The growth of community colleges and technical institutes is one of the most significant workforce developments in American education in this century. Nearly half of all adults take at least one course in a community college, and about 45% of all undergraduates enroll first in a two-year college. In addition to preparing some students for four-year colleges, the community colleges also provide initial preparation for work, upgrade training to those needing additional skills, retraining for displaced workers and others who want to change careers, and second-chance education for individuals who need some combination of basic (or remedial) academic education and technical skills (Hansen, 1994). Most states have now built community colleges within commuting distance of the majority of the population.
Given their increasingly important role in education and training, community colleges have been sustaining the complaints by employers that job seekers lack the academic preparation necessary for them to adapt to a changing workforce (Grubb, 1996a; SCANS, 1991; Zemsky, 1994). Over the past several years, some community colleges have responded to this demand by attempting to create a closer connection between academic and occupational education--that is, to incorporate more "basic" or academic content into occupational programs so that graduates will have both the basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills and some of the "higher-order" skills demanded by the business community and various educators.
A study sponsored by NCRVE has examined efforts to integrate curriculum in community colleges.[27] One finding is that the kinds of skill, knowledge, and understanding that these efforts are trying to promote do not all fall into the simple categories of academic basics and occupational specifics. Instead, the study identified seven distinct domains of competence:
The conventional structure of independent courses and conventional methods of teaching and assessment are not adequate for developing competencies in all these domains. Therefore, innovative community colleges have devised new approaches to curriculum and instruction. These include the following:
Here we offer examples of how these different approaches to curriculum and instruction are used to address the various domains of career competence. In order to ensure that community college graduates have the options to transfer to a four-year college, high academic standards must be maintained. Some forms of communications courses have appeared which explicitly blend transfer requirements with career perspectives, and demonstrate that transfer outcomes can be achieved when content and text adaptations are made. For instance, by varying topics for written assignments and reading materials, the Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee developed three forms of the introductory transfer English course--rhetoric, literature, and workplace oriented.
In many occupational courses, the infusion of academic skills and concepts is often informal, but some colleges also publish handbooks to provide instructors with sample applications or assignments. For instance, when a campuswide effort to infuse reading, writing, computing, and speaking was undertaken at the Community College of Denver, their Teaching and Learning Center complied an "Integration of Critical Skills Handbook," describing examples of integrated applications at each of three increasing levels of proficiency.
Hybrid courses are often referred to as "applied academics" because conventional academic competencies are meshed with work-related applications. One way to assure rigor is to cross instructors as well as content, by having academic faculty teach occupational content. For example, Mt. Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts and City College of San Francisco both offer courses in nutrition and food safety through their microbiology or chemistry departments.
For teaching generic technical skills, infused activities and stand-alone courses are the most common approaches. In programs intended for transfer students, several colleges infuse word processing skills into written communications courses. For instance, at Oakton Colleges in Illinois, keyboarding and common software are infused into marketing courses. At San Jacinto Community College in Texas, students in literature classes write newspaper articles about characters in short stories, using the newspaper template in popular word processing software, and research information about social conditions in the stories via the Internet.
Occupational safety, another generic topic, is a stand-alone course at Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina, the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, and Monroe Community College in New York. Other colleges require first aid or CPR in certificate programs. Guilford also requires a course in Small Business Operations for several technical diplomas, knowledge which is generally useful for graduates wanting to become employed in or open their own small enterprises.
To promote competence with organizational systems at work (diverse personnel, time, capital, material, and utilities), some community colleges offer units within clustered courses--occupational, psychology, or applied communication courses. Some colleges offer stand-alone human resource courses; for example, Yakima Community College in Washington requires Human Relations in the Workplace for all students enrolled in an occupational/technical program. Other colleges have focused on a broader set of competencies, imparting skills using a multiple resources to plan and implement substantial projects so that students gain a personal understanding of interdependence across divisions of the organization.
