projects and some limited fabrication runs, some very limited ones. Usually what's cool about those is that we're in conversation with the clients to design the thing will be fabricating. So they. They might be like just private customers, you know, who've got an idea for a shepherd's hook for the backyard or something. You know, I talk about that in the book.
- [16:51]
B
Yeah.
- [16:52]
C
So, yeah, there's sort of a conversation and we, you know, kind of figure out a drawing. What would work best given, like the winds in Iowa or how deep the things got to go in the ground or how it's going to be balanced or. Yeah, and that happens a lot. A lot. So that's the kind of shop it is. It's what some people call a job shop.
- [17:13]
B
Okay. All right. So that's what we're going to call it.
- [17:15]
C
Yeah.
- [17:16]
B
And it's different because there's. There are other kinds of welding processes, right?
- [17:22]
C
Oh, for sure. Yeah. In fact, as part of my research for the book originally, I Went to, like, nine other shops, too. Houzz was the first one I visited. But then I started going to other places. Some small, like Houzz, but others big like John Deere or Vermeer, and to sort of see, like, what is their process, what is their production like. And also I was really interested in what is their communication like, like, what are the genres that occur in these places. In fact, this book actually started as an examination of genres on the shop floor. And then I started writing and. And it became like, that's one chapter, but the rest is like the story of learning.
- [18:07]
B
Okay, yeah, so we're talking about learning. So what are the six characteristics of scaffolded interactions?
- [18:16]
C
The six characteristics of scaffolded interactions?
- [18:19]
B
Yeah.
- [18:20]
C
Are you talking about, like, cognitive scaffolding? Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. So mainly, like, I type, I tend to classify them into, like, three categories. And then there are different strategies that. That occur within those. But, you know, the basic breakdown is like, three different categories. Instruction, which is when somebody tells you to do something or somebody demonstrates how to do something. Those are like instructional strategies. And then there's cognitive scaffolding, when somebody, like, asks you a question to try to draw out your own thinking on it. Pumping questions or questions are like prototypical kind of cognitive. Cognitive scaffolding. And you can hear it in the term, like, cognitive thinking scaffolding, like trying to bootstrap somebody up. And then there's motivational scaffolding, which has to do with, like, the affective state or emotions. So how do you keep somebody motivated? How do you keep them? How do you tamp down their frustration? How do you keep them, you know, energized to keep going? And I found all three of those at work at Houzz, of course. So it's sort of interesting to see how they combine how, for instance, somebody can be demonstrating something, but then at the same time telling you what they're doing. So you get, like a visual sort of instruction going on, even while you're getting a verbal overlay on it. And I noted that, you know, Jim, despite not having any, like, formal educational pedagogical training, he was using those strategies. And it was just really interesting to see how some of them seem, like, somewhat intuitive. And it was also interesting, and maybe in follow up, too, to kind of elaborate on it to see, like, okay, well, how could we. How could we. I'm going to use the word again, elaborate on what they do naturally. How can we sort of hone it so that people learn. Learn More effectively and efficiently. Yeah.
- [20:39]
B
Did you ever find yourself in the position of wanting to. This is the wrong word, but critique the way you were being instructed?
- [20:49]
C
Well, I'm sorry, I cut off your question.
- [20:52]
B
No, no, given, you know, given your background.
