Community colleges and technical institutes in the United States are enormously varied, as befits their status as local, community-serving institutions. They vary widely in the composition of their students, from those at middle-class suburban campuses to those at urban institutions dominated by low-income and minority students; and they vary substantially in their emphases on transfer-oriented, occupational, remedial, and avocational offerings. Therefore it is often difficult to describe these institutions, since practices vary so much with so little standardization from either state or federal policy. Consistent with this pattern, the responses to our telephone interviews revealed an enormous variety of practices that administrators and instructors considered integration. While initially bewildering, the responses began to fall into eight distinct approaches. There is substantial variation within each of these approaches; a particular model should not be interpreted as a blueprint, but rather as a general direction which can vary depending on specific fields of study, on the interests of instructors and students, and on the requirements of employment. Not surprisingly, the approaches vary in their frequency, with the first two--general education requirements and applied academic courses--by far the most common, and the others occurring in only a handful of institutions. They also vary substantially in their ambitions, since some affect only single courses while others attempt to reform entire programs of study.
At the outset, it became clear that one form of "integration" is nearly universal--but was mentioned by only a few individuals. The course requirements for certificate and Associate degree programs in occupational fields generally include a sequence of occupationally specific courses and related academic courses--for example, biology and chemistry for health occupations, mathematics for engineering technologies and other technical specialties, English courses concentrating on writing for many business occupations, and related social science courses for social work and police science programs.[5] The amount of such related academic content varies from field to field, of course, and is generally more substantial in two-year Associate programs than in shorter certificate programs, but it is still universally required.[6] Because of these related academic courses, a few individuals responded that the integration of academic content in occupational programs is not a problem, or that postsecondary programs are "naturally integrated."
However, most respondents did not point to such related academic coursework as evidence of integration. One reason, perhaps, is that, like general education requirements, such efforts require students to integrate material from courses that are otherwise independent of each other; the institution and the instructors do little to combine material from different disciplines, and there is no evidence that instructors help students to make connections among courses. Another limitation of this practice as an approach to integration is that it requires students to complete all the courses required within a program. However, the great majority of students in community colleges and technical institutes take only a few courses, rather than completing an entire program (e.g., Grubb, 1989). Particularly if such students enter with specific employment purposes, they are unlikely to complete the related academic courses and no integration of academic content can take place. It is heartening to see academic courses included in occupational programs of study, since they indicate that instructors have developed coherent programs of study--that is, sequences of logically related courses with the appropriate academic prerequisites. But such an approach does not necessarily imply that integration of occupationally oriented and academic content takes place in any other sense.
The most frequent approach to integrating occupational and academic education is general education: Of the 121 institutions that reported some kind of integration, forty-nine referred to general education requirements. Such courses are overwhelmingly drawn from academic subjects: Of community colleges and technical institutes with general education programs, ninety-six percent include courses in communications (both writing and speaking), ninety-four percent in the social sciences, eighty-six percent in the natural sciences, eighty-five percent in the arts and humanities, and sixty-seven percent in health, physical education, and family education (Hammons, 1979). Typically, general education requirements apply to students in Associate programs, but not to students in certificate programs or those enrolling for only a few courses.
The purposes of general education requirements in community colleges and technical institutes have a long and somewhat tortured history--just as they do in four-year colleges--with a variety of motives behind them (e.g., Cohen, 1988; Bartkovich, 1981). Within the institutions we examined, communications skills, critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, an understanding of civic responsibilities, and appreciation of the arts and humanities are common rationales for general education requirements. A few institutions include unconventional statements with loftier motives: Diablo Valley College (California) seeks "to help you make meaning from your encounters with your world . . . to handle the spirit of criticism and skepticism which pervades and threatens contemporary life; to help you offset the depersonalization and fragmentation of urbanization; . . . to help you find some security despite the rapid rate of change in the conditions of our lives." Cypress College (California) has designed its requirements "to introduce students to the variety of means through which people comprehend the modern world," and Yavapai College (Arizona) "commits students and faculty to seek a coherent center of values and understanding," "an alternative to the current fragmentation of knowledge and experience in education and in our culture."
The question for our purposes is whether general education requirements constitute a way of integrating academic content and concerns into occupational programs. In a few cases, particularly in technical institutes, a clear goal is to provide some context for occupational programs, or a deeper understanding of the forces affecting occupations. For example, Springfield Technical Community College (Massachusetts) cites "an understanding of the historical basis of our modern technological society" as one of its goals. Nashville Technical Institute (Tennessee) intends its requirements to prepare students to "use technology and science effectively and responsibly"; and it states that "assignments [in English courses] frequently allow students to make use of their job experience or technical background," suggesting an effort to link the "academic" training in writing and communication with occupational knowledge and concerns. However, such references are clearly exceptions, and they have developed in technically oriented institutions, which have good reasons for orienting their general education requirements toward occupational issues. The overwhelming majority of institutions have established requirements that emphasize certain capacities considered important for all students, but without taking any special consideration of the interests of vocational students.
A somewhat tighter link between general education and occupational programs has developed in a few institutions which provide guidance about the specific general education courses that would be most useful to students in particular occupational areas. However, this kind of effort is comparatively rare; the vast majority of institutions simply offer students a menu of general education courses, with none linked to occupational concerns and little guidance about which to take.
The most thorough effort to link general education requirements with occupational goals among the institutions we interviewed was that of Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport. That institution decided that the skills required for success in the workplace should determine its general education program. It then asked successful graduates from different occupational areas what capacities individuals need to be successful; using the DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) process,[7] they used these responses to develop core competencies. In turn, general education courses developed by instructors must incorporate these competencies. To be sure, the resulting competencies are not much different from those cited in most general education statements of purpose; they include "comprehensive interrelated skills" including problem identification and problem-solving; communications skill; mathematics; computer-related competencies; humanities, social sciences, and arts; science and technology; and competencies labeled "personal" and "career" (see Pennsylvania College of Technology, 1987). However, the process by which they were derived was substantially different, and the point of general education, in an institution where all students are occupational, is more clearly vocational.