A few colleges have created workplace simulations in the school environment, or have designed capstone projects that unite academic and technical skills to complete a work-similar plan or product. Simulations assist students in moving from classroom-based knowledge to practical performance. For instance, at the College of DuPage in Illinois, an elaborate Business Simulation Project encompasses seven business, management, and marketing courses, with students in each course taking the role of a department in a hypothetical firm. The simulation provides a framework for students to understand the flow of work among departments and the underlying system of work production. Interpersonal communication occurs within and among departments, and between managers and line workers. For example, the production students have to explain their jobs well enough to the human resources students that the latter can prepare an evaluation instrument for the production department. Students apply industry-approved software packages to improve productivity and product marketability.
Capstone projects are another way to integrate academic and technical skills. Typically, a project develops and demonstrates a student's knowledge and performance ability, through the planning, execution, and presentation of a work-like product. For example, at Columbus State Community College in Ohio, students in microcomputer technology work in small groups to evaluate appropriate hardware and software for a start-up small business system, and design and develop the appropriate forms, presentations, data entry, and retrieval procedures that such a firm would require. To complete the project, students must conduct interviews to gain information, evaluate the purposes and alternative forms of management reports, develop complete simulations of the database, spreadsheet, and other functional systems, and make a class presentation using transparencies, graphs, and charts.
Projects and simulations may accomplish some purposes better than actual work experience, but to gain exposure to the culture and practices of actual workplaces, there is no substitute for being there. Community colleges offer WBL in the form of internships or cooperative education mainly for students in technical fields. One of the rare institutions that also offers co-op for nonvocational students is LaGuardia Community College in New York, where enrollment in three 12-week co-op placements is mandatory for all students. Placements vary from 15 to 40 hours per week depending on the needs of the internship agency and the student's schedule. Coupled with each internship experience is a seminar, which connects particular coursework with practical application (Grubb & Badway, 1995).
Also unusual is the provision of internships for developmental students. Penn Valley in Missouri and Mt. San Antonio in California offer clustered courses to provide an occupational context for basic skills. These two programs were initiated through joint planning between several divisions of the college to overcome the long spells of remediation before students can meet career goals. In these programs, students with limited-English abilities improve their proficiency at the same time that they engage in occupational and/or academic study.
Although many students in community colleges are unsure of their career goals, services intended to help students evaluate their career options are usually limited. Sometimes, however, information about career requirements is infused into introductory academic or occupational courses. For example, in an Introduction to Psychology course, a chapter or a series of vignettes describes career options, educational requirements, employer and workplace characteristics, and future demand for positions related to that discipline. There are also hybrid courses that combine general and career-specific explorations. At the Community College of Philadelphia, Life Planning and Career Decision-Making presents a model for vocational selection and life planning, using a multimedia approach to gathering information about the world of work. Other hybrid courses explore specific career clusters. The course Survey of Health Occupations at Los Angeles Trade Technical College is a modularized course required for entry into nursing and health occupations programs. The course covers opportunities in health careers, transfer credit, and individual learning styles.
General education courses to prepare informed citizens are widely required for associate degrees in occupational majors, but some instructors report that occupational students find such courses tedious and unrelated to their futures. Furthermore, such courses are independent of occupational studies, forcing students to find the connections between their occupational concerns and the humanities and social science courses included in the typical general education sequence. An exception to this pattern is Salt Lake Community College in Utah, where administrators and faculty redefined the purpose of general education to be "the integration of attitudes, skills and broad abstractions of knowledge." As a result, the college evaluated every course against new criteria, with quality control resting in a joint academic and vocational faculty committee. In addition, SLCC instituted a 5-credit interdisciplinary course requirement outside of a student's major, opening creative learning opportunities.