- [20:56]
C
Yeah. Well, I'll say this like. Well, I'll say anything really about it because it's not a secret. But there have been times, and Jim knows it. It's sort of a. Between us now, where I'll say like, my brain is full. You have to stop now. Like, he is a person who is excited about machines and knowing them, and I am too. But you can only. I mean, that's what scaffolding is, right? You can only get within your zone of proximal development. You are prepared to learn, like, a next step based on the competence you've developed. You can't jump over five more steps. So when he's given me that next step, like, for instance, on the lathe, telling me, like, how to, like, set the angle of the bit so that it hits it, the piece that's turning in the right way and how I'm not gouging too much out. There are a lot of working parts, like figuratively and literally to using a lathe. And I can only take so many new things at once. So sometimes he'll keep explaining and giving me more information. He knows so much, and guys like it and people like him know so much that, you know, they want to talk about the difference between a German lathe and an American lathe and why, you know, it goes twice as fast in reverse and da, da, da. It's all great, except, you know, as a learner, I just need to know, like, how do I move this handle so that the angle of the debt wall won't break off? You know, so it won't break. That's the main thing I'm going for. So I'll say, like, I'm full. You gotta stop now, you know, and just let me try it. Yeah, so those are the main things. And I get it because I have the same. I mean, we all do. If you have some expertise in something and you're excited about it and you like talking about it, you want to, like, tell the world about it. You want to tell the world about the difference between German lays and other delays. And. But learners can only take so much of a new thing at once. And so. Yeah. And now actually it's funny because it's like a. It's like an iterative process. Jim's read my book. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's read my last book. I might be reading this one too. I don't know. But yeah. So he's always, like, making jokes about scaffolding. Now, okay, like, all right, let's scaffold this.
- [23:30]
B
Scaffold this. All right. Right. You introduced the language.
- [23:34]
C
Exactly.
- [23:35]
B
And we kind of jumped over this. But tell us a little bit about Jim Ho, because he kind of emerges as an interesting character in your story.
- [23:42]
C
Oh, I'd love to. Yeah, I did jump over that in talking about the shop. Well, so Jim was a welder on. In the Navy. And so that was way back when he was, you know, a young man, a teenager, and he won a state championship for welding early on. He is naturally, I think, an excellent welder, somebody born with a certain skill set. He's also somebody who has practiced more than most people do. So he really has worked very hard. I talk in the book about deliberative practice, analyzing the work that you've done. Not just repetitions. He's someone who's done that work, and he's done it over 50 some years and having his own shop and encountering, like, project after, you know, individual project and learning, developing strategies for solving problems. So, you know, he's this walking wealth of information and knowledge, not just about welding, but about machining, about running a small business, about just all sorts of things. And I know that over the course of years he's had people working for him and he. He's been scaffolding their learning the same way he's been doing it for me for the last four years, like, just trying to show people, like, the value of being able to repair, of saving items from landfills, from helping out the community. There's a really cool book by Douglas Harper that talks about a. It's way back from 1987, and in that book he talks about this mechanic, handyman, sort of guy named Willie. And I love that book because Harper really homes in on Willie's value to the community. And I see Jim as that for Ames, but more the region of central Iowa. I don't think there's really anybody like him where people can bring things that. That are broken and he wants to fix them rather than just saying, get a different one or something like that. So there's. I call it like a, you know, sort of a wisdom of expertise there too. You know, something that's beyond the shop, but thinking more globally or at least more regionally about, you know, saving items and trying to repair things. And I just really respect that.
- [26:34]
B
Yeah. And it's A, it's something that seems to be disappearing a lot.
- [26:38]
C
That's the thing. So like when we were talking about depth and breadth of expertise, that's really what I'm thinking a lot about now is like how do we get more people like Jim? You know, I mean, in some ways, yeah, of course it takes years. But people have to be given the freedom to not just dive into like one type of welding, making one sort of thing, but be giving the, given the grace to have the time to expand their competences, to be able to practice other things, to do other tasks. And I think if we are really going to walk the talk, walk the talk of, of meeting more people with that, with that sort of expert tradesmanship, we're going to have to do more than just drill down on like tasks based training. You know, we're going to have to actually give people the time and the space to develop like that. Yeah. And I don't exactly know what it looks like, but that's part of what I'm thinking about now is kind of like, all right, what does this sort of expertise look like and what does it mean or what will it take to, to. Because we're losing people like Jim. I mean, it's just a fact, you know, people, you know, people are retiring from the profession and then what do you do? I, I wonder about that. Like with the city of Ames, the way we get, you know, machines and equipment from the city, the county, the university, everybody's relying on him to fix things. So what happens when he's not there anymore? Somebody who really cares about fixing something. Right. And not just slapping something together. I don't know.
