The co-op seminar was part of LaGuardia's program since its inception. It was originally conceived as an opportunity to reflect on work placements--that is, to convert what might otherwise be ordinary employment into a truly educational experience. The early seminars were quite loosely structured, and came under criticism from students who complained about having to give up precious evenings and weekends for what seemed to be ordinary rap sessions. In response, the seminars have been developed over time, with much more carefully defined purposes, structure, and curricula.
During each of the three internships, students attend a co-op seminar once a week for two hours, for a total of 12 hours. The co-op seminars are scheduled in the evening or on Saturdays, so as not to interfere with normal work hours. In general terms, the co-op seminar provides a framework for analyzing and evaluating students' internship experiences, linking work experience with critical analysis and reflection. The co-op seminar is not used to deal with personal difficulties at the internship site; instead, these are managed through individual counseling and planning sessions with the co-op advisor. Rather, the LaGuardia model conceives of work experience as a field laboratory for applying concepts introduced in the seminar and for collecting data to analyze in the seminar. Students then analyze the results of their data via written exercises and group discussion. The internship or field experience is characterized as participant observation, applying research methodologies such as interviewing, identifying critical incidents, document review, and systematic observation (Heinemann et al., 1991). The internship enriches the learning process of the classroom seminar in multiple ways, leading students to appreciate the role of each worker within an organization and the larger issues of organizational systems and processes.
The college has identified eight goals for students in the seminars[9]:
There are three levels of co-op seminars, each taken during one of the three co-op placements. The first and third co-op seminar may either be generic, focusing on general workplace issues, or major-specific, focusing on applications particular to a student's major area. Whether a seminar is generic or major-specific depends upon a student's schedule and the college's ability to generate high enough attendance to justify a class for a specific major. The second level seminar, "Fundamentals of Career Advancement," is common to all students.
There are five major-specific seminars[10]
and one generic seminar offered at
Level 1. At this initial phase, topics
include information gathering, data organization, quality standards,
maintaining currency in technical skills, and other issues specific to the
major. Examples of classroom activities include working as teams to identify
data from financial reports, using case studies to evaluate information and
hardware systems, brainstorming questions to ask in an interview, and simulated
production exercises. Examples of field assignments include describing document
flow at the internship site, analyzing span of control and specialization,
identifying services available in a school neighborhood, evaluating quality
standards in school food service, and listing job classifications within the
students' internship departments. In addition, students are led through a
series of activities which apply technical skills formerly mastered in a
classroom setting such as identifying document purposes and information
flows.
The generic Level 1 seminar, "Understanding Critical Issues at Work," allows multidisciplinary perspectives on common aspects of the workplace. In classroom exercises, students apply theoretical concepts such as corporate culture, organization schema, leadership styles, and corporate ethics. Field assignments direct students to identify ways in which their internship site encourages teamwork, to describe physical clues to indicate power and level of authority, to compare corporate values in centralized and decentralized systems, and to analyze the consequences of ethical dilemmas.
The Level 2 seminar, "Fundamentals of Career Advancement," is common to all students, and focuses on using the workplace to gain information about skill and personal requirements for upward mobility. The text for the seminar, Fundamentals of Career Advancement (Ducat, 1994), emphasizes solving career dilemmas through self-assessment, gaining further education, learning from experience, researching reliable career information, and career networking. Using short practical exercises, research activities, and case studies, students gather and analyze information about career options and about four- year colleges. An important element in this Level 2 seminar is a "map" for extracting the greatest potential learning from any work experience by replicating strategies used by successful executives, seeking challenging assignments, coping with hardships, observing key people, and getting feedback on strengths and areas for improvement. Students visit the Campus Career Center to research career and educational opportunities.