With a very few exceptions, then, general education requirements incorporate academic courses into occupational programs, but they have not fostered the integration of academic competencies and occupational content since the courses remain independent. Like the inclusion of academic requirements in occupationally oriented Associate degree programs, they require students on their own to make the links to occupational concerns or the requirements of employment, rather than providing any curriculum materials or instruction to help them make such connections. If community college students were adept at integrating different content areas, there might not be any problem with such an approach. However, there is good reason to think that community college students--whose prior academic records have often been weak, who may have been out of school for a considerable period of time, and who may be insecure about academic coursework in particular--are likely to need substantial help with such integration. For example, the non-traditional students in community colleges (including many occupational students) are more likely to be field-dependent, and therefore to have trouble applying a concept from one area to another (Cross, 1976, chap. 5).[8] Indeed, a few instructors remarked that occupational students resist taking academic and general education courses: One commented that they take general education courses only "grudgingly," and several said that occupational students often fail to see the relevance of general education to their occupational goals.
In a different sense, general education requirements may not be effective ways to integrate occupational and academic content. By and large, they apply only to students in Associate programs, not to those in shorter programs or those enrolled for a few courses. By one estimate, about half of community college students are in vocational programs that do not require general education (Cohen, 1988); and many will leave the institution before completing any such requirements. For that reason alone, we suspect that general education requirements reach only a minority of occupational students in community colleges and technical institutes.
We conclude, then, that general education is a promising but incomplete approach to integrating vocational and academic education. It can certainly bring into an occupational program the content and skills associated with academic disciplines, and it may be an antidote to complaints from employers that recent graduates lack communications skills, adequate reading abilities, or other fundamental competencies. But it places the burden for integration on students themselves, and may not reach the occupational students most in need of such abilities.
A second common approach to integration takes place in the majority of community colleges and technical institutes: the development of applied academics courses which take conventional academic subjects and apply them to occupational areas, usually broadly defined.[9] Of the 121 institutions that mentioned some kind of integration, sixty-seven specifically identified applied academics courses, though a perusal of course catalogues suggests that virtually every community college and technical institute has several such courses. Examples include Technical Writing, or Writing for the Workplace, or Written Business Communication; Applied Math or Technical Math, sometimes further specialized as in the Technical Math for Nurses course at San Bernadino Community College (California), or Applied Math for Recording Technology (Cedar Valley Community College, Lancaster, Texas); and Agricultural Economics or Business Economics. Some colleges offer a roster of occupation-specific courses. For example, Yavapai College (Prescott, Arizona) offers applied math courses for health sciences, for welding, for electronics, and for management, as well as Technical Math I and II; Cedar Valley College (Lancaster, Texas) offers applied math for nursing, veterinary technology, recording technology/music, business, and economics.
Applied academic courses generally adapt the content from conventional academic subjects, and use practical applications taken from those occupations. In many cases, these courses have been developed as a way to serve the needs of occupational students more precisely, sometimes because of the perception that standard academic courses in math or English are too general, too abstract, or too lacking in appropriate applications. Typically, such applied academics courses are taught to occupational students only, reinforcing the ability of instructors to mold the content to a particular occupational area. Most such courses are locally developed, though in Alabama centrally developed courses in Technical English and Technical Math are used for all non-degree occupational students; the state curricula occurred as a way of imposing some quality standards and consistency on local institutions.
These hybrid courses may be taught either by academic instructors or by occupational instructors; rarely, because of fiscal limitations, are they team-taught. Occasional battles over who is to teach the course reveal the unavoidable conflict: Should an applied academics course stress the more abstract, theoretical, "academic" underpinnings of the subject, including discipline-based modes of thinking, or should it pay minimal attention to the academic content and instead stress occupational examples, "practical" information (including institutional details), and a further socialization into the values of an occupation? Often, academic instructors take the first approach while vocational instructors take the second. In one community college, a business math course was initially taught by business instructors. However, the math department thought the course inadequate and refused to assign the course a math department number. Finally, the business and math faculty collaborated in developing a course--taught by business faculty most of the time, and by math faculty when their teaching loads are light--worthy of being included among the math offerings. This particular episode reveals the inevitable tension between occupational and academic emphases, and suggests that collaboration is crucial to reaching some accommodation. The only troubling aspect of current practice in community colleges is that, since there is so little team teaching in community colleges,[10] there may not be sufficient opportunities for instructors from different disciplines to hammer out compromises that appropriately balance academic content with occupational applications.
Of course, there is a potential drawback to applied academics courses: They segregate occupational students from others, a form of tracking that could limit their ambitions. As a dean at Bunker Hill Community College (Boston) explained his opposition to such courses, "these [occupational] students need to have broader exposure. It's useful for them to sit in class with students studying different fields." As another example, an effort in one community college to establish an English course specifically for occupational students failed. The faculty found that "it isolated students and they ended up being too focused on their technical area"--a comment that implies that mixing with the transfer-oriented students is a valuable aspect of the general education requirement. In addition, the courses devised were largely remedial instruction in areas where students were weak; they perceived this as adult basic education, and "students didn't like that approach." In this case, the underlying problem seems to have been that the applied English class was remedial and therefore insulting to students, and it segregated them from the rest of the students. Whether the benefits of making the content of applied academic courses occupationally related outweigh the costs of segregation from other students is difficult to answer in general, though the practice is so widespread that most institutions have implicitly decided that the benefits are substantial.[11]
Still another way to incorporate more academic skills into occupational programs has been to adopt cross-curriculum efforts in an entire institution. The best-known example is Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), in which all instructors--both occupational and academic--are encouraged to incorporate more writing into their courses. Writing Across the Curriculum efforts have been implemented in several different ways: In Florida, the state has required WAC of all its community colleges; in other cases, like Wright State University, the institution has required that all instructors participate. In the majority of community colleges, however, much more informal methods are used to motivate faculty to participate, including recruitment and outreach by members of the WAC staff (usually from the English Department), seminars and staff development efforts to show instructors how to incorporate writing exercises into their courses, and availability of WAC staff to provide help to individual instructors. The best WAC efforts therefore provide instructors some resources to modify their course content, as well as the rationale and peer support to do so.