- [28:32]
B
So one of the things you described in sort of as a follow up to the scaffolding chapter is about the idea of non linear path towards competence.
- [28:44]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:46]
B
This is so important because you know, as academics we tend to think very linearly that, you know, and so talk to us a little about the, about the nonlinear path.
- [28:56]
C
Well, yeah, so this is something I've seen and one of the reasons I like to talk about, you know, my day to day experience in the shop and this happens to everybody is, you know, you think you have got like some sort of, you know, advanced beginner, competent sort of expertise in some domain and some task and then, you know, you're away from it for a couple days and boom, you're making mistakes in it again. One example is I, I talk in the book about these chrome chairs that came into the shop. Very, very thin, metal, like I don't know 20 gauge, 18, I don't know, something around there, but thin. And so you go to TIG weld them, and if you don't have your amp set right, and if you're not ready to just zip it across the joint, it's gonna like blow a hole right in it. So the first time that I tried to repair one of these chairs and the client wanted the joints like welded together, they weren't really well welded together. You know, I got one, like I managed to do one joint and they're probably about an inch long, so they weren't that big. I got one, it wasn't that pretty, but I didn't burn a hole. Then the next time I go to do it, boosh, you know, just a gigantic hole. And then I get nervous, I get worried. That's part of the thing about working on people's stuff, you know, you might break it or, you know, ruin it. So I've blown a hole in this chair and I have to like, get Jim, you know, say, I'm sorry, look what I did. And of course he can fix it, you know, but. But yeah, so like, you get it and then you don't have it. So that's another really interesting, like part of, of this journey of learning expertises or competences is like, you know, it's not like straightforward for whatever reason, whether it's the situation or the day or or what you forget because you're concentrating on other things. Yeah, you can make a mistake or your hand might just slip. So there's all sorts of ways that learning can be impeded at a certain time, but then move ahead. So, like, the happy ending to that chrome chair story is that I think it was about two or three months ago this fellow brought in another chair. Chair. Apparently he's got a whole dining room set. So. And he wanted those joints and I thought he wanted them welded up. And I thought, oh, this could be an interesting test to see if I've actually developed like from two years ago when I first did this chair and had this kind of problem of getting one barely, and then blowing a hole. And sure enough, boom, boom, boom, boom. The weld looked pretty good, you know, and I was able to complete the whole chair, weld up all the joints, joints. And I thought, okay, you know, it's not like a step by step fashion approach, but if you keep doing deliberative practice, you keep learning, you are going to eventually be able to weld that chrome chair. So it does happen that way eventually, but it is not linear. Nope, nope.
- [32:11]
B
And it seems to me like so much isn't right. Like I can, oh my gosh, I can still think of things that a professor might have taught me back in whatever time. And it's just sort of sitting there and I couldn't figure out what the hell that was all about. And then sometime later, just like something hit me.