As with the first seminar, both major-specific[11] and generic seminars are offered. The major-specific seminars demand the use of systematic research skills in an independent and professional way. At the advanced level, students are expected to review theory while applying complex knowledge to their fieldwork experience. In the accounting seminar, for example, students follow a detailed outline for analyzing systems or information flows at the work site. Each week they gather components of a final, comprehensive paper and work in teams to evaluate data and to proofread draft papers. In the School Food Service Management seminar, students critique and design operational systems as well as develop personnel selection, training, and supervision practices. During our observation, these students examined promotion policies from legal, union, employee morale, and organizational perspectives.
The generic Level 3 seminar is titled "Humanism and Technology," and is designed to examine the major issues with which technology confronts modern society. The co-op seminar parallels a required liberal arts seminar of similar title, incorporating literature and popular press readings to present multiple perspectives. This co-op seminar is currently being modified to be applicable to the experiences of all students.
The instructors for the co-op seminars come from different backgrounds. Some of them are local employers, who teach because they like to have personal involvement with students in the co-op program; for example, the vice-president of a hat manufacturing company located two blocks from the college; a senior director with the New York City Partnership, Inc., which coordinates public and private efforts to improve the economic environment of New York City; and the director of food service at Riker's Island all teach co-op seminars. Others are co-op faculty who are paid extra to teach a co-op seminar; they are obviously much more familiar with the structure and purpose of co-op and of the co-op seminars than are other instructors, although they lack the real-life experiences of employers. A small number are instructors or administrators in other divisions of LaGuardia, who teach co-op seminars as a logical extension of the theoretical skills taught in their classrooms.
One of the special advantages of instructors from the business world is that they can provide "true stories" from the workplace--descriptions of actual workplace situations and problems that students seem to find fascinating. Of course, students have their own "true stories" from their co-op placements, but the tales that employers tell have the weight of experience and the stamp of authority. One interpretation of student fascination with these "true stories" is that they represent a way of teaching about the customs and folk ways of the workplace--dimensions of employment that cannot be taught in conventional classes, and that are crucial to the success of the job. In contrast, faculty are less likely to have the kinds of recent experiences in work that would provide a fund of "true stories."
Beyond an annual co-op orientation, seminar instructors from outside the college have no access to any form of staff development. Co-op faculty and administrators have access to various staff development activities, which often involve aspects of teaching; however, the yearlong seminar that promotes active instruction is available to only one or two co-op faculty each school term, and this is certainly not mandatory. Not surprisingly, given the differences in the backgrounds of instructors and the lack of any explicit attention to training, the emphases of different instructors vary considerably. Some focus on career exploration to the exclusion of the other purposes; others stress job-specific skills, or behavioral aspects of the job. And, of course, individual approaches to teaching vary considerably (as we describe in the section titled, "The Conduct of the Co-op Seminar"). However, LaGuardia has tried to anticipate the variation among instructors by developing a series of curriculum materials for the co-op seminars, which are described in the next section. The manuals allow an instructor without much background in education and without much prior experience in the co-op program to teach one of the co-op seminars.
To some extent, the content of the co-op seminars has been standardized, particularly through the use of texts that have been written by various faculty members at LaGuardia and that provide topics, classroom exercises, and fieldwork assignments. (An exception to the standardized curriculum is the Level 3 generic seminar, "Humanism and Technology," a changing course that has not yet been fully elaborated.) Each co-op seminar session tends to encompass three to nine pages of text, one page of reading comprehension questions, a classroom simulation or case study from which students make judgments and draw conclusions, and a field assignment to be completed from observation or interview at the internship site.
Case studies and simulations often form a basis for problem-solving exercises. Student analysis of a particular case is guided by the instructor, relying in part on questions embedded in the seminar text; for example, students analyzing the culture of the PepsiCo Company follow a set of questions to discern the primary mission, culture, organizational values, and the relationship of competitiveness to employee morale. Homework assignments link seminar theory to internship experiences by requiring highly specific observations such as contrasting the language style used among co-workers with that used with supervisors; describing corporate rituals practiced at the internship site; comparing home and work rituals, dress, and language style; and assessing the fit between personal values and the culture of the internship site.