WAC is often viewed as a method of improving instruction by helping students think more deeply about their subject, to clarify and organize their thoughts, and to become more active learners (Watkins, 1990), an approach often labeled Writing to Learn. For example, the WAC coordinator at Cedar Valley College (Lancaster, Texas) stressed that the ability to write different kinds of papers is not as important (especially for occupational students) as is using writing in the service of improved teaching and learning. In particular, the head of the Air Conditioning Program uses writing extensively, though he notes that his students are "turned off" to writing and he therefore avoids mentioning writing when he incorporates it into class exercises. He has since moved to writing exercises as a way of clarifying what students have learned and as a way into critical thinking, since the diagnosis of equipment failures requires the kind of trouble-shooting and problem-solving often incorporated in critical thinking (Eishen, 1991). For example, early in the program he has students write on the role of air conditioning--presumably their chosen occupation--in their long-range plans. Later he has them write (both individually and as a team), as if they were instructors, about a method he has just demonstrated; and other exercises ask them to write about their solutions to ambiguous problems (i.e., a misdiagnosed air conditioning failure), what they would write to a customer, and what company policy they might establish.
Similarly, Prince George's Community College (Largo, Maryland) instituted a WAC Program with an emphasis on writing to learn. As an example of the emphasis on improving learning (rather than improving writing), writing exercises were introduced into business math classes that had previously experienced poor student success; they were intended to help students move between word problems and mathematical formulations, to identify applications in everyday life, and in other ways to focus on the mathematical content in non-standard ways. The instructor reported substantial increases in the passing rate among students completing the writing exercises (Stout & Magnotto, 1988). The humanities faculty at Mohawk Valley Community College (Utica, New York) developed a Learning Through Writing program as a way to teach writing in an informal way; the program has been used particularly in the Human Services Technology and Health programs.
Although Writing Across the Curriculum is by far the most common cross-curricular effort, there are a few others. Prince George's Community College initiated Communication Across the Curriculum, spearheaded by faculty in the speech department who felt they weren't successful in stimulating class discussion; they have developed materials to enable students and instructors to increase the amount and coherence of discussion--an attempt to shift to a pedagogy where students are more active and questioning.
In another variant, Nashville State Technical Institute has adopted what might be called Humanities Across the Technologies, an effort to incorporate some aspects of the humanities in every course to improve student outcomes in communications, the arts, math, and writing. This project includes Writing Across the Curriculum, designed to increase both reading and writing related to historical perspectives, ethical issues, and aesthetics within various occupational programs. There are other components as well: A mechanical engineering technology course now includes components in the history, art, and ethics of the field and a unit on "solving problems related to balancing academics and beginning a technical career," while other technical courses include activities "designed to enhance [student] abilities in communication, critical thinking, and problem solving." A course in Mechanical Equipment provides a good example of how many different perspectives can be incorporated into a technical course: The instructor requires students to give oral presentations, with possible topics including whether the designer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which collapsed in a high wind) should be criminally prosecuted, and whether the third little pig over-engineered his house. One paper requires students to clarify what steps technicians can do to "help preserve and/or protect the environment," and other assignments require them to read Petroski's To Err is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and then write about the turning point in the development of Gothic structures, the ambivalence of William Wordsworth toward nineteenth century technology, and Galileo's error in calculating the yield stress of cantilever beams.
A final interesting effort has been Reading Across the Curriculum in Metropolitan Community College (Kansas City, Missouri). Instructors in all courses were encouraged to have their students read Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, with students in different programs emphasizing different aspects of the book. Occupational students could examine issues of technology and leadership, for example, and an electronics course used it to explore problems of new technologies. In addition, the book became the basis for various extracurricular activities: contests in songwriting, visual arts, writing, oral interpretation, and logo design (to be used on T-shirts and other items to support the reading project). At the end Vonnegut himself spoke with students and faculty in a teleconference. As a semester-long event rather than a continuous course or curriculum revision like WAC, the focus on Galapagos also provided what a good core curriculum would: It gave all students a common experience--a rare event in the fragmented community college--that they could discuss from different perspectives.
When community colleges and technical institutes adopt a cross-curriculum effort, it is difficult to know how extensively instructors modify their courses in response. The informal and voluntary nature of most WAC and other cross-curriculum programs--perhaps necessary for their acceptance within an institution--is also a potential weakness because the incentives for faculty to participate are slight. Not surprisingly, the participation of instructors varies enormously: One director mentioned that "the old guard types say it's impossible," while others are more accepting. However, our impression--based on the comments of a very few deans, and impossible to substantiate[12]--is that occupational instructors participate in WAC and other cross-curriculum efforts less than academic instructors because they are less persuaded of the value of writing, because it takes time away from occupation-specific skills, because it requires skills that occupational faculty may not have, and because they may not be included in the networks of academic instructors. (One WAC coordinator reported that articulate English teachers sometimes "scare" occupational instructors who are told that their students need something they can't provide.) However, even if WAC is more widely used in academic courses, there are clearly exceptions. The director of occupational education at Three Rivers Community College (Poplar Bluff, Missouri) claimed that vocational faculty have adopted WAC more than the academic faculty because of insistence from their business advisory committees about the importance of communication for successful job performance. At Orange County Community College (California) the Writing Consultancy Project focuses specifically on eight technical and allied health occupations (Godwin, 1991; see also Killingsworth, 1988).