- [32:26]
C
It's like, oh, I just wrote about this very thing. It's really been kind of captivating my thinking lately, like for years. In the shop we have this big drill press that's got many speeds, but basically there are two main handles and you can have up, up, down, down, or a combination of the two. The other two. And when I was first learning in the shop, Jim would say up, up for fast, down, down for slow, down, up if it's like. And he would tell me like, use up, up if it's a quarter inch drill bit, use up, down if it's a half inch drill bit. So I just memorized those positions. I also knew that there was another lever that had nine choices for each one of those, those four combinations. So everything, not just four, but nine times four. When I was for the first two, maybe three years, it only just happened recently where I thought, I think I'm ready to try the other lever to try to like nuance my speed. I've been playing around with the up, up, down, down, up, up, up, down, up down. But I thought like, you know what with the this, what this bit needs is like not just up, down, but it needs to go just a tad slower. So what if I'm like, start playing with this other one and see where it goes. That's like these, you've got to be ready, you know, you've got to be ready to take these steps. And so I'm a firm believer in like zone of proximal development, as Vygotsky said. And yeah, it, if you're not ready, it's just not going to stick. Yeah, yeah. And then as far as like making mistakes or like non linear process, I mean there have just been times when in trying to concentrate on all of the different variables of a task, I've forgotten something very basic or simple. And, and it's because I'm trying to think like, okay, you know, I'm, let's say I'm welding aluminum, you know, I got to feed it in, I got to ease off the pedal at the end, you know. And then I realized, oh, I didn't like clamp it down. So now it's like bent up, you know, Just the basic things like, yeah, of course, you're welding something, you clamp it so that it doesn't, you know, deform. So, yeah, it's okay. Every day is sort of like a challenge. Like that. Yeah.
- [34:59]
B
So you introduced the idea of mistakes. So I'd like to ask you to read here, turn to your book and page 89, that first paragraph.
- [35:10]
C
Oh, sure. Even though I try not to compare myself to the people I work with, I feel like I've made a lot more mistakes than any of my co workers. My brain tells me that can't be true. My full time coworkers put in more hours than I do. They'd have to have made as many mistakes as I have. But my gut tells me it is true that I have made more mistakes because I don't readily learn the shop's conceptual and procedural knowledge. In any case, when I look through my daily journal entries, I relive the frustration and embarrassment I felt with each mistake. These entries, lamenting my errors, have added up during my years at Houzz.
- [35:57]
B
So this chapter contains what I think is an utterly delightful taxonomy of different kinds of mistakes. Thank you. You want to share those with us?
- [36:06]
C
Well, sure. Yeah. So the first kind I was thinking about, I made up this title of, like, dope slap mistakes. And I kind of alluded to these before. My definition for them is the sort of mistakes you make, but somebody off the street wouldn't have made the same mistake. So you've been like, trying to do this task, but, like, plugging in something that needs plugging in. That's a sort of dope slap mistake. I've. I've made mistakes like that, I think, more times than I can count. And I detail. Yeah, some of them in the book. One of them I. I go through in, like, some detail because it involves like, Tig welding a scroll saw and not recognizing that. I mean, anybody who knows anything about heat would have realized that a piece of rubber sticking out of this thing should be removed from the metal, you know, so, yeah, that's what I consider like a dope setup mistake. In. In retrospect, you just think, what was I thinking? You know, rubber melts. Yeah.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah.
- [37:24]
C
Other ones I talk about are communication mistakes. And these I actually maybe want to look at in more detail later on because they relate really closely to, like, my interest in, obviously in communication and writing. We've had some in the shop where clients leave off dimensions. So, in fact, fact, just last week when I was in the shot, I will not name any names, but we got drawings in for an item that had some dimensions, but not all dimensions. So it's interesting when you see something like that because you think, clearly they know the dimensions are important, but why not give all of them? You know, so there was that, but then also just the interesting choice of printing the dimensions in yellow, yellow text. So it was really, really hard to see what they were. I just thought, wow, that's a really interesting example. And I took a little screenshot because I thought, maybe I can use this in another book. But anyway, yeah, I talk about, like, the communication mistakes, not just ones from the clients, because. Because, you know, that's a whole another thing, but, like, just communication between or