THE DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS AND PURPOSES OF INTEGRATION

The conception of integrating occupational and academic education has not yet been given much thought at the postsecondary level. Most of our respondents were unsure what we meant by integration; almost none of them had thought about curriculum integration, and their responses in citing their own institution's efforts revealed that there is no consistent understanding of integration. In contrast to the secondary schools, where there is substantial discussion of curriculum integration in general and of the integration of vocational and academic education in particular,[31] most postsecondary institutions have not begun to think about what integration might be or why it might be valuable for their students.

The models of integration described in the previous section reveal a variety of practices, ranging from the incorporation of some additional writing in a conventional occupational course to substantial reorganizations of programs within clusters and learning communities. The underlying conceptions of integration also vary substantially among these models, and include the following:

• Students are presented both occupationally specific and academic content in separate courses, and they make the links among subjects themselves. The inclusion of academic prerequisites in certificate and Associate degree programs, and the presence of academic requirements in general education programs, are examples of placing the burden for integration on students.

• Occupational examples and settings are used to contextualize academic instruction--to clarify its relevance to future plans and its usefulness in employment, in order to motivate students--but the stress is still on skills and abilities usually considered academic like reading, writing, mathematics, science, and literary analysis. The remedial and ESL courses with an occupational focus (Model 8) are good examples emphasizing basic academic skills; applied academics courses are examples where skill levels may be somewhat higher. Whether such contextualization operates to narrow the academic component--to make it overly occupation-specific, or to "dumb down" the content taught to remedial or occupational students--or to expand the capacities which occupational or remedial students master is not always clear, and contributes to debates about this approach.

• Courses incorporate the skills and the content traditionally associated with academic subjects with the skills and applications conventionally included in occupational courses. Examples include some applied academics courses, cross-curriculum efforts like Writing Across the Curriculum, and expanded vocational courses incorporating more academic components. The balance of vocationally-oriented and academic components varies, of course; and no doubt classroom observations over extended periods would reveal that instructors vary in the extent to which they clarify the connections between vocational and academic content, rather than leaving the student to make these connections. Nonetheless, in this conception of integration, vocational and academic content are brought in closer proximity under one instructor (or, rarely, a pair of instructors), facilitating a greater role for instructors in integrating material from different disciplines and increasing the chance that students can make these connections.

• In addition to learning occupation-specific skills, students learn about the variety of careers within a broad occupational area, their requirements, and the structure of the industries in which they are likely to be found. This kind of "career exploration" is part of many introductory courses in certificate and Associate programs, as well as the introductory courses in the remedial programs linked with occupational concerns of Model 8. These components are clearly aimed at giving students a broader conception of the alternatives available to them and a sense of the economic setting within which they will work.

• Courses incorporate the broad perspectives and concerns from academic disciplines with occupational issues, broadly defined. The interdisciplinary or hybrid humanities courses described under Model 5 represent good examples of this conception of integration, as do some of the expanded vocational courses of Model 4. In this approach, there is less stress on skills and knowledge (reading, writing, knowledge of medical procedures, machining skills) and more on broader perspectives and ways of seeing the world--historical perspectives, or exploration of the human condition through literature, or the analytic mode common in economics or political science. In addition, such courses usually include broad employment-related concerns, usually missing from standard academic courses and from standard vocational programs, that should be important to self-conscious, inquisitive, and politically-aware individuals who will spend a good of their lives in employment and whose purposes in postsecondary education are essentially vocational. The capacities taught in such an approach are not necessarily those touted as helping the United States establish its international competitiveness, but they may be crucial to helping students participate fully in the world of employment.

• Occupational and academic instructors collaborate in developing courses and programs, finding a variety of connections between their areas and clarifying the relationships for students (rather than leaving students to figure them out). Tandem courses and clusters, which are always developed by teams of instructors (despite complaints about not having enough time to work together), are the best examples of collaboration, and some applied academics courses and multidisciplinary courses have also been developed by pairs or teams of instructors. The collaboration of instructors shifts the burden of integration away from students, and allows many different kinds of connections to develop. Indeed, the approaches to integration which have the richest possibilities as ways of reshaping postsecondary occupational programs--the multidisciplinary courses of Model 5 and the clusters and learning communities of Model 6--all rely to some extent on collaboration, suggesting that this may be central to the most thorough forms of integration.[32]

• Postsecondary institutions restructure their practices to facilitate the collaboration of teachers and the ability of students to integrate material from different areas. The cluster courses, learning communities, and (potentially) colleges-within-colleges described in Models 6 and 7 are the best examples of such structures, operating at different scales but all moving away from the isolated course as the basic unit of postsecondary institutions.

Evidently, the ambitions underlying these different conceptions of integration vary. Some of them make minor modifications in existing practices, while others fundamentally reshape how community colleges and technical institutes operate. Some aspire to teach students high-level academic skills and various higher-order skills, while others concentrate on the most basic skills for students who come to postsecondary education woefully underprepared. In our view, each of them has something positive to offer; compared to conventional practices, each has potential benefits for students, faculty, and the coherence of postsecondary institutions. From this vantage, it is inappropriate to label certain approaches to integration as exemplary and other as unacceptable. Rather, distinctly different approaches to curriculum integration exist with varying assumptions about what integration means, assumptions which ought to be explicit and carefully examined rather than covert.

[32] At the secondary level, the collaboration of academic and vocational teachers is crucial in distinguishing the forms of integration that are relatively modest in their ambitions from those with the potential to reshape schools in substantial ways. See Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, and Morgaine (1991).