As a form of integrating certain "academic" skills into occupational programs, then, cross-curriculum efforts have substantial promise but also certain structural weaknesses. Because WAC and other cross-curriculum efforts provide resources--staff development, suggested exercises, and peer support--to help instructors modify their courses, they are likely to be more effective than simply the exhortation to incorporate more academic content from deans, college presidents, the business community, and national commissions. On the other hand, the effectiveness of such initiatives in getting instructors--especially occupational instructors--to change is unclear, and voluntary programs have especially weak incentives. Changing teaching methods and content is a difficult and slow process, in all institutions and at all times (Cuban, 1984), and something more may be necessary to cause change than simply the power of a good idea.
Another way to increase the "academic" content and skills taught within occupational programs has been to introduce units of material taken from academic disciplines into standard occupational courses. A few community colleges and technical institutes have done this quite intentionally. For example, the Introduction to Law Enforcement course at Southern Maine Vocational-Technical College recently added a component on the history of law enforcement; and instructors at Nashville State Technical Institute inserted modules on historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives into Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Business Technology courses. The inclusion of ethics--normally a topic within philosophy--in a variety of occupational programs is by now a standard recommendation. The course on Mechanical Equipment at Nashville State Technical Institute described above, with its inclusion of various topics drawn from history, aesthetics, and environmental concerns, is an excellent example of this approach.
In the cases where instructors have expanded their courses, they report doing so in order to bring broader perspectives to occupational students. Not surprisingly, then, the scope of such additions varies widely: A few examples (particularly the incorporation of ethics) look like quick efforts to respond to nagging social problems, while others seem more substantial.
Of course, Writing Across the Curriculum and other cross-curriculum efforts, to the extent they are adopted by occupational instructors, are also ways of incorporating more "academic" content into occupational courses. However, the two approaches differ in some important ways. WAC is typically broader in scope, applying (potentially) to all programs within a community college, and it tends to have some institutional support and to represent an on-going effort. The development of modules is generally limited to specific courses, and tends to result from collaboration of occupational and academic faculty around a specific goal. Once changes are made, the groups tend to disband or, in at least one case, to move on to revise other courses. But such efforts are more episodic and less sustained than are institution-wide efforts like Writing Across the Curriculum.
This approach and the previous model (cross-curriculum efforts) are essentially ways of taking existing occupational courses and stuffing more academic content into them, either with the help of academic faculty (in WAC and other cross-curricular efforts) or simply with the efforts of occupational instructors. In contrast, the applied academic courses described in Model 2 are essentially efforts to take standard academic subjects and modify them to include more occupationally relevant examples and applications.[13] While the balance of occupation-specific and academic components varies across all these efforts, the starting point matters a great deal to this balance. Efforts to start afresh and to develop courses or programs that modify both occupational and academic components are much less common, but they can be seen in the next two approaches.
A fascinating and quite different approach to integrating occupational and academic education has been the development of multidisciplinary courses, taking the perspectives and methods of particular academic disciplines but incorporating issues and concerns that are distinctly occupational. The resulting hybrids are often courses that could be included in general education programs, though--unlike most general education courses, which tend to be standard academic approaches--they have subjects thought to be of special interest to occupational students. Examples of this approach include the following:
Another example is a course on "Technology in a Changing World," examining the origins, uses, and social influence of inventions and discovery. However, the course is taught entirely without reading, relying instead on videotapes. While it certainly develops topics that should be of interest to occupational students, it misses entirely the point of using multidisciplinary courses to get them engaged in activities--in this case, reading a variety of materials from different perspectives--that they would not normally see in their occupational courses.
The common element in these courses is the application of academic subjects--history, literature, ethics and philosophy, the study of culture from sociology or anthropology--and their concepts and analytic methods to technological developments, to working and its consequences, or to other employment-related issues that are presumably more compelling for occupational students.[14] These courses can also serve as vehicles for introducing students to radically different ways of viewing the world. A business instructor teaching a course called "Wisdom for the Workplace"--using literature together with case studies from business to "teach students that the wisdom of great writers from the past is still pertinent to the solving of contemporary job-related problems"--described the process as follows:
I have also discovered why my business-career students generally falter when faced with complex problems in their business or technical core courses, especially those that deal with human issues. The juxtaposition between the humanities--which always ask questions about life, happiness, and freedom--and the courses that fill their career programs (always focusing on the absorption of accepted processes or pragmatic applications) is so strong. [My course] is a wild mix that asks students to question first, and then to justify their opinions convincingly, rather than to simply accept. (Smith, 1990).
There are other obvious candidates for multidisciplinary courses that we have not yet discovered. These could include courses examining public policy and political issues related to technological change and employment issues (including unemployment, discrimination, the quality of work, and other unpleasant realities of capitalism); courses examining the sociology and the psychology of work[15] (including the psychology of occupational choice, for students unsure of their direction); and courses in business-government relations, to examine the ethical, political, and regulatory issues surrounding employment. Almost every area of the humanities and social sciences contains issues which are related to employment and which could form the basis for several courses.
Most of the existing multidisciplinary courses have come from the humanities rather than the social sciences, however. This may be due to the fact that these hybrid courses have often been developed with special funding, from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the NEH-supported project on "Integrating the Humanities into Occupational Programs" (Shared Vision Task Force, National Council on Occupational Education and Community College Humanities Association, 1989, 1991); no parallel funding for hybrid courses related to social science disciplines has been available.
The reliance of multidisciplinary courses on special funding is testimony to the resources necessary to develop novel approaches. Every participant in multidisciplinary courses has stressed the need for staff development, since individuals are generally unfamiliar with the range of disciplines required; faculty must have release time to develop new materials, and many hybrid courses have required the collaboration of faculty from several disciplines, at least in the development stage. (Some but not all of them are team-taught as well, again increasing their costs.) However, there is a dangerous side to reliance on special funding: When the funding disappears, the courses may disappear too. One clear example arose in New York State, which supported interdisciplinary courses in nine community colleges through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, starting with planning grants in 1984-1985 and ending with a summary conference in 1987, brought together two-person teams from the humanities and occupational fields, and developed several versions of a course entitled "Humanities and Technology." However, funding for such efforts subsequently ended, and there appear to be no more than one or two such courses still being taught, (Fadale 1991) and these rely entirely on the initiative and interest of individual faculty without any institutional support. Given the power of the disciplines and of the conventional split between occupational and academic programs within community colleges, it is all too easy for novel and hybrid approaches to fade once special support is withdrawn. The challenge is to institutionalize such courses, to have them become part of the normal offerings of community colleges and technical institutes from "regular" rather than special funds, and accepted as legitimate by faculty, administrators, and students alike.
