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WHAT VOCATIONAL EDUCATION BRINGS TO THE REFORM OF SECONDARY SCHOOLING
Each of these reform campaigns challenges long-standing conceptions of
secondary schooling. How is vocational education positioned to respond to the
challenges and to exploit the opportunities they present? What do vocational
educators bring to the discussion? The strength of vocational education--in
principle, if not uniformly in practice--consists in (1) the import of
vocational perspectives, topics, and activities for achieving the goals of
secondary schooling; (2) instructional practices that overcome the distinction
between theory and practice, and that prepare students for the work environment
of the next century; (3) a principled support for authentic assessment; and (4)
a history of engaging the disengaged student. In each of these areas, the
reforms underway in vocational education promise a new image of work education
that could be joined with other reform agendas for the redesign of secondary
schools.
A broadly defined vision for vocational education is gradually displacing the
widely criticized "narrow vocationalism" that has dominated secondary
education. In this broadened conception, achieving the vocational purposes of
education requires (1) that education "prepare individuals, including members
of special populations, for substantial and rewarding employment over the long
run" and (2) that vocational education "act[s] as a catalyst for a shift to an
economy [characterized by] a 'high-skills equilibrium' . . . rather than an
economy with low average skills, limited opportunities, older conceptions of
work organization, and increasing inequality in skill and education" (NCRVE
proposal, 1992, pp. 5, 6). These goals coincide with the aims of other reform
movements: They embrace a high standard of intellectual achievement,
anticipate a wide range of educational and occupational futures, acknowledge
the rapid changes confronting the economy and the wider society, and explicitly
respond to demands regarding equity. Progress has been predictably uneven. To
the extent that vocational educators and programs exemplify this broadened
vision, however, they stand not only to overcome the lingering stigma attached
to "voc ed" in comprehensive high schools, but also to help shape the future of
secondary schooling.
The differences between two rounds of field research illustrate the direction
of the emerging vocationalism, while also revealing the context created by the
demise of traditional concepts of vocational education. In our three-year
study of five ordinary comprehensive high schools, we found a steady decline in
the number of vocational teachers and vocational course offerings. Vocational
programs had suffered a steady erosion of staff positions, a corresponding
reduction in course offerings, and an increasing confusion regarding program
purposes (Little, 1993; Little & Threatt, 1992). At the same time, work,
seen as an enterprise of the larger society and as the pursuit of individuals
or groups, seemed nearly invisible in the broader academic curriculum.
These five "ordinary" schools typified the state of affairs that prevailed in
most comprehensive high schools by the end of the 1980s (Clune, White, &
Patterson, 1989; Oakes et al., 1992; Selvin et al., 1990). Vocational
education has been disadvantaged by the diminishing support for traditional
vocational offerings and the resulting compromises of curricular content and
purpose (Little & Threatt, 1992). Traditional forms of vocational training
are indeed withering, and traditional vocational teachers, especially in the
industrial trades, are something of a dying breed in all the schools we studied
(with the possible exception of vocational agriculture in rural areas). There
would appear to be little credible base from which vocational educators and
leaders might operate to influence the reform agenda in the high schools.
Vocational educators in these schools, it is fair to say, have been weakly
positioned to achieve any meaningful integration of vocational and academic
education. At the same time, our interviews with academic teachers suggested
that their teaching priorities, curriculum-in-use, and instructional practices
offered relatively few opportunities for students to make meaningful
connections between academic concepts and real-world applications. We also
found that vocational and academic teachers did share common interests in the
academic accomplishments of students, in students' ability to make good use of
what they learned, and in their social and emotional maturation. On the basis
of that study, we sought examples of comprehensive high schools structured in
ways that would alter the general separation of the academic from the
practical. Such schools might intensify the content and elevate the status of
work education. We found such conditions in four schools in which the
integration of vocational and academic education formed part of a broader
reform agenda.
In a limited round of site visits to "innovating" schools, we found
administrators and teachers experimenting with interdisciplinary divisions,
career clusters, or academic houses combined with vocational academies. Such
schools supplant traditional departments as the dominant mode of social
organization, requiring that teachers move toward a curriculum that integrates
subjects and that forges closer links between academic study and work
preparation. In doing so, they challenge the traditional subject boundaries
and subject hierarchies in secondary schools (see Little, 1993; see also
Hargreaves & Macmillan, 1992; Siskin, in press). In addition, they call
for a closer integration of the schools and community through arrangements for
work and community service.
