Improving Maritime Education and Training for the Sophisticated Ships of Today

APPRENTICESHIP training on board ships is a mandatory component of seafarers training scheme. Traditionally, seafarers develop best part of their disciplinary knowledge and competencies by means of apprenticeship and workplace learning through legitimate participation at work on board ships.

A significant feature of the traditional apprenticeship is the availability of the process of performing a task for the apprentices to observe.

There is a transparent relationship between a skill, its use, and the outcome of its application. In the work environment the apprenticeship process makes it easy for seafaring trainees to learn the required skill by observation of application of skills by expert crew memebrs. 

At the the same time the expert is able to monitor the trainee’s application of the skill and to observe and diagnose if there is any error in understanding of the task or the application of the skill by the future seafarer.

In recent decades, ships have undergone numerous changes. These changes are primarily due to the introduction of new technologies on board ships. Use of technology same as performing higher-order cognitive skills, are some tasks that are more internalised and do not leave visible clues. Thus a significant feature of the new technological workplaces is the invisibility of its work procedures and the mental processes of its operator while working with the instruments.

As the result, the influx of high technology and rapidly changing work environment onboard ships seems, to some extent, preclude many traditional and authentic opportunities that exist in apprenticeship activities.

Hence, the apprenticeship system and on-the-job training alone are unable to fulfil the training requirements of the newcomers in the maritime technological workplaces. This implies that technology education has to rely on the training institutes to provide the practitioners of the new workplaces with the competencies they need.

Currently, technology education is integrated into conventional maritime education and training systems and treated the same.

Furthermore, the introduction of new technologies demands education to take a new direction, which needs to be vastly different from the current view of education that pervades the culture of schooling. There is a need for a novel epistemological approach to education to accommodate the learning needs of current and future ship board technological environments. Consequently, new learning and curriculum theories need to be applied to the current maritime vocational education and training system to adapt it to the novel context.

To solve the problem and based on my extensive research in the filed of maritime education and training I have developed the concept of quasi-community. The idea of quasi-community constitutes a framework for theorising knowing and learning in maritime vocational education that may address the problems (Emad and Roth, 2016). In the following, I briefly feature some of the elements of the quasi-community that are relevant to technology education in formal maritime education.