Despite the difficulty institutions have had institutionalizing these courses, they present a promising vision for integrating occupational and academic education. They represent a fresh approach to integration, one which creates new courses rather than simply modifying existing courses in minor ways. The best of them have required the collaboration of both occupational and academic faculty, rather than being developed by one side or the other. The difficulty institutions have had in institutionalizing them is distressing, to be sure, but the current round of courses is relatively new and, with the interest in broader forms of education and higher-order skills, may be able to establish themselves as permanent parts of the community college.
Yet another approach has been to develop courses--including both occupational and academic courses--which students take simultaneously, with each course designed to complement the other. This kind of interaction among courses can happen at several different scales. In several institutions, two subjects have been linked, creating tandem courses. For example, Chemetketa Community College (Oregon) has developed a Human Services Practicum coupled with Writing 121. The practicum introduces students to various human services placements and requires extensive writing from students about positions they might like, in effect getting them to assess opportunities in human services; the writing course presents various styles of writing, and enables students to work more intensively on the papers they prepare for the practicum.
At a slightly larger scale, clusters of more than two courses can be related to one another. LaGuardia Community College (Long Island City, New York) has developed an umbrella called the Enterprise Center for cluster courses related to business. One cluster pairs introductory accounting with basic reading; it is essentially a remediation sequence with a clear focus on business uses of reading and arithmetic. The Introductory Business Cluster includes Introduction to Business, Composition I, and Introduction to Economics. The Advanced Business Cluster includes Principles of Management; Philosophy, Values, and Business Ethics; and Writing Through Literature. The advanced cluster has also articulated four themes--the entrepreneur versus individual rights, the individual within the organization, cultural and corporate values, and the social cost of business--intended to cut across the three courses in the cluster. The choice of themes reveals purposes related both to general education--providing critical perspectives from the humanities, for example--and to broad vocational purposes like introducing students to the personal and social tensions within business.
In addition, basic math is paired with a course called "Computer Topics"--again at a relatively basic level--while the pairing of "Introduction to Business" and "Introduction to Computers" is designed "to explore the impact of computer technology on contemporary business." Other clusters at LaGuardia include the Animal Health Technology Cluster, including "Introduction to Animal Health," a chemistry course, and an English course, designed in part to clarify the need for good writing to students; and a pairing of ESL and keyboarding for students new to this country--what the instructors called a "sheltered pair" because it presumably shelters students from the more rigorous pacing of a standard class. Of course, clusters can be developed without a vocational component; for example, Chemetketa Community College (Oregon) offers a sequence in "Evolving American Cultures" which includes a course in American literature, one in U.S. history, and one called Understanding Movies.
In each pair or triple, students take all courses simultaneously. Instructors report that students within clusters are engaged in deeper ways than are most community college students. They have stronger personal relationships with other students, since they see them more frequently; they tend to work more collaboratively, and to develop study groups and other support mechanisms. Elsewhere the institution has tried to construct collaborative learning by pairing courses with formal study groups. (These groups are modeled on the research of Uri Treisman with minority students in calculus.) Students can refer to material from other classes, and benefit from having connections among classes clarified both by the structure of the courses and by instructors. As one student indicated in a flyer advertising the business cluster to all students, students in the clusters seemed to appreciate the connections between the courses and the collaborative environment that resulted.
For their part, instructors can be more confident about what material students have already learned, and can therefore build on earlier material in other classes. The faculty at LaGuardia College report that their regular meetings include discussion of assessment and teaching and learning methods, suggesting another mechanism where teaching can improve. They also claim that students in pairs and clusters are more motivated, and less likely to drop out; while there is only a little evidence,[16] the conclusion that students in clusters have closer ties to other students is consistent with the finding that dropout rates are lower among individuals whose social connections within postsecondary institutions are stronger.[17]
To be sure, there may be some drawbacks to clusters. Several instructors mentioned that they never had sufficient time for joint planning. While acknowledging the benefits of greater student interaction, several mentioned that students form cliques and that discipline problems may develop--"familiarity can become too familiar," in the words of one instructor with experience in several clusters. Several faculty members expressed the feeling that clusters were not worth the effort necessary to coordinate instructors and to cope with discipline problems, though one faculty member considering leaving a cluster still acknowledged the value of clusters: "When it works, it's incredible." Evidently, clusters represent substantial departures from conventional classroom practice, for instructors and students alike, and place novel demands on instructors; some may be unwilling to spend the time, and some may find themselves unprepared for the cooperation clusters require.
Of course, tandem courses and clusters can become larger groupings of courses, though such efforts are rare.[18] These approaches are sometimes referred to as learning communities (e.g., Hamberg, 1991; Gabelnick, MacGregor, Matthews, & Smith, 1990). Any number of disciplines can be linked within learning communities, of course, and many examples group conventional academic courses--economics and history, math and science, literature and art--rather than incorporating occupational fields. Whatever the specific disciplines, the most important aspects of self-conscious learning communities are the emphasis on interdisciplinary study, the development of institutional structures (like co-enrollment and team teaching) that overcome the fragmentation of conventional educational institutions, the integration of skills from various disciplines and content areas, and the development of more active approaches to teaching, with seminars, discussion groups, and projects more common than conventional lectures.
