Curricular Approach

The grant proposal set forth the view that "training must be derived by way of direct identification, observation, and validation by workers and supervisors" (p. 18). Needs assessment strategies inclusive of task inventorying, job analyses, interviews, and observation of samples of literacy materials related to the job were promised, leading to individualized and outcome-based curriculum design. Specific project tasks set forth for Redwood included

[(a)] development of curricula (organized in multiple self-paced modules); (b) editorial review of these training resources by the project steering committee, workers, hospital representatives, and others; and (c) field tests and evaluations of the training materials.

We were interested in examining this approach closely.

Actual Approach

This section deals with how the workplace literacy philosophy articulated by project staff was actually translated into curricular actions. It is based on a combination of interviews with college project staffers, hospital representatives associated with the project, union administrators, and inspection and analysis of project curriculum documents. Because curricular approach is so much a part of the unique claims that a technical college can make about its suitability to conduct workplace literacy programs, we allow college project staffers to speak at length in their own voices in this section. For triangulation purposes, their comments are juxtaposed against that of hospital representatives.

The basic curricular approach adopted by the college was consistent with functional context theory as articulated by Sticht, Armstrong, Hickey, and Caylor (1987) and as set forth in the prescriptive works of Phillipi (1988) and Cornell (1988). Central to the approach was collaboration between workers and their representatives, managers and supervisors, and project staff. The project curriculum and literacy specialists conducted on-site needs assessments by interviewing workers, supervisors, and managers and by shadowing and observing workers as they performed their tasks. Data so gathered was later verified or clarified through further meetings. Some workers were voluntarily tested to determine the reading level to which project curriculum materials should be aimed.

The curriculum development process was as much political as it was technical. Our inspection of the records of the project staff revealed that they had organized several joint meetings at the hospital, which were designed to get consensus as to what were the problems that needed to be solved. Excerpts from interviews with Redwood project staff provide the flavor of how the needs assessment leading to the curriculum was approached.

John: The approach that we've taken is that when we enter into a project or when we develop curriculum, we are not going to buy anything off the shelf. That's the attitude that we go in there with. Because every workplace is different. What we do is truly customized to that work environment. I can give you some good examples in the hospital project. As we developed the curriculum, we found common needs that could be presented in all four hospitals, that being the modules that dealt with [measurement and mathematics] basically. And we taught basic math skills by using the measurements that they would use on the job--to ... the custodial maintenance group ... the nursing assistants group, and ... the dietetic technicians group.... And those were pretty consistent across the hospitals--those needs. When it came to the written communication part of it, and also the part of it that was [human relations] "Understanding Where You Work," we had four unique organizations. So really ... we had a module written for that written communication, that's the "Writing That Works" module, and the "Understanding Where You Work" modules. We had to do four hybrids. We had the framework. But we had to custom tailor it, the curriculum model that we developed, we had to further customize it to an additional level for each one of the four worksites. And we use the materials that they used daily in their jobs [emphasis added]. They're the materials that these people saw every day, they handled every day, but they never really understood. And it gave, as Bill said, it gave meaning. It kind of, it brought their job alive.

Researcher: Now ... that customizing, is that a part of the tradition of the tech college and the way in which you would do business anyway?

John: Yes.

Researcher: ... that if an employer calls you ... You would go in and see what it is, whatever their occupation is, and then you would work backward from that?

John: Yes. It has to start--the whole process has to start with an evaluation of the workplace, to see what the processes are. And we approach it from the aspect of what things cause you the most problems. Or as Pete [curriculum specialist] would say, where's the pain? What's causing you pain in your operation?

Researcher: So in other words you haven't had to go and learn that part of it. That, in a sense--that has been traditional ... this idea of going into a company or going in to talk to any client and figuring out what the client needs and then working back ... that's sort of the way in which you do business?

John: Absolutely ...

Bret: It's also the background that the technical colleges have, even in regular programming. When we do any kind of a new program we have to go and talk ... deal with an advisory committee.... Even though it's off the shelf [the curriculum], there's still a history, and a background of getting information from the field.

John: The whole system I think--the technical college--whether you're dealing with our day school classes or customized classes or customized training, is really user-driven. And it's needs-driven. By the need of the industry, or in the cases that we're dealing with workplace literacy, by the need of the individual workplace.

