Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
We believe that opportunities for education, employment, and compensation of
people in the trades are directly reflected in the quality of the built environment,
and the effective stewardship of cultural heritage. In the beginning, PTN found
its identity in a single event, the International Preservation Trades Workshop.
The first 'gathering of the trades' in 1997 not only proved that it could be done,
it demonstrated that sharing, learning and talking with tools in hand filled a void
in the mainstream preservation movement that many doubted even existed. Since
then PTN has evolved into a year round networking and educational resource for
people in the traditional building trades and allied disciplines.
Regaining the Balance: Delivering Craft Education and Training
Regaining the former balance requires putting value back into craft education
and training, to attract and retain dedicated students who have the potential to
achieve fully respected qualifications by all professionals across the whole indus-
try. Vital to its success will be the professional retention of the foremost peer-
respected, experienced, and highly skilled master craftspeople as instruct-ors.
Programme planners will also need to consult with them and the rele-vant indus-
trial organisations and professional educators, to design intuitive, validated, lin-
ear programmes with clearly defined routes from start to completion, through a
well-thought-out craft syllabus. This would guide a pragmatically delivered and
cross-subject related craft curriculum of skills, theory, and related technology,
underpinned with historical background to achieve meaningful context.
Students once more must be reconnected to traditional materials, their
preparation, and the skills of handcrafting and use, to be able to eventu-
ally replicate selected enrichments from past centuries with empathetic
authenticity within their apprenticeship course. Yet they must also fully learn
about up-to-date factory-made materials, tools, equipment, and associated craft
techniques for contemporary construction too.
Bureaucracy and overhead costs should be kept low, so that most funding
is spent within workshops and classrooms. With appropriate levels of fund-
ing by colleges, sponsorships, and financial and in-kind support by stakehold-
ers, institutions should be able to provide first-class facilities to teach in and
programmes of the quality to earn international recognition.
Recruitment of Students
This approach requires recruiting students with the right attitude, aptitude,
and ability to succeed in the crafts. Young people today, however, are often
influenced by prevailing social attitudes that see little virtue in the ethos of
working with one's hands and years of study to qualify. This must be addressed
so that both parents and their children view traditional skilled crafts as digni-
fied and fulfilling, with real status.