Finally, the potential exists for groups of related courses, instructors, and students to form a college-within-a college, with its own identity and culture. Like clusters and learning communities, such an organizational structure can provide an institution within which collaboration among instructors, and integration of all subject matter, is a logical and natural result of having a common purpose. A college-within-a-college can also have a clear focus, in place of the all-embracing purposes of the comprehensive community college which sometimes leads to diffuseness and chaos.[19]
However, such arrangements are quite rare in community colleges, as in the rest of postsecondary education.[20] The LaGuardia Community College Enterprise Center started out as a college-within-a college, where a group of students would stay together for two full years. However, community college students tend to require highly flexible schedules, particularly if they are older and have family and employment responsibilities; and the scheduling problems and inflexibility of the college-within-a college caused that attempt to fail and to be replaced by the more flexible clusters of the Enterprise Center.
One other example is the effort to develop a College of Design, Art, and Architecture as part of Santa Monica College (California). This college-within-a college is an arts-oriented college modeled after Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus that is both physically separate from the rest of the community college and philosophically distinct (see also "SMC," 1990). The aim is to provide a range of academic subjects as well as arts- and design-oriented courses, where the academic courses could incorporate readings, applications, and projects drawn from the arts curriculum. The academic courses would include English courses like "Language and Metaphor," science courses like "Patterns in Nature," social science courses like "Psychology of Perception," "Human Factors in Design," and "History of American Design," business courses emphasizing the business aspects of art and design-related occupations, a course in Italian and one in Italian Cooking taught in Italian (presumably to give the program the flavor of Art). There is also a distinct ambition to develop a true arts community--much as Black Mountain College was reputed to have been--in the manner of a learning community. Whether the college can realize this vision is unclear, since it still seems to be in the planning stages. However, we know of no other efforts to develop colleges-within-community colleges with an occupational focus.[21]
The approaches of Models 6 and 7--tandem courses, cluster courses, learning communities, and colleges-within-colleges--have similar ambitions, though they include varying numbers of courses, instructors, and students. They all aim to provide a structure within which collaboration among instructors can flourish, in which two or more courses reinforce one another, in which instructors can presuppose knowledge and abilities gained in other courses, and in which common examples and applications can be developed.[22] In the best examples, they also serve to generate a community among students and a sense of purpose within community colleges and technical institutes. Their potential for integrating occupational and academic content is powerful, then, because they provide ways of removing the barriers among disciplines and for fostering collaboration where none might otherwise exist.
The two approaches differ principally in their flexibility: unless a college-within-a college were sufficiently large, it would require students to attend many courses in a fixed pattern. Tandem and cluster courses have many of the advantages of a college-within-a college without as much inflexibility: While students must commit themselves to all the courses of a cluster for a semester, they can alternate between clusters and conventional courses or to take a semester off from the cluster structure if need be.
A final approach to the integration of occupational and academic content is to develop remedial (or developmental) courses and English as a Second Language (ESL) programs with an occupational emphasis. Within the past ten or twenty years, the amount of remedial education in community colleges and technical institutes has expanded enormously, with estimates of the fraction of students needing remediation varying from twenty-five percent to seventy-eight percent (the latter in the Tennessee system, cited by Riggs, Davis, & Wilson, 1990). In regions of the country with substantial immigration, the demand for ESL has grown enormously, particularly in areas where community colleges are responsible for non-credit adult education. In most community colleges and technical institutes, remediation and ESL are freestanding courses, arranged in sequences leading to mastery of reading, writing, and simple mathematics but quite independent of the other course offerings of the institution (Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, & Bradby, 1991). However, there are reasons to think that this independence is detrimental to success in these courses. Many instructors report that students (especially occupational students) are bored with remedial courses and fail to see their relevance to occupational goals; motivation is low and dropout rates are high. Furthermore, the teaching in most remedial and ESL courses is decontextualized, providing a set of skills by textbooks and examples that are unconnected to the lives of students. In contrast, a long tradition within teaching reaching back to John Dewey and before--and a set of principles widely cited within adult education--has argued that teaching should be contextualized, using material and examples drawn from settings which have some intrinsic meaning to students.[23] For students who come to community colleges for vocational purposes, an obvious approach to contextualizing remediation and ESL, and clarifying their relevance to the goals of students, would be to teach basic academic skills or English while simultaneously preparing them for specific occupational areas.
A few community colleges and technical institutes have developed developmental or ESL programs which teach basic academic skills (or English) while introducing students to the concepts, tasks, and job-specific skills required in an occupational area:[24]
Developmental students are physically remote from vocational/ technological programs and faculty [and] remain unaware of program opportunities available to them . . . This collaborative learning community will build bridges for faculty and students, and more clearly define a pathway from developmental education to vocational and technological programs.[25]
Of course, it is possible to develop developmental courses which use academic rather than occupational courses to make applications. Schoolcraft College (Livonia, Michigan) has developed "paired classes" in developmental reading and psychology, and found, in a relatively well-controlled study, that students enrolled in the pair earned higher grades and had lower dropout rates than did a control group of equivalent ability (Gudan, Clack, Tang, & Dixon, 1991). As a result of this success, the college is planning to extend such pairs to business and political science.
A similar approach has been taken in a very few ESL courses. At Bunker Hill Community College (Massachusetts), an ESL program for Allied Health, preparing students to become nursing assistants, lab assistants, and pharmacy technicians, and one for Electronics have been developed, based on the belief that "language training is most effective when taught in the context of skill training." The courses aim to improve the English-language reading and writing of students, but they include reading and vocabulary drawn from the related occupation, develop writing assignments that mimic those that will be used on the job, and introduce students to the careers available and the basic tasks and capacities required.[28] These courses are part of a practice sometimes labeled English for Special Purposes (ESP), an offshoot of ESL. Similarly, an approach called technology-specific ESL has been developed at the Applied Technology Center operated by Everett and Edmonds Community Colleges (Washington). ESL instructors are first taught about electronics; then, in consultation with industry supervisors and managers from a number of local high-tech firms, they teach limited English-proficient employees of these firms "the reading, writing, and speaking skills necessary to participate in the problem-solving and collaboration required in high technology firms" and to pass the certification tests required by federal contracts. As yet another example of postsecondary Vocational English as Second Language (VESL), Black Hawk College (Moline, Illinois) has developed a machine tool curriculum for new Indochinese students, with vocational instructors and the Laotian and Vietnamese bilingual staff of the college collaborating.