These and similar experiments constitute--in principle at least--an emerging
family of alternatives to traditional work education. Among the most prominent
examples are specialized occupational high schools (Mitchell, Russell, &
Benson, 1989), career academies (Stern, Raby, & Dayton, 1992), and
coursework emphasizing "applied academics" and career path or career cluster
arrangements (Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, & Morgaine, 1991a). Of these, the
career academies have attracted the greatest attention and provide a useful
illustration of the "broadened vision" at work in comprehensive high schools.
The academy model integrates the vocational and academic by redefining
vocational aims to embrace a wider array of occupational possibilities. Thus
we see academies devoted to career options in air and space industries, health
occupations, visual arts and design, and finance (Stern et al., 1992). The
academies replace traditional vocational courses of study (often demeaned by
academic teachers) with occupational domains that display greater vertical
organization, more credible links to higher education, and a certain high tech
appeal.[11] Stern et al. (1992) see the
academies as offering a solution to chronic problems of student apathy and low
performance in high schools by responding to certain institutional "design
flaws": in particular they see a design that "isolates schools from the adult
world" and that pursues the teaching of subject matter "detached from its
practical context" (p. xi).
Integration of vocational and academic content is central to the academy
design, as is integration of classroom study with occupational mentorships and
internships, summer employment, and other forms of connection with occupational
settings and circumstances. Integration of content is managed to some extent
through coordination of topics--for example, in a health occupations
academy in which students simultaneously study the literary features of The
Andromeda Strain, the effects and treatment of viruses, the nature of the
immune system, and the geometric progression of unchecked viruses. Integration
is sometimes managed through coordination of products: At a graphic
arts academy, students studied the acid properties of paper in preparation for
making and testing their own paper; they then used the paper to print poems
they had written in their English class.
It remains to be seen whether these transformations succeed in legitimizing
work-related applications of traditional academic subjects. Historical and
sociological inquiries over the past two decades have illuminated the
conditions that are conducive to changes in the definition and status of school
subjects. Especially germane to this paper, they have traced the ways in which
"marginalized" subjects gain legitimacy (see Connell, 1985; Goodson, 1988a).
The relative status of vocational and academic studies might be expected to
shift over time in a manner consistent with the following three propositions
articulated by Goodson (1983) in his account of the emergence of "environmental
studies" as an examination subject in British secondary schools: "(a) that
subjects are not monolithic entities but shifting amalgamations of sub-groups
and traditions. . . . ; (b) that in the process of establishing a school
subject (and associated university discipline) base subject groups tend to move
from promoting pedagogic and utilitarian traditions toward the academic
tradition. . . . ; and (c) that in the conflict over [specific subjects] much
of the curriculum debate can be interpreted in terms of conflict between
subjects over status, resources, and territory" (p. 394). If the campaign to
integrate vocational and academic education succeeds, it will be not only
because its advocates have succeeded in adding advanced academic topics to
vocational programs, but because they also have succeeded in redefining the
meaning of "academic study" to legitimate the world of concrete experience.[12]
Recent research on how persons learn has engendered various appeals for
schooling as a form of "cognitive apprenticeship" that takes adequate account
of the situated and social character of human learning (Brown et al., 1989).
Such a cognitive apprenticeship would "embed learning in activity and make
deliberate use of the social and physical context" (p. 32).[13] Students would be "exposed to the use of a domain's
conceptual tools in authentic activity--to teachers acting as practitioners and
using these tools in wrestling with the problems of the world. Such activity
can tease out the way a mathematician or historian looks at the world and
solves emergent problems" (p. 34). In the view of these cognitive scientists,
there are presently few places in the high school curriculum in which students
engage in "authentic activity" or as a routine matter produce publicly visible
and meaningful work. Among the examples one might count dramatic or musical
performances, science competitions, and some of the more ambitious and
comprehensive vocational partnerships.