In the past, the co-op program has tried to promote an approach to teaching that it calls T.A.R.--which stands for Teach - Apply - Reinforce--that reappears in many of the co-op seminar texts. For example, the workbook for the introductory seminar in accounting describes the teaching component in the following way: "You were taught certain concepts in Principles of Accounting II and Co-op Prep which will be the educational focus of your internship. These concepts are called T.A.R. concepts. You use T.A.R. workbooks to focus on these concepts." Then the application of concepts takes place in the work setting: "You will observe how T.A.R. concepts apply to your work setting during your first internship. You will use this Internship Workbook to guide you." Finally, concepts are reinforced: "In your internship seminar, you will reinforce the T.A.R. concepts you have observed in your internship setting." The T.A.R. approach could be considered an approach to teaching suitable for integrating work-based experiences into the classroom, particularly for instructors without experience in doing so. However, it is unclear how uniformly the T.A.R. concept is used by instructors: As new instructors have come into the program who were not associated with its development in the 1980s, the use of this pedagogical device seems to have weakened. This is, of course, part of the larger problem of maintaining a distinctive educational approach when there are many new and part-time faculty who need to be socialized to unfamiliar practices.
Many of the major-specific materials were written during the mid-1980s under a Department of Education grant for integrating cooperative education and classroom learning. Co-op administrators acknowledge that these materials are outdated due to changes in business technology and workplace practices; however, there are no funds available to update these materials, which are voluminous. The lack of funds is unfortunate for another reason: The process of writing the seminar texts during the 1980s apparently brought together co-op and "regular" faculty in ways that otherwise do not happen.
From our observation, the standardized curriculum reduces differences between instructors in content and focus, as well as overcomes many of the difficulties related to weak pedagogy. Even in cases where we observed a reliance on traditional lecture and poorly planned audiovisual materials, the students were clearly engaged by the topics of the co-op seminar. However, no attempt to "teacher-proof" a curriculum can be completely successful, and so the quality of instruction and the approach to teaching varies considerably among instructors (as we will see in the next section). Of course, this is precisely what happens in most educational institutions, including community colleges.[12] The only surprising element is that, while LaGuardia is one of the few community colleges to make teaching an institutionwide priority, they have not extended this emphasis on teaching to the co-op program.
In practice, the co-op seminars serve one of three purposes. The first is allowing students to explore the career options they face. The importance of career exploration, in our view, cannot be overstated: Many students come to community colleges unsure of what they want to do and trying to "get a life" for themselves. Even at LaGuardia, where students often apply and are accepted for a particular major, the co-op seminars allow students who have come from foreign countries and are unsure about American jobs and opportunities an avenue to evaluate their initial career decisions. Unfortunately, most community colleges provide little help for students trying to investigate their career options, and so they take courses aimlessly or enroll without clear intentions in the transfer program because it is the most obvious alternative.[13] However, the co-op seminars provide a combination of a work placement and time for reflection, a much more active form of career exploration and validation than is usually available in either high schools or community colleges. This results in a high rate of changes in major as students select careers matched to their interests and aptitudes. One of the manuals for the generic Level 1 seminar, "Understanding Critical Issues at Work," expresses the benefit:
Through LaGuardia's unique education program called Cooperative Education, you are temporarily allowed to leave the world of classroom academics and to enter the world of work for specific periods of time. "Co-op" gives you the chance to try out career fields to see if they are right for you. You may not fully realize at the present time how beneficial an opportunity this is to your own career development and discovery. "Co-op" will enable you to make better informed career decisions because it provides a real life laboratory to test your career goals and aspirations.