among, you know, me and my co workers or Jim and me. There's been times when Jim's told me to do something, I only get part of it. I should have asked more questions. I should have, you know, talked about, like, okay, what exactly are you talking about? Or what are we making? Like, sometimes he's already got the whole schema of something that we're fabricating in his head. Like, one time we were making these covers for pulleys, and I had no idea of, like, what we were making. I just knew that I was cutting some pieces of rec tubing. And I think I would understood better if I had known what we were doing. But instead of cutting, I talk about this in the book. Instead of cutting like five and a half inches, I cut like five and a half feet, which is a big waste of steel. So, yeah, just. They cost money, they cost time, these sort of communication mistakes. So I try to delineate some of those. I could have made that section a lot longer because I have made many of them. I talk a little bit about, like, perception mistakes. This is another thing that, That I find fascinating. I think it's worthy of more research is, like, as we develop in our competence, we learn how to perceive more expertly. Like, we are able to look at, like, a weld puddle, for example, and see, like, okay, is it clear? Is it sitting? Is it. Am I at the front of the puddle? Am I pulling it? You know, you're. You're just gauging, like, what is. Is the quality of the weld puddle, you know, but you need to have knowledge in order to do that, in order to, like, read the situation. So there's been times when I've been. I've made mistakes because I didn't read the situation correctly because I don't have that sort of expertise. And one I talk about in the book is like the problem of having undercut on a weld and not being able to see that I was long arcing my stick electrode and thus causing a. A defect in the weld. When Jim finally, you know, kind of walked me through it scaffolded, it even used a video to show me, like, how I was pulling away from the. From the weld puddle. And that just creates more amperage and, you know, causes problems. So, yeah, that's a. Those are perception mistakes that I talk about. And I don't know, should I keep detailing? No, it's okay. But there's. There's a few other kinds of. That I could have elaborated on in the book. They're like knowledge of what mistakes? So that's like conceptual knowledge, not having some key piece of information, like, for example, that the lathe goes twice as fast backwards.
- [41:36]
B
Okay.
- [41:36]
C
You know, if you didn't know that, that could be a big problem. And then just then knowledge of how mistakes. And this could be a whole nother book. I mean, honestly, I felt like the rest of the book was pretty much about this. But. But knowledge of how is like not understanding or not knowing how to carry out some task. So without Jim's scaffolding, a week or so ago, when I was working on that aluminum, cast aluminum cover for the tiller chain, I wouldn't have known how to. I could have, like, you know, Tig welded that aluminum broken off aluminum piece back on. On, no problem or few problems, but I wouldn't have known, like, how to maintain the bolt holes in the exact same space they were. So what he did was walk me through, like, the steps that I would have to do, like turning pieces of round stock aluminum, putting them into the holes that exist, and then welding around that as I. As I'm repairing. And what we had done on those pieces of round stock was end drill them so that when I had welded in those pieces of round stock and took the whole cover to the drill press, I could use those spots to get the drill into this exact same location. And it. That was a process that I didn't think of. I could do each of the individual steps, but I didn't know the process. And it was indeed a challenge. Like, I'm no expert at the lathe, so I had some scaffolding from my colleague Heather, who is learning machining and is way better than I am. And then also, you know, I was proud of myself because I was able to weld around those pieces of round stock without melting that little drilled spot. And I kept that. So that I could get the, the drill bit in there. All this is to say that's, that's know how. And if you don't know how to do it, you need somebody to, to scaffold you. Yeah.
- [43:47]
B
So there's a lot of different kinds of learning that you described that takes place in, in the machine shop, in the, in the welding shop. I'm the. And I'm just gonna. I was gonna ask a question about this, but I think I'm gonna let it go because we're running out of time.
- [44:03]
C
Oh, okay.
- [44:03]
B
Just. But any. For anyone who's listening, the chapter on the different standards and measurements is the most weirdly entertaining section that I think I've read. And again, you and I talked a minute as we were setting this up about cycling and the fact that bicycles use metric and then whatever the other standard is called anyway, that whole thing.
- [44:30]
C
Oh, us customary. Yeah.
- [44:32]
B
It's like, oh, this bike has 30 millimeter tires on a 12 inch, you know, 15 inch for. Anyway, so anyway. But again, for anyone who's out there who's.
- [44:41]
C
I'm so grateful for you for saying that.