A more explicit approach is hybrid courses that examine technological development from multidisciplinary perspectives. Using a theme of technological change, a number of courses examine technology as a threat to freedom, religion, imagination and nature versus the promotion of equality, democracy, rational thinking and economic progress. Technology and Culture was jointly developed by humanities and technology instructors at the Technical College of the Lowcountry in South Carolina in 1991, and pilot-taught to industrial faculty to gain their views about how students might react to the class content and format. Under a Tech Prep grant, the Business Division at Allan Hancock College in California identified management and economics themes in standard literary texts and designed a series of suggested writing assignments. For instance, Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith lends itself to an analysis of management issues related to social responsibility.
The innovations uncovered by the NCRVE study form a continuum--from isolated efforts on the part of individual faculty which influence only a few students, to institution-wide undertakings. Despite the differences, all these efforts were generated by concern about a range of student outcomes broader than technical skills alone. Both external and internal factors led to self-examination. In some cases, accreditation boards or employee advisory committees recommended stronger academic student outcomes, while in other colleges a leading administrator identified a need for program improvement. Some colleges received large grants to develop effective models of curricular innovation; other colleges funded very small projects out of general revenues.
The lack of a statewide or national consensus on the elements and strategies for comprehensive career preparation has left local colleges to find their own direction. A minority of colleges have brought liberal arts and occupational departments closer together by locating offices near one another, or by forming joint councils, sometimes including counseling staff. Fifteen percent of the colleges in the NCRVE survey have assigned both academic and occupational departments to a single dean. Joint social activities also encourage informal relationships between faculty. "There is a free lunch" was the title of one such activity, awarding free meals in the campus dining hall to occupational instructors who made lunch dates with academic counterparts (Orange Coast Community College, California).
More systematic and institutional changes have been led by particularly dynamic educational administrators. Some have defined student outcomes in terms of competency rather than course completion. In these cases, an instructional leader, usually the vice president or dean of instruction or academic affairs, made a commitment to reform, gained information about alternative approaches through the college's professional development or self-study, articulated principles and objectives, and then ceded authority for implementing these reforms to faculty. Overall, without a centrally designed pattern for reform and support from the highest levels of administration, colleges have floundered, or the efforts of individual faculty have remained idiosyncratic and isolated.
Two contrasting styles characterize the institutional efforts: collegial versus entrepreneurial. Collegial change is inclusive, fostered by all faculty at a rate which they find comfortable. In contrast, Washtenaw Community College in Michigan and Salt Lake Community College adopted an entrepreneurial approach, in which faculty willing to meet specified standards in course competencies were granted approval for their courses to meet requirements for graduation. Quality control rested with a faculty committee, through review of course outlines, assessment methods, or student work samples.
Any change entails risk, and college leaders can foster a culture of support for risk-taking. In developing new courses and teaching approaches for the Bridge Program at Indian River Community College in Florida, a physics instructor commended administrators "for creating a supportive atmosphere in which I felt secure enough to take risks and make mistakes without fear of criticism or failure." Usually such reforms begin as pilot projects with only a few courses or instructors involved. The speed with which a pilot project diffuses across campus varies greatly, from a single semester to several years.
Nearly every college adopting substantial innovations has planned for voluntary diffusion as other faculty become excited and elect to participate--since it is so difficult to force faculty to change. Waukesha County Technical College in Wisconsin formalized diffusion by using faculty "advocates" to make presentations at department meetings and to work individually with instructors wanting to infuse core competencies into courses. Administrative leaders continued to provide leadership--"accepting incremental change but keeping the heat on," as one said--while faculty teams planned and conducted reforms.
Regardless of the approach used, faculty and administrators report some change in the instructional culture of the college as a result of these efforts. Statements that "we are learning as we go along" and "learning from these experiments" reflect the pioneering nature of these initiatives. Every college cautioned us that the initial reforms are not final results, but, rather, ongoing forays in program design. Over time, such efforts may produce a more fundamental change in the culture of a community college toward one in which instruction is planned to promote a range of learning outcomes, including various kinds of work-related competencies. In this transformed institution, faculty collaborate in the development of programs and courses, and the vision of the "teaching college" motivates all faculty and administrators.