The scene is Riddershof – a modern 140 bed nursing home in a large Dutch provincial city in the late 1970s. A young anthropologist from Australia is undertaking an ethnography of the nursing home and the Dutch welfare state. Using the methods of participant observation, and unable to be a resident he becomes a leerling ziekeverzorgende (trainee practical nurse) and commits to a two year vocational training program which involves a combination of supervised nursing care on the job supplemented by blocks of class room based education. In accordance with Dutch legislation, all those who work with the frail elderly and other vulnerable groups must be qualified or be in an educational training programme, their practice on the wards supervised by qualified staff.

Ethnographic research is essentially a process of learning social forms and cultural codes understood implicitly by insiders in an attempt to reveal them to other outsiders. It is an unspoken assumption of the participant observation methods employed that the most important information to be learned in the field can not be gleaned from books or other secondary sources but must be experienced first hand. The intangible, elusive and subjective component of personal experience is what distinguishes practical cultural competency from the awkward, bookish theoretical expertise that marks out the academic outsider from the adept insider. Learning some of the lessons of local history through experience shared with the elders, the supposed beneficiaries of the care provided in Riddershof, provided a powerful illustration of its importance.

As part of the on-the-job apprenticeship involved in undertaking my first major field research project, I began to distinguish between three distinct but inter-related forms of learning. The first and perhaps most widely recognised technique of knowledge transmission concerned the processes of formal learning. Evidence of having followed such a process was necessary, for example, to demonstrate a level of professional competency amongst all nursing home staff as required under Dutch law. In this form, instruction took place according to an agreed curriculum which covered a range of generic educational competencies, which included basic mathematics, science and written Dutch, as well as the more specific clinical subjects required of practical nurses, such as anatomy, physiology and nursing practice. The results were confirmed through various forms of testing and exams, as well as through ongoing monitoring of daily practice on the wards.