- [44:45]
B
It was really interesting. It was. I mean, it, it. I looked at the title and I was like, oh, God, really? We got to talk about this. And then I read again. I was like, okay, it's shorter.
- [44:55]
C
I, I really went back and forth on whether even to put it in there because it was such an oddball little thing. And I thought, eh, what the hell? I think it's interesting, you know, like how you have to learn it. Yeah. There are all these weird arcanities, and a lot of them apply just to like a US setting.
- [45:16]
B
Of course.
- [45:16]
C
Yeah, yeah. But there I, I think that some of them apply in your. In Europe and elsewhere in the world too. But yeah, just like, you know, pipe schedules, drill bits, sizes that come in letters and numbers and then they go to fractions and it's just this weird language and systems. They're bizarre, but that's what they have. And they have a really interesting history too. I mean, that's what fascinated me. Like, you know, gauge of metal, where it comes from. Yeah.
- [45:48]
B
But let's talk a little bit about learning safety though, because that's obviously a big piece to this and, And a little scary. Scary.
- [45:56]
C
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's just a lot of ways that you can get hurt in a shop. And I think like, some bigger shops do a good job at trying to really minimize the sort of learning that could go on could happen. Learning the sort of Problems that can happen or injuries. Yeah. And they've got in a place like John Deere where I went and visited a few times. You know, the production is very systematized. The safety regulations are in place. People are, are using filters and you know, ventilation packs when they're welding so they're not breathing in fumes. So a place like John Deere has really thought a lot about people's safety. It's the same sort of thing you see at Vermeer or the, or these big companies. Yeah. You know, smaller places deal with fewer resources. So people have to be a little bit more on their toes about watching where you're going and watching where the hoists are and there's, and paying attention to like, you know, guards on machines and not getting your fingers and things. But even basically on like a day to day basis, you know, learning how to, to pick up sheets of metal without getting sliced. I mean there are countless ways and what's scary about it is that it only takes like one second, you know, to make some mistake that can really be pretty injurious. So that's unnerving and it really does keep me on my toes. I think about it all the time when I'm walking around the shop. Like how, you know, not just about fumes or keeping my head out of, out of those or all the things I do to like for long term safety, but just, you know, being safe on a day to day basis. Yeah, I had another thought but I forgot it anyways. Yeah, it's, it's something that we think about, you know, the people I work with. Yeah, we think about it a lot because it's pretty, I mean my first day getting paid at Houzz, I got injured. Like it couldn't have been worse timing. I had been just going there, volunteering to help. I was doing research. So you know, I wasn't going to get paid for it. I wasn't double dipping. I was just like, okay, I'm just hanging out here, here. But then when I actually, you know, I could get, get paid, the first thing I did was get my finger between two pieces of metal on the press break. So blood everywhere. You know, it's. But it happens and yeah. So I think like learning safety practices. We talk about that a lot at the shop about like how do you handle metal? How do you, like how do you use a grinder and avoid jetting sparks or metal into somebody's face? How do we deal with fumes like doing carbon arcing or welding as much as we can outside or near the doors. So yeah, these long term and short term kind of health concerns are ever present. And some places like these, a lot of bigger places, they really have very robust training. At John Deere they do like monthly trainings for on safety where people get a new topic every month. I think it's great like that. It's just a refresher.
- [49:23]
B
Yeah. So you said earlier that this book started out as a book on shop genres. So what are they and how to learn them?