On the face of it, vocational educators would appear to be well-positioned to
help schools construct a model of authentic activity and a "cognitive
apprenticeship." Sizer (1984) gives us the example of Charles Gross, who
teaches electricity in an inner city vocational high school. Classroom work
combined vocational and academic aspects:
Electricity is a subject demanding great accuracy: a mistake can
mean a fire or a painful injury. Precision in planning, in following a wiring
system logically and sequentially, and in understanding its operating realities
(if not all the underlying physics), is as essential as is precision in
language. Gross pressed both electricity and language: the students had to
show and tell him what they were doing and why . . . each student had to
explain his own reasons for wiring or switching a situation in a particular
way. Precision, logic, hypothetical thinking, clarity of expression--all were
staples of Gross's classroom. (pp. 147-148)
Charles Gross's success might well be attributed to two important features of
his curriculum: (1) those students who continued in the electricity program as
far as their junior year became part of a team, led by Gross, that rewired
residential properties as part of a church-sponsored urban rehabilitation
project (i.e., they learned in the context of paid work); and (2) students were
able to see realistic employment opportunities in electrical contracting in
their own neighborhood. Vocational programs are perhaps best positioned to
demonstrate the nature of "situated learning" when they are organized in this
fashion around a form of structured apprenticeship, and when they engage groups
or teams of students in legitimate and complex tasks (e.g., when students study
drafting and design, electricity, and woodworking in the context of a house
construction project).
The disposition toward experiential learning that teachers of vocational or
"practical" subjects espouse leads them to emphasize the links between knowing
and doing in ways that are less often evident in the views or practices of
academic teachers. Consider, for example, the way in which cabinetmaker and
teacher Sam Bush employs cabinetry projects as a medium for student learning
(Macrorie, 1984). (Bush teaches in an independent school for boys, hence the
references to students as "the boys" throughout the text that follows.)
Bush begins his courses by introducing students to problems of design and
proportion, and elicits from each student an idea for a project--something to
build: "I never assign projects. . . . The boys create a design and then they
bring that design into being in wood" (pp. 6, 7). To enable them to do so,
Bush starts by requiring a written description of the project--the first
expression of the idea--followed by "lots of drawing": "Before you start
cutting you must know what you are doing. . . . I'm not concerned about a
perfect drawing, but want to see the construction problems laid out and the
proportions solidified."
Once building is underway, students learn the use of specific tools and
techniques in the course of bringing their idea to fruition--a pedagogical
decision that makes it virtually impossible to standardize instruction for a
class. "A boy's first project may be very involved if he wishes. Then it just
takes longer. Such a teaching formula consumes vast amounts of my time" (pp.
7-8).
Since he has turned much of the initiative for defining the "product" over to
the students, to communicate and maintain a high standard of work, Bush relies
in part on the continuity achieved by generations of students' work:
"Tradition in this place does much of the teaching for me . . . The pieces of
furniture you see standing around waiting to be finished by last semester's
boys say more to the boys than I can say. When they walk into this great room,
they see they are expected to do work of a very high quality" (p. 6). He also
pursues some of his own woodworking projects in the school's shop: "I feel
it's important for me to be creating my own objects in the shop, so that the
boys' efforts are not so much in a school shop as in an active, creative
studio" (p. 8).
Sam Bush's account suggests a model--a conception of subject and
pedagogy--that might well compel the admiration and emulation of academic
teachers. (He sums up the teaching of woodworking as "a means to an
end, which is understanding" [Macrorie, 1984, p. 4]). Admittedly, his is an
uncommon standard in the comprehensive high schools we have visited over the
past several years. Rather than witnessing an "active, creative studio" of the
sort Bush describes, we more typically observed introductory woodworking
classes in which students began with a series of structured exercises designed
to introduce them to various tools and processes. They were to complete each
of these exercises, a process that might consume several weeks, before they
were permitted to begin work on the first of several relatively simple,
standardized projects (of the breadboard or bookend variety).
In practice, then, models of authentic activity may be more sparse than we
would wish. Some of the instances of experiential learning to which teachers
point are admittedly trivial and mindlessly hands on. Some of the teachers we
observed matched or exceeded the portraits of Charles Gross and Sam Bush; many,
however, did not. Some were widely admired by academic teachers; many were
viewed as pleasant people but inconsequential teachers; and some were viewed
with disdain.[14]
The classroom (or studio) environment constructed by Sam Bush, the
apprenticeship in electrical trade work provided by Charles Gross, and the most
mature of the academy programs exemplify a shift in the relations between
student and the materials and situations of learning and the relations between
teacher and student. These are shifts consistent with the notion that students
will engage in genuine work, not make-work activity. So a crucial question is
this: To what extent does the learning environment in vocational classes and
programs routinely exemplify the highest standards of "learning in context?"
Of course, proposals for a "cognitive apprenticeship" or "authentic activity"
do not necessarily anticipate that the academic enterprise will thereby
be rendered directly vocational. Rather, the standard of authenticity
is derived from the system of beliefs, principles, and practices characteristic
of a particular discipline (mathematics, history, and the like). To be an
occasion of authentic mathematics learning, for example, an activity should
engage students in the kinds of mathematical sense-making employed by
mathematicians themselves. Examples are found in Schoenfeld's (1985, 1991)
investigations of mathematical problem solving, and Lampert's (1986)
experiments with fourth graders on the concepts underlying multiplication.[15] Nonetheless, teachers of topics that are
designated nonacademic (ranging from occupational auto to the performing arts)
may serve as powerful and credible models of instruction that embed theory and
practice, knowing and doing. It is less clear how those same teachers might
help to construct the specific activities by which academic topics might be
transformed in the manner anticipated by Schoenfeld or Lampert. Still more
problematic may be the institutional invisibility of powerful exemplars even
where they exist (Do Charles Gross's colleagues know what he does?) and the
absence of any mechanism by which colleagues could explore the transfer of
curricular ideas and instructional methods between those contexts and the
ordinary academic classroom.
Vocational educators have long favored practical demonstrations of knowledge
and competence. In that regard, they are aligned with those reformers who seek
remedies for the apathy that students display toward high school (and for the
teacher compromises that both result from and reinforce it) in assessments that
measure students' accomplishments against a clear and significant external
standard. Bishop (1989) argues that such forms of assessment would help to
reduce the disincentives for hard work that reside in the present competitive
system--a system that engenders peer resistance to academic competition and
academic achievement. Genuine performance assessments of this sort would
respond to two recurrent criticisms: (1) that there is little connection
between the ways in which schoolwork is assessed and the way that actual
knowledge use is judged in the work world; and (2) that there is a reward
scarcity in high schools, with relatively few students holding a monopoly on a
small number of rewards that acknowledge success on school tasks but that often
signify little in the outside world.
Companion to a problem-oriented or project-oriented curriculum is a shift
toward practices of performance-based assessment. To the extent that
vocational programs are able to generate meaningful examples of assessment that
combine theoretical and practical knowledge, they may enhance their legitimacy
in the eyes of academic teachers and advance the wider agenda of assessment
reform. Vocational educators are able to speak to the possibilities in the use
of completed projects to demonstrate student competence.
On the whole, we find academic teachers attracted by the promise that is
inherent in such terms as "authentic assessment," "performance assessment," or
"alternative assessment." We also find teachers to be largely uncertain what
might be meant by them. It is not at all clear, however, that academic
teachers look to their vocational colleagues to help them resolve their
uncertainty. Certainly this is due in part to the nearly complete absence of
interdependence between the two groups. Only in the academies or in similar
career-oriented arrangements do we see vocational and academic teachers jointly
designing an approach to assessment. In conventional departmental
arrangements, or in alternatives built solely around academic topics (e.g.,
interdisciplinary teams and houses), academic teachers turn to their subject
colleagues or team members to sort out the possibilities.
Another part of the explanation undoubtedly resides in the nature of the
"performance" that vocational educators require of their students. To earn the
regard of academic teachers and the wider community, performances must be
sufficiently ambitious to compel admiration and must be rated by criteria that
are clear, sufficiently high, and otherwise defensible. Vocational education
has been home to some of the earliest and most extensive examples of
performance-based assessment, but it has also been vulnerable to the charge
that projects are often trivial and assessment criteria weak. Indeed, in our
visits to schools over the past five years, we were astounded by the frequency
with which "balancing a checkbook" came to stand for the level of practical
accomplishments sought by a vocational curriculum. In contrast, the academic
performance requirements associated with well-developed programs of work
education may satisfy the standard of high performance expectations.
In principle, then, vocational educators bring to the reform initiatives a
commitment to the assessment of knowledge-in-use. To sustain their part in the
conversation (or debate), they must demonstrate that their assessment
strategies and the tasks that they require of students rightly earn the
approbation of both the public and professional communities.
Vocational classes are often populated with students for whom school has been
something less than a rewarding experience; these are often the academically
unsuccessful, the socially marginal, or the difficult students. The sources of
student disengagement are several, and they offer quite different possibilities
or obstacles to vocational teachers. Some students--a dwindling number,
according to teachers--display well-formed interests and commitments in
particular occupational arenas, but find little to support them in the academic
classes they attend. These are the genuine "vocational" students about which
vocational teachers speak in nostalgic or wistful tones (Little & Threatt,
1992). They are readily engaged by well-organized vocational programs and are
often the reference point for teachers' arguments that "not all kids need to go
to a four-year college."
More commonly, the students who concentrate in vocational classes are those
whose main distinguishing feature is the absence of success in academic
studies.[16] Among them are the limited- or
non-English speaking, the special education students, the disruptive, and
others who do not keep pace with the intellectual and social demands of the
academic classroom. For vocational educators, the task of engaging such
students presents an enormous challenge. At their best, they boast a record of
success with these students who have found little reward in academic study,
engaging them in forms and purposes of learning that are motivated by practical
considerations and that yield practical results. At worst, they compound the
failures of the past, doing little more than supervising classrooms that serve
as warehouses or holding pens. The teachers of such students say they are
discouraged and embittered by the "dumping ground" syndrome that makes a
travesty of their expertise and their professional interests.
It does not escape the notice of vocational teachers that the students in
their classes are disproportionately the poor and minority. Many vocational
educators espouse commitments to the most disenfranchised students, especially
those who have talents that are substantial but that do not earn recognition
within the traditional academic frames. Some locate the problem in the system
of student tracking that reserves a college-bound education for only some of
the school's population. Others accept the classification of students as
appropriate and simply express their desire for a larger share of the "good"
students. In this arena, as with regard to the purposes they pursue, the
curricular and pedagogical preferences they espouse, and the performance they
seek from students, vocational educators display considerable variation among
themselves. They are, however, more often than not well-equipped to speak
knowledgeably about engaging the disengaged student.
By each of four vehicles--(1) a broadened conception of work education, (2) an
invigorated curriculum and pedagogy, (3) a context for meaningful assessment,
and (4) a capacity for responding to student diversity--vocational education
has begun to move from the margins toward the center. We find vocational
educators positioned in principle to contribute a way of thinking and a history
of practice that are remarkably consonant with the aims of present reforms. We
also find, on close examination, a host of internal contradictions that temper
one's enthusiasm. On the whole, our recent visits to "innovating" schools have
shown us more of an intersection of academic content and practical application
than we were able to locate in our prior visits to vocational classes in
conventional high schools. Our observations in the innovating schools suggest
that educators can create a situation in which the work preparation offered by
secondary schools achieves greater coherence, less stigma, and greater academic
content, and in which most students achieve a solid academic grounding. They
also suggest that it will not be easy.
[11] For a comparable development in Canadian
secondary schools, see Davis, 1992.
[12] That they will be able to make such a
case is by no means certain. The "practical" or "concrete" applications of
academic principles are not necessarily "utilitarian" in any straightforward
sense. For example, some scholars argue that concrete experience alone is
unlikely to engender abstract conceptual understandings in subjects such as
science; the underlying relationships among physical phenomena are easily
misinterpreted on the basis of observation alone (e.g., White, in press).
[13] The fundamental precepts here are not
new, though their special contribution may be to underscore the nature of
learning as social practice. The burgeoning research on situated
cognition has antecedents in the cognitive development research of activity
theorists such as Vygotsky as well as in Dewey's philosophy of experiential
learning. For the purposes of this paper, the importance of the situated
cognition arguments derives from their timeliness, their ramifications for
conventional academic instruction, and their overlap with an agenda centered on
the integration of vocational and academic education.
[14] Our observations were consonant with the
scenario enacted by the hypothetical "redesign committee" in Horace's
School (Sizer, 1992). As the committee's deliberations begin to center
more exclusively on a program dedicated to traditional intellectual topics, the
vocational teachers remain on the margins. In one of the book's hypothetical
exchanges, Sizer conveys (but does not elaborate on) the peripheral status of
vocational topics: "'Will you accept us?' the shop teacher asked. The
question stung. The teachers in the academic departments knew what he meant
but cared not to address it" (pp. 137-138).
[15] A brief summary of the Schoenfeld and
Lampert experiments can be found in Brown et al. (1989).
[16] Transcript studies show that most
secondary students take at least one class that is designated "vocational"
(e.g., Oakes et al., 1992). Many do so to satisfy graduation requirements
calling for some version of a "practical studies" class. The proportion of
students concentrating in vocational classes--taking six or more over their
high school career, for example--is far smaller, and the members of this group
are more likely to have been unsuccessful in academic classes.
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