Researcher: So in a sense all you have to do here then, because you already have the, shall we say, technology, to go out there and figure out what it is that this workplace or this individual or this whole group needs, and you could just simply ask the literacy question to the extent that that's what is needed in addition to the other things, without missing a step. Because you already know how to do that.... Is that about right?

John: Yes, in a general sense. If we go into the worksite and we're in this discovery process, that's really what it is at first. You're trying to discover exactly what the needs are. You look at many levels. You can't ask just the manager, because all you are going to get are some of the right answers ... You also have to ask the individual who is at the hands-on level, or production level out on the floor what the problem is also. And you'll find invariably that perceptions are different as to what the needs are.

What these project staffers were saying was that their traditional needs assessment technology now served the college in good stead when they performed literacy audits. The basic mechanism of determining the nature of the problem, and designing curriculum to remedy it, was virtually the same.

We asked Pete to provide specifics, as he reflected on his needs assessment processes. The dialogue that follows provides insight:

Pete: We have to spend some time telling them [workers] what we're going to do with them first. In other words, we have to explain that we're looking for the pain.... We have to make it real clear what we're doing and what we want them to help us to do. And then once that's clear [we ask] what are the problems, and that's a questioning process. What is it about your job, for example, that you find most difficult to do? We don't say, "Can you read well, can you write well?" None of that.... You get them talking and the listening starts to accumulate.

Researcher: So you zero in?

Pete: ... we don't want to know all the things that are involved in doing their job.

Researcher: You don't do a task analysis?

Pete: Well, it's a task analysis for the problem, but we don't do a job analysis.

Researcher: You don't do a job analysis for the whole job? ... You zero in on the problem?

Pete: We're looking for the performances that they can't do as well as they should ... the specific performances ... measuring the recipe that is for 100 people and I need it to change to 350.

Researcher: If you do it that way, how many people would you have to [interview] before you know that you had captured what the range of the problem is?

Pete: Well, what we do is we get as many of them as we can get to talk to.... We go back there until we can get a list to give back to them and say, "Is this it?" I mean, "Is this all of what you had, or is there more? Did we describe it right?" So we reflect back what they have told us. And then they sign off on it and say, "Yes, that's it. That's all we've got ... "

Pete continued, explaining that aside from workers, it is necessary during the needs assessment phase of curriculum development to involve management.

And when we talk to management, that is the top management, we start out at the Vice-President level, whoever will come and listen to us. And then we work down to the managers and supervisors of these people and then we actually talk to the people themselves.... Sometimes we've talked to the managers and the people together, sometimes we talk to the people separately. A lot of it at that point is just me not being satisfied that I know enough. And so I'll schedule another meeting with an individual person or a group of people or a supervisor or somebody and say, "I don't understand this." And then we reflect it back to them. That's the key to the whole thing. We say, here is your opportunity to tell us whether we did this right or whether you want to add something because at this point we're not going to do anymore with the needs analysis. Then we'll design the curriculum.

The approach described by Pete here was internalized by hospital representatives associated with the project, as the following excerpt from an interview with two of them (Carmen and Melinda) attest:

Carmen: The people who were doing curriculum development were working as fast as they could work.... [They were] trying to coordinate four hospitals ... commonalities are not great. And so they had to come in and do the needs assessments.

Melinda: [They were] very responsive. They did a heroic effort at touching base. They sent surveys to the managers, they gathered tools from the hospital, you know, forms that we use and so forth.

Carmen: They went into the settings ...

Melinda: They did personal interviews; they were here on-site many times. So they really did a heroic effort.

The approach was also internalized by union officials who spoke of the "very intricate skills assessment" performed by the college's curriculum development team.

Document Examination

To gain another perspective on the curricular procedures adopted by the college, we examined project documents and notes from minutes of meetings (from among the key stakeholders) that pertained to curriculum development. The documentation revealed that the first step taken by the college was to set forth a plan for the curriculum development process (e.g., Table 1). The first three steps, (1) "conduct needs/task analysis," (2) "finalize task listing," and (3) "sequence and modularize tasks," were probably the most crucial and certainly the most political, requiring the consensus of the collaborating parties. We will focus on these three.

Table 1
Curriculum Development Process--Hospital Project

Needs Analysis

As shown in Table 1 and as discussed previously, the needs assessment process included interviews with job supervisors, training directors, and selected employees. These personnel were urged to consider eight specific questions as they considered the literacy needs of their workers:

1. What specific