A second purpose, particularly of the major-specific Level 1 and Level 3 co-op seminars, is to present certain skills and competencies required on the job. Some of these are "academic" topics conventionally taught in classrooms, like accounting systems, computer programs, and specific approaches to management. In other cases, these may be behavioral competencies; for example, one of the co-op administrators stressed the value of the co-op seminar in acculturating foreign-born students to the norms of American workplaces by means of training students to look supervisors in the eye and to engage with fellow workers and supervisors in the apparently egalitarian and informal style of most work settings. However, unlike the presentation of job-related skills in conventional classrooms, these skills are presented in the co-op seminar as part of a total system of production, in which tasks are part of a larger organizational structure. In many cases, instructors make good use of the work placements students are in; for example, by contrasting specific accounting practices with textbook methods, or by locating particular tasks within a larger production system. In these ways, students can come to understand the ways in which the practices and competencies learned in the classroom are applied and modified on the job and, in turn, they can explore the origins of particular practices they observe in their work.
The third purpose of some co-op seminars is the more humanistic one of raising the larger issues about work--for example, its influence on individuals and on society. In many ways this is similar to the intent of general education requirements, except that students can use their own specific employment--rather than fabricated or contrived descriptions of employment--to explore the larger social, ethical, political, and moral themes associated with working. However, most students in the "Humanism and Technology" seminar are liberal arts majors (since most other students take major-specific Level 3 seminars), and so the potential purpose is less well-developed than the other two.
Over the past decade, the co-op seminar has undergone a number of intentional changes in purpose and in content. Until about 1990, the Level 1 and Level 3 seminars were major-specific, with registration limited to students with shared career goals and courses. Fiscal constraints made the low enrollments in some of these courses untenable, and the college began to develop a series of more generic seminars. Interestingly, generic seminars offer a number of benefits in both philosophy and practice. The mobility of workers and the changing nature of work proscribe narrow career preparation, and a mixed population of students within a co-op seminar offers a wider perspective on possible careers. In addition, all careers share a core of employability skills, including an ability to understand the larger system in which one completes discrete tasks and an appreciation of the cultural norms of a particular work site. In creating generic seminars, LaGuardia has moved closer to a metacognitive approach to experiential learning in which students gain a "map" for understanding both the current internship site and future employment opportunities. The change also reflects the shift in Heinemann's thinking about co-op programs away from the conception of co-op as a kind of laboratory for the seminars to a conception of the co-op placement as an experience to be examined from multiple perspectives and disciplines.
The co-op seminars offer flexibility in other ways as well. An example is the food service management program and its associated seminar. Under the joint auspices of the School Employees Union and LaGuardia, experienced entry-level school cafeteria employees who show management potential are nominated for the training required to qualify for food service manager. Nominees who fail to meet the skill requirements at LaGuardia receive tutoring through a union-sponsored program. Frequently, students who enroll in the food service management co-op program elect to complete their degrees, encouraged by a course schedule adapted to their work hours. Interviews with students, mostly mature women, enrolled in this program indicate great satisfaction with the union-supported tutoring in basic skills and with the accommodation LaGuardia has made in scheduling.
[10] The five Level 1 major-specific seminars are (1) Accounting Information Systems, (2) Application of Computer Information Systems: Concepts in the Workplace, (3) Management Principles: Theory and Application, (4) Introduction to Teaching, and (5) School Food Service Management I.
[11] The four Level 3 major-specific seminars are (1) Accounting Information Systems for Decision-Making by Objectives, (2) What Do Managers Do: An Advanced Approach, (3) Advanced Computer Information Systems, and (4) School Food Service Management. Students in the education major complete a practicum arranged through that department.
[12] This statement is based on an ongoing study directed by Norton Grubb of teaching in community colleges, based on observations of about 225 classrooms as well as interviews with instructors and administrators. Although community colleges pride themselves on being "teaching institutions," very few of them have made good teaching an institutional priority, and, because of this, high-quality teaching remains individual and idiosyncratic. LaGuardia is one of the few community colleges to make teaching a priority of the institution.
[13] These statements are based on a series of in-depth interviews with about 40 community college students in California, exploring their reasons for enrolling. The surprising result was that both the younger students, who had usually left high school without much sense of what they might do, and the older students, who had frequently been closed out of a promising career through no fault of their own, were trying to "find a life."