In these cases, then, the integration of occupational content and academic instruction involves teaching basic skills (or English) within courses that draw reading, vocabulary, writing exercises, and other applications from a broad occupational area. Each also provides what might be termed career exploration--an introduction to the specific jobs within the occupation and to the concepts, practices, and demands in these positions. These courses, or the longer sequence of the Health Career Community in Springfield Technical Community College, prepare students to enter "regular" occupational programs, and so their vocational purpose is clear, in contrast to most remedial programs, which prepare students to pass basic skills tests but fail to link remediation to any future ambitions of students. The claims that this approach increases retention--consistent with the complaints of instructors in conventional remedial programs that their students are unmotivated and fail to see the connection to their vocational goals--suggest real promise for this particular form of "contextualized" instruction. On the other hand, there appear to be relatively few efforts around the country to integrate remediation (or ESL) with occupational programs,[29] so--like many other approaches to integrating occupational and academic education--this is an innovation which has not been widely tried.
In one crucial way, the integration of remediation with occupational content is different from the seven other models we have described: The academic competencies included are quite basic, and the courses are aimed specifically at students needing remediation.[30] These are not efforts to achieve "higher order skills," or to educate the workers of the future more broadly, and they do not respond to the pressures on postsecondary institutions to increase the skill levels of students. But as a response to another pressing problem of community colleges--the surge of students who come unprepared for college-level work--they present another vision of combining occupational and academic instruction in a way that can make community colleges and technical institutes more effective in their diverse missions.
Evidently, the eight different models of integrating occupational and academic education vary in their frequency. The requirement of general education is virtually ubiquitous in community colleges and technical institutes, even though many occupational students may escape these requirements. Applied academics courses are also quite common: Of the 121 institutions that responded, sixty-seven had one or more applied academics courses. Writing Across the Curriculum is also a well-established innovation, even though its influence seems limited within many institutions. But each of the other approaches (including cross-curriculum efforts aside from Writing Across the Curriculum) exists, to our knowledge, in only a handful of postsecondary institutions.
Innovations have usually been the responsibility of small numbers of faculty, working independently without much institutional encouragement. Only a few community colleges have developed more than one or two isolated efforts at integration. For example, Yavapai Community College has a large number of applied academics courses, as well as several multidisciplinary courses like "Technology and Human Values" and "History of Technology." Chemetketa Community College (Salem, Oregon) has a number of integrated programs, some (the tandem courses in human services and writing, and the program in drafting and study skills) involving occupational areas while others (the American Culture cluster and a course in "Cultural and Racial Issues in the U.S." paired with "Introduction to Fiction") do not. Kirkwood Community College (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) has been one of the most successful participants in the Advancing the Humanities project sponsored by the AACJC and the National Endowment for the Humanities: Instructors at Kirkwood have already implemented courses in "Working in America" and "Culture and Technology," and are developing a third on "Living in the Information Age" (Sessions, 1991/1992). Most notably, LaGuardia Community College, with its large numbers of clusters and tandem courses, has developed an institutional vision which supports many integration efforts; integration across courses appears to be a routine and widely accepted practice there, not dependent on outside funding or the initiative of just a few faculty.
The existing practices in postsecondary institutions therefore reveal a wide variety of innovations, many practices with real potential for improving postsecondary vocational education, and a few institutions that have participated quite actively in integration. But with examples so rare, and institutionalization of integration efforts so uncommon, there is a long way to go before the integration of occupational and academic education becomes more than a glimmer.
[6] For a similar conclusion based on transcripts of students in community colleges and technical institutes, see Grubb (1987).
[7] The DACUM process involves bringing practitioners together from a specific occupational area, asking them to describe typical tasks and duties, and having faculty use these job descriptions to determine the competencies students need to master.
[8] It is important to note, however, that students in even the best four-year colleges are likely to need guidance in integrating material from different courses. The movement for interdisciplinary courses within four-year colleges, the efforts to teach from case studies, and the movement to adopt capstone courses all reflect the difficulty all students have with fragmented courses.
[9] These applied academics courses are locally developed; they are not the same as the Applied Academics courses--Applied Math, Applied Communications, and Principles of Technology--developed for high school students by the Council for Occupational Research and Development (CORD) and the Agency for Instructional Technology (AIT). However, the logic underlying the postsecondary applied academics courses and the CORD/AIT courses is roughly the same: to take a standard academic subject and incorporate more occupational examples and applications.
[10] With the exception of courses supported by special funding, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, we found no examples of team teaching; and administrators uniformly reported that fiscal constraints make team teaching rare.
[11] While concerns about tracking are widespread in secondary schools, they are much more rare in community colleges except in the literature about "cooling out" stimulated by Clark (1960). We suspect that tracking mechanisms internal to community colleges are quite widespread, and that distinctions among "occupational," "transfer," and "developmental" students are central to such tracking. However, since the literature about "cooling out" tends to be hortatory rather than empirical, we have no way of knowing how widespread or how detrimental internal tracking mechanisms are.
[12] A national survey of WAC programs provided no evidence about its use by occupational versus academic faculty (Stout & Magnotto, 1991). In no WAC program that we interviewed was there any effort to determine the extent of course changes in response to WAC, or the numbers or types of instructors participating. Nor does there seem to be much emphasis within the national WAC "movement" to develop measures of effects. For example, a recent special issue of "New Directions in Community Colleges" about WAC (Stanley & Ambron, 1991) contained many articles on how to do it, but only one on measuring effects (Hughes-Wiener & Jensen-Cekalla, 1991).
[13] This distinction--between academic courses modified with occupational applications, and vocational courses modified with more academic content--also distinguishes several approaches to integration at the high school level: Applied academic courses take the first of these approaches, while other efforts incorporate more academic content in vocational courses. See Models 1, 2, and 3 in Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, and Morgaine (1991).