- [49:33]
C
Yeah. So being a writing professor, I originally said started out going to these shops because I had this thought especially after being in house for a bit that you know, there are all sorts of documents flying around on shop floors and we don't think about, we in general don't think about shops as being like literate spaces where literacy is going on, you know. And of course, so I thought like, but there are, there are documents here so why don't we talk about this them. And honestly my, my biggest or my main thought at that point and it's something still I'm working on is, you know, is there some way where we can take these genres that appear on the shop floor and use them in the, in the writing classes that students have to take, like students who are doing trades or vocational training. Could we take the genres that are specific to their, to their vocation and kind of mix them into the writing class so that what they're learning is very, very applied. We're still learning like you know, how to analyze discourse, how to you know, write a clear sentence but do it in a way that actually kind of grabs onto their future and their interests, you know, so that was the main, the idea and it honestly I thought of this but I wasn't the first person. I mean there are people doing this one who I talked to Maria di Placito up in Canada. She, she, she and I talked a few times about this and she's doing that very thing. So anywho, yeah, I went in looking at, thinking okay, I'm going to look at these genres. And so I talk about three of them in the book. In the one chapter that actually did turn out to be about shop genres I talk about like near miss reports, I talk about invoices and I talk about non conforming parts tags. So when somebody, a fabricator needs to write up like why a certain sub assembly or part isn't, isn't a quality part, you know, they need to put a tag on it, send it back either for to get fixed or to just be Put into scrap. So yeah, these genres appeared a lot and I think they're super interesting like especially at a place like Houzz, a smaller place where I found like in doing more advanced projects over even since the book's been published, having a couple more years under my belt since I stopped writing this, you know, I'm doing, I'm writing an invoice to the client and I'm, I'm sort of trying to motivate like the price, like here's the hours I spent on it and here's what I did in those hours. Like it took this long to do the cutting, this long to do the sanding, this long to do the welding, you know, all of that to try to help them to understand but also to say like this, to be persuasive and say this is why it cost this. Yeah. So I think invoices are fascinating. I think near missed reports where people talk about what almost happened, you know, like something an injury that came this close to happening but didn't happen. I think they're, they're fascinating documents like in the information they convey in the persuasion. So I wanted to do more research on those and not just on those three, but to start thinking, okay, what is the literacy on the shop floor and how can we use it to make more interesting classes for people who are doing industrial work but just any sort of vocational class. Yeah.
- [53:10]
B
So as we're getting to the end here, I'm going to admit something I had expected in your book, book, and this is probably my own trained incapacity, that there was going to be more of a foregrounding of what it's like to be a woman in a welding shop and you don't treat that topic until, until the end of the book. So, so but, but when you do you talk about some of the, you know, some of what's going on there. So. Yeah, tell us a little bit about.
- [53:43]
C
What that like, yeah, it's interesting. You know, now I work in a shop where there's two, sometimes three other women and some days we're the only employees in the shop now. So there's been some turnover and who's working there. So I'm in a shop now that's like all women and it's been, it's been really cool. But you know, before when I started, yeah, I was the only woman in the shop and I think that's very, very, very difficult for a lot of women who, especially one who might start in a smaller shop, you know, even one you might be one of 20. You know, like, there's a. Another weld shop in Ames that employs about 25 people. I could totally imagine having just one woman in a shop like that. You know, I think that's changing. We see more women entering trades, programs of all sorts, including welding. So it's great. And I think there's way more attention now on women doing trades. I also see more talking about safety equipment that's geared to women. Gloves, jackets. Well, jackets that actually fit. I would love to see more coveralls that actually fit as well because they are very hard to come by. But. Yeah. So as a woman. Yeah, you know, it was interesting. So I was the only woman for a very long time, but I was also the oldest. So it was. It was. I always had a hard time kind of like, trying to figure out my intersectionality to say, you know, like, am I. Am I getting responded to in this way because I'm older or is it because I'm a woman? Or maybe both. So. Yeah. Yeah. But I was really lucky. I know I write in the book