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

Jan 9, 2026

Jo Mackiewicz, a professor at Iowa State University and author of Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace, shares her unique journey into welding, highlighting her recovery from injury and the importance of empathy in teaching. She discusses filling research gaps on scaffolded learning in trades, defining types of scaffolding, and the nonlinear paths to competence. Jo also reflects on the challenges women face in trades, and emphasizes developing both breadth and depth of skill through community and practice.

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INSIGHT

Depth And Breadth Define Expertise

Expertise in trades requires both depth in specific tasks and breadth across related domains.
Jo Mackiewicz argues that true expert tradespeople combine wide-ranging competences rather than narrow specialization.

ANECDOTE

Learning In A Job Shop Of One-Offs

Jo describes Howe's Welding as a job shop with one-off repairs and small fabrication runs.
She emphasizes daily novelty and frequent tasks she had never seen before, making it ideal for learning.

ADVICE

Scaffold Learning With Three Strategies

Use three scaffolding categories: instruction, cognitive questioning, and motivational support.
Combine demonstrations with verbal explanations and questions to bootstrap a learner's problem-solving.

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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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