How best to prepare for work? Historically, work itself was the only way of preparing for work--at a father's right hand, near a mother's knee, in apprenticeship programs both formal and informal, or through on-the-job training. But these methods have their own limitations and politics: they may not be effective for complex occupations, they often limit the range of occupations an individual can consider, and--particularly as the pressures of profit-making have taken over, in the long decline of apprenticeship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--they may be more exploitive than nurturing. And so, school-based preparation has gradually taken over from work-based preparation, both in the specific sense that professional and occupational education prepares individuals for employment, and in the more general sense that a great deal of schooling is justified by its value in employment.
But not without a sense of loss: The view that school-based preparation is inadequate--too "academic," too removed from the realities of work--has persisted throughout this century. Various reforms have emerged to develop work-based learning either as a substitute for or a complement to school-based learning: in co-op education programs established in 1906; in the continuation schools envisioned by the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917; in the internships that developed in the schools of the Eight-Year Study; and in the work experience programs of the 1970s. The most recent renewal of interest in work-based learning is the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994, which provides federal seed money for school-to-work (STW) programs incorporating both school-based learning, work-based learning, and connecting activities to make the two consistent with each other.
In trying to design STW programs, there are relatively few examples or models in this country from which individuals attempting to develop new programs might learn. The recent experimental efforts are too new or too special to provide much guidance, and many earlier efforts to develop work-based learning have either disappeared or are small in numbers.[1] The exemplars of connecting activities are particularly scarce, since with few examples of work-based learning, there has been no reason to elaborate mechanisms to coordinate it with school-based learning. However, in the search for possible models, there exist a handful of cooperative education programs of relatively long standing that can provide some guidance for emerging STW programs.
In this paper, we examine a particular kind of connecting activity: the co-op seminars developed as part of the Cooperative Education Program at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. The co-op seminars, taken by students while they are in co-op placements, are intended to raise general issues about work, about occupations in general, and about the competencies required on the job. They serve as a mechanism of connecting a particular kind of school-based learning--the learning that takes place in the seminars themselves--with experiences on the job; but they also serve as a form of career exploration and a way of linking occupational students with some of the larger issues generally associated with the moral, political, and intellectual purposes of schooling. The co-op seminars have been an integral part of the co-op program since its inception, and have been continuously changed and elaborated since then, so they represent a well-considered effort to link school-based and work-based learning. While they have been developed in a community college, the possibilities they offer and the warnings they provide are equally applicable at the high school level, where much of the energy in developing STW programs will be concentrated.
In the first section, we will describe the co-op program at LaGuardia Community College, since it provides the setting within which the co-op seminars take place. In the second section, we describe the structure and purpose of the co-op seminars. In the third section, we describe a number of co-op seminars we observed in order to illustrate the variety of pedagogical strategies that different instructors use. Finally, the implications of the co-op seminar are examined in the fourth section, assessing how it might be used in other STW programs and outlining a series of problems that all STW programs must confront as they attempt to integrate school-based with work-based learning.