about this. Like, I landed in a place with some just really decent human beings. You know, I don't have any complaints about my treatment. The. The men that I worked with were willing to help me to learn if I had trouble. I mean, just physically, it's a. It's a physical place place, pulling pieces of metal. They were great about asking me if I wanted help, and I would. I tried to be. I tried to be. What's the word I want? Careful about do I really need help? Like, so if I could do it myself, I would do it. But I was balancing, like, is this going to take me a half hour? If somebody. Wouldn't it be faster if somebody just grabbed the other end of this piece, a piece of steel, rather than me having to use a hoist, do all this rigamarole to get it over onto the rollers to cut it. We could do this in, like, 30 seconds if somebody helped. And that was something like that we would all do for each other. So I felt pretty good about that kind of compromise, I guess, you know, and. But there were other times where, you know, I'm trying to pull something and I'd say, like, it's hard to get this out. And they're like, yeah, well, you need muscle. Like, you know, some things because you're a smaller person, it's just harder to do. Yeah. So my experience was really good. But I would say that I have heard stories from women who have not had that experience, and I'VE read a lot of stories, too, so I definitely don't want to paint my experience as the norm. I'm thinking that it's not, but I think that it is getting better because I think more people in administration and management are starting to take these concerns seriously. I think they need employees, skilled employees, and recognize that they need to start treating people right and not like treating this as like a good old boy sort of network. So I think I'm optimistic about where we're going. But you only have to read a book like Alone in a Crowd, with which I cite in the book by Jean Reese Schrodel, to see, like, back in 1985, what it was like. Not great. And then even more recent stories. I love going on Blue Collar Women. It's a subreddit and reading women's stories. It's just this great place where people give advice and help out and act as a sounding board. But you don't have to read very far to see that there are still problems. For sure. Yeah. So I tried to acknowledge that in the book that, you know, I've had some encounters, but mine have been with clients, with customers, you know, that have. It still happens, you know, somebody will walk in, look right past me.
- [58:33]
B
Yeah.
- [58:34]
C
You know, and I. It's interesting because I think it's, you know, it's teaching me something I haven't really had a ton of experience with. You know, you work as a professor for 20 years. I don't know. I didn't. I don't remember having this experience. But yeah. So this is. It's been an interesting journey, but I think it is getting better for women. I'll leave it on that. I'm optimistic. Yeah.
- [59:03]
B
So as we wrap up, the last chapter deals with learning communities and about enculturation and establishing an identity.
- [59:14]
C
Yeah. Through your work. Yeah. So that's one of the things I'm sort of interested in, too, is like, what does it mean to be a part of a community of practice? What is a community of practice? Is it like within a shop or is it wider, like fabricators or something like that? I think it's both. And what does it mean to have an identity as like, a welder, fabricator? What. When can you say that that is what you are? When can you claim that? And part of me has always sort of been on the fence about it, like, I don't know enough about this thing, or I don't work full time. So part of me is always like, oh, I can't claim that because I'M not in the trenches all eight hours or ten hours a day. But another part of me is like, well, I've done. Been doing this since 2018. You know, I've put in a fair bit of time, and I have. Have these competences. I can do a lot of different welding tasks, and I know how to fabricate some things. So, you know, I think I should have some right to say, like, I'm a welder fabricator. Yeah. So that's sort of what the last chapter is about, is thinking about, like, you know, this sort of process. As we learn, we become enculturated into these communities. And so, like, okay, at what point have I learned enough to say that I. That I am a part of it? Am I still on the periphery, or have I finally made it into the interior? That's kind of based on other research about communities of practice, like lava and Wagner. So, yeah, I try to draw on them and their ideas to think about my own process of becoming for. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what I mean. Yeah. For a process of becoming a welder fabricator. And specifically. Yeah.
- [61:05]
B
Well, again, Joe Mackiewicz, thank you very much for this book, and it's been a pleasure to talk to you today.
- [61:11]
C
Thanks so much for taking the time and for all the great questions. It's just been a. It's been a blast. I appreciate it.
- [61:17]
B
Once again, my guest today has been Joe Makowicz, the author of Learning Skill Trades in the Work Place, available in open access from Springer. My name is Tom Disena, and you are listening to the New Books Network.