[14] Whether such employment-related issues are in fact more compelling for vocational students is an open question. While this link seems to make sense, in other contexts students are not necessarily preoccupied with employment-related issues. For example, in evaluating a workplace literacy program in Oakland, we discovered that some students--all employed as health care workers--did not want to use employment-related materials because they preferred a respite from work, and because their work was only a minor aspect of their identity. In this as in all other aspects of instruction, there is no substitute for discovering rather than assuming what most interests students.
[15] South Seattle Community College (Washington) does offer a course in "The Psychology of the Workplace," described by the division chair as "not really integrated" but still more responsive to the needs of occupational students than is the conventional psychology course.
[16] One ESL instructor reported that the pass rate in the ESL/keyboarding pair was ninety percent, compared to seventy percent in the non-paired ESL--but acknowledged that self-selection of highly-motivated students into the pair might be responsible. Those associated with the clusters in LaGuardia Community College contend that the pass rate is higher for cluster students than for noncluster students in the same English courses (85% versus 70%), and that students in the business cluster have retention rates from the first year to the second which are ten to twenty-four percentage points higher than noncluster students.
[17] In Tinto's (1987) model, which dominates the empirical literature on persistence, academic integration (essentially, academic success) and social integration--the participation of students in the social life of the institution--are crucial to decisions about continuing rather than dropping out. Social integration is particularly difficult for students in community college because so many of them are part-time and have substantial non-educational demands on their time.
[18] The ambition of some programs in LaGuardia is to expand such groupings. As the director of the Enterprise Center has written, "Our long range goal is to develop several `streams' of offerings which give students choices each semester of their first year at the college, regardless of the skill levels at which they start" (Sussman, 1991). While the Enterprise Center has started with business-oriented clusters, it is also working with faculty from other disciplines to develop clusters and "streams."
[19] The proposal to develop a college-within-a-college with a clear focus is similar to the "focus schools" analyzed by Hill, Foster, and Gendler (1990) at the high school level.
[20] The analogues at the high school level--schools-within-schools--are somewhat more common. Magnet schools often operate as school-within-schools, and the Academy model (described in Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, & Morgaine, 1991; Stern, Raby, & Dayton, 1992) is another example that usually has a vocational focus.
[21] Interestingly enough, AB1725 in California, legislation that some community college advocates have hailed as a substantial advance, required the state Chancellor to study the feasibility of establishing, as pilot projects, " 'interdisciplinary colleges' within selected community colleges--with a special concern with the integration of vocational and academic study" (Section 60). Unfortunately, funds for the feasibility study have not been appropriated.
[22] This approach is similar to the model of "alignment" at the secondary level, in which both vocational and academic content are modified; see Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, and Morgaine (1991), Model 4. Clusters and learning communities at the postsecondary level are similar in many ways to Academies and other occupationally focused schools-within-schools, including the use of occupational clusters and career paths; a college-within-a-college would be similar to occupational high schools and magnet schools. There are, then, clear similarities between many of the forms of integration at the secondary and the postsecondary levels.
[23] The question of what it means to "contextualize" teaching involves a substantial and sometimes abstruse debate, reviewed in part in Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, and Bradby, 1991. One prominent approach relies on the notion of functional context literacy training developed by Sticht and his associates (e.g., Sticht, Armstrong, Caylor, & Hickey, 1987), though this proves to revise standard teaching practices in one way--in drawing curriculum materials from "functional contexts" like work--but not in others. In another school of thought, however, a context includes the social norms and expectations, the personal relationships, the purposes in reading and writing, and other aspects of the social setting in which reading and writing occur, not merely the origins of texts (e.g., Scribner & Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983; Erickson, 1988; Street, 1984). Therefore it becomes important to recognize that substantial differences exist in what a "contextualized" program might be. In practice, however, there appear to be very few efforts to developed contextualized remedial or ESL courses of any kind.
[24] In addition to the programs described in this section, the Two-Year College Development Center at the State University of New York, Albany, sponsored a project in the early 1980s to develop materials for faculty about the integration of basic skills into postsecondary occupational programs. The result was a series of monographs with titles like Reading in Postsecondary Occupational Education, Writing in Postsecondary Occupational Education, and Basic Skills in Postsecondary Occupational Education. However, like most projects supported by grant funds, this effort seems to have vanished once the funding (from federal vocational education funds) ended.
[25] The importance of this pathway cannot be overemphasized. Conventional practice in community colleges and technical institutes, as well as in JTPA and welfare-to-work programs, is to assess students and refer them to remediation if necessary--but only rarely to follow them and make sure they successfully enroll in remediation, complete, and progress back into occupational skill training (Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, & Bradby 1991). The "pathway" implicit in Introduction to Technology establishes connections at each of these junctures, and ought to improve rates of completing remediation and moving into job skills training.
[26] Sadly enough, the program is aimed at unprepared high school graduates; as the program proposal states, "the Non-Regents Diploma and the General Equivalency Diploma have become the most suspect in terms of producing high school graduates who are unprepared for employment in modern industry."
[27] In community colleges and technical institutes everywhere, data on retention is difficult to come by and often suspect. However, in this example, the most relevant comparison would be to retention rates in the regular development program, which would normally be much lower than retention rates in a community college as a whole. Therefore the finding of retention rates higher than college-wide rates suggests that the Health Careers Community has a much higher retention than other developmental programs.
[28] These courses appear to be similar to those in Vocational English as a Second Language (VESL) which can be found in some high schools.
[29] In telephone surveys of remedial programs within twenty-three communities and a search for developmental programs linked to occupational training--the data underlying Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, and Bradby (1991)--we uncovered no examples within community colleges or technical institutes.
[30] In fact, there is a potential problem with vocationally oriented remedial and ESL programs, pointed out by some instructors: They segregate students from their transfer-oriented peers. Whether the benefits of a contextualized curriculum outweigh the potential disadvantages of such tracking is impossible to determine.