An exception to this pattern is Salt Lake Community College, where administrators and faculty redefined the purpose of general education to be "the integration of attitudes, skills, and broad abstractions of knowledge." [N] As a result, SLCC evaluated every course against a new criteria, with quality control resting in a joint academic and vocational faculty committee. In addition, SLCC instituted a five credit interdisciplinary course requirement outside of a student's major, opening creative learning opportunities. The outcome to date has been an increased enrollment in vocational courses by humanities majors and a more positive attitude about career studies based on the personal experiences of students who have met the interdisciplinary requirement through one of the college's active learning alternatives.
Electricity and Modern Living combines social science perspectives with hands-on activities in which students complete common electrical wiring projects and deliver a Power Symposium--a class presentation on an aspect of power generation or consumption describing tradeoffs and practicalities of that form of production or usage. Business and Society explores the changing role of business through the ages, culminating with a collaborative student group report on factors impacting the history and future plans of a local industry, community, or geographical region. Two other courses, Technology and Society and Enriching Our Living: Enriching Our Lives, combine historical, philosophical, and technological aspects of work and its impact on our lives. [II-37]
An active approach to history, in which students "do" history is in place in SLCC's Understanding History and history and political science classes at San Diego City College. The SLCC course is subtitled What History Is and What Historians Do, challenging students to debate whether Henry Ford was right when he said "All history is bunk." In the same vein, students in the San Diego courses analyze reproductions of historical primary documents related to working conditions such as "Runaway Indentured Slaves" (Virginia Gazette), "Child Labor" (Massachusetts Senate), "Rules for Husbands and Wives" (Matthew Carey), "The Evil of Female Labor" (National Trade's Union) or "The Dangers of Immigration" (Samuel F. B. Morse).[N]
While other colleges have not taken such bold steps, some have developed ways of integrating the knowledge of economic, political, and cultural dimensions of our society into the college curriculum.
Of course, in a small way, the historical, social, and economic foundations of courses are naturally infused into introductory academic or occupational courses, with a chapter or unit related to the history, philosophy, or ethics of a discipline. Students encounter chapters about the history of psychology, of early childhood education, or of criminal justice. Discussions of ethics are as likely to occur in a business or environmental science course as in philosophy. Issues of supply and demand appear in both allied health programs and economics courses. But this is peripheral integration that does not show students how they benefit from general education.
A more explicit approach is the hybrid course that examines technological developments from multidisciplinary perspectives. Using a theme of technological change, a number of courses examine technology as a threat to freedom, religion, imagination, and nature versus the promotion of equality, democracy, rational thinking, and economic progress. Technology and Culture was jointly developed by humanities and technology instructors at the Technical College of the Lowcountry in South Carolina in 1991, and pilot-taught to industrial faculty to gain their views about how students might react to the class content and format. The course attracts both liberal arts and technology students, and guides them in understanding the intricate interdependence of technology and culture using atypical texts like Walden and Jurassic Park. An important outcome of the course is student awareness of the differential and unequal benefits of technology and their further consequences for social and economic divisions. [II-38]
A team-taught course encompassing historical, biological, physical, and engineering perspectives, Technology and Society at County College of Morris in New Jersey is taught for three to four weeks each by faculty from those departments. The course is intended for non-science majors interested in the role of technology in shaping human history. [N] Nassau Community College in New York offers Issues in Science, Technology and Society, which examines how modern technology affects society and how social institutions shape the development and use of new science and technology. At Washtenaw Community College in Wisconsin, students explain concepts such as survival of the fittest, natural selection, specialization, and adaptability, and study artifacts used by humans as early examples of technology in a course titled Technology and Society. [N]
At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, faculty from Construction Technology, Business Administration, Computer Integrated Manufacturing, and History jointly designed a writing enriched history course titled Technology and Society. Students examine technology both as a social solution and a social question, making predictions about future technological change. A unique component of this course is a discussion of the ideological and historical dimensions of the changing work ethic in the United States from colonial times to the early twentieth century, including the influence of capitalism, rationalism, and Protestantism. Students read about the labor problems at Jamestown and public perceptions about the work ethic during industrialization.[18] The course uses on-line readings from the library at Stevens Institute of Technology, and a faculty-developed, computer-aided tutorial about the British Industrial Revolution. The midterm essay includes an analysis of ideological and historical influences on the student's personal work ethic (as identified on a work ethic survey), identifying how their own work ethic might create traps in their futures. [II-39]
Other hybrid courses concentrate on historical perspectives, exploring the role of technology and the importance of timeliness, chance, and the social and cultural setting in the development of technology and science.[19] Students are asked to illustrate the positive and negative effects of automation on a worker, based on personal experience, and then to defend their view that the public policy should support, restrict, or remain neutral on the issue of automation. Historical perspectives sometimes emphasize a locality such as California's Industrial History (DeAnza College in California) [N] or Connecting Technology and Our Lives (Sinclair Community College in Ohio), which focuses on the history, underlying concepts, effect on community values, and quality of life resulting from technological development in the Dayton, Ohio, area. [II-40]
In other cases, the perspective is more specifically career-oriented; examples include History of American Health Care (Community College of Philadelphia) and History of American Architecture (Belmont Technical College in Ohio). Courses combining economics and geography are offered at Tidewater Community College in Virginia and Johnson County Community College in Kansas for environmental science students.
Similarly, ethics courses may be generic or career specific, with many business and allied health departments offering ethics courses appropriate for their majors. Business Ethics is the most common variation, offered at Butte in California, Monterey Peninsula in California, Johnson County in Kansas, Southwest Technical in Minnesota, Westchester in New York, and Colorado Mountain Community Colleges, and is team taught at Prince George's Community College in Maryland. Montcalm in Michigan, Illinois Central, and Ivy Tech-East Central in Indiana offer medical ethics courses, titled variously as Health, Medical, or Bioethics.
Transfer-level courses can combine political and career issues in Labor Studies. Los Angeles Trade-Tech College offers one and three semester credit transfer-eligible courses, including Labor History, Labor Economics, and Labor Communications. [N]
Although several colleges have established clusters of courses which include social science and humanities, few have addressed occupational concerns. A unique linkage at San Diego Community College was initiated by an accounting and a philosophy instructor who sought an avenue to collaborate, which resulted in a Workplace Ethics cluster. In a true example of authentic assessment related to both academic and career preparation outcomes, exam questions have provided a case study of fraudulent accounting practices, and students are asked to explain how Mills, Kant, and a philosopher of their choice would advise this employee. [II-41]
Associate-Level Programs
Because gen ed and citizenship preparation are dominated by the academic disciplines associated with transfer programs, there are fewer examples of integrating citizenship education into Associate-level programs. Many colleges infuse ethical considerations into occupational programs with a unit of study or student exercises. For example, students in the food service program at Cape Cod Community College in Massachusetts use a social responsibility audit to identify, analyze, and solve ethical dilemmas common to the industry.
Linked courses also serve as vehicles for understanding the nature of work life. Waukesha County Technical College in Wisconsin links two credits of Basic Workplace Psychology with eight credits of welding in a course combining the psychology of interpersonal relations with workplace applications. In addition to exercises in which they identify the adjustments a new worker must make, devise "survival" suggestions for new workers, and resolve stressful situations, students complete three Performance Reviews of their own behavior, based on an industrial model. To prepare the course, the psychology instructor interned at several welding firms to learn how the welding workplace operates, so that students could understand and practice appropriate uses of color, health, safety and interpersonal relationships on the job.
Similarly, Human Relations in Business forms a natural linkage with Introduction to Psychology at Allan Hancock Community College in California. Students compare intrinsic and extrinsic employee strategies with theoretical motivation theory; contrast reinforcement theory with rewards for individual and team performance; discuss business and psychological perspectives on a rating system for violence in children's television programming; and evaluate commercials that focus audience attention on the visual aspects of a product. [II-42]
These innovations indicate that occupational education and citizenship education need not be considered independent or even antithetical to one another--as they often are. The concerns surrounding occupations provide rich opportunities to examine the political, economic, and cultural dimensions usually incorporated in social science courses and gen ed requirements. The literature examining work is similarly rich and varied, and history perspectives--often quite unloved by students--can come alive through the perspectives it offers on the development of industries and occupations, technical change, and its effect on society. These integrated approaches to gen ed and citizenship education may provide the most effective ways of motivating students who are not inherently interested in conventional "academic" disciplines.
[18] Literature about work in general as well as the historical and moral aspects of work offers a rich literary tradition for occupational students to explore. The Pennsylvania College of Technology course uses historical reviews of the labor problems at Jamestown and studies of the American work ethic at the turn of the twentieth century, while other innovative courses focus on working class writing. [II-40] See also Koziol (1992) for an annotated bibliography of novels and short stories about work. At the same time, poorly prepared and delivered instruction can curtail the benefits of even the most interesting text. We thank Helena Worthen for reminding us of this.
[19] Representative courses include History of Technology (New Hampshire Technical College at Nashua) [N], which traces the technological development through the ancient world, Middle Ages, Industrial Revolution, and the 20th century; Technology and Our Society, focusing on the cultural context; societal and environmental effects; and the importance of timeliness, milieu, and chance in technological development (Linn Benton Community College in Oregon) [N]; and The Machine in America, described as an introductory study of America's romance with technology and the role of engineering in American life, and includes a unit on historical research and writing (DeAnza College in California). [N] At Salt Lake Community College, students explore the future impact of technology on the global culture and society in Future Studies [N] and at Washtenaw Community College in Michigan students are introduced to basic principles and methods to study technology in Technology and Society. [N] County College of Morris in New Jersey offers Technology and Society, taught by rotating instructors from history, biology, physical science, and engineering, each presenting a disciplinary view of technological change and its impact on society. [N]