Jo Mackiewicz, "Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace" (Springer, 2025)

Jan 9, 2026

Jo Mackiewicz, a professor at Iowa State University, explores her journey into welding and the dynamics of learning in trades. She shares insights from her book that detail how personal experiences shape trade competencies. Jo discusses the importance of scaffolding in teaching and the challenges of learning through mistakes. She reflects on her growth in empathy as a novice and how this informs her teaching. Additionally, she highlights the complexities of being a woman in a predominantly male field and the evolving landscape of trades education.

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INSIGHT

Depth And Breadth Make True Expertise

Expertise in trades requires both depth in tasks and breadth across related domains.
Jo Mackiewicz argues rounded competences produce better shop problem-solvers than narrow task-only training.

ANECDOTE

Learning In A Job Shop Of One-Off Projects

Jo worked part-time at Howe's Welding, a small repair-and-fabrication 'job shop' with one-off projects.
She learned new tasks daily because clients bring unique repair problems that often haven't been seen before.

ADVICE

Scaffold Learning With Three Strategies

Use instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding to teach trades skills.
Combine demonstration, questioning, and affective support to help newcomers progress within their zone of proximal development.

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This open access book describes and explains a fifty-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 Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, where she has worked for over three years. This book uses accessible, everyday language and draws heavily from personal experience in trades, taking the value of trades as a given and explaining the process of developing the depth and breadth of conceptual and procedural knowledges—the competences—required to work in repair and fabrication shops like Howe’s. This book combines a research-derived framework for analyzing scaffolded learning and expertise development with stories of learning how and learning what. Readers will gain a better understanding of knowledge development in trades workplaces, including how one-to-one interactions scaffold knowledge, how workers gradually enter a community of practice, and how workplaces can constrain learning. This book also gives readers a view of workplace learning over time and helps readers—researchers and practitioners—recognize opportunities for development toward expertise. The book is useful for tradespeople, especially newcomers to trades and, in particular, women.

Jo Mackiewicz, is 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 cowritten numerous articles. Her book, 'Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge', was published by SUNY Press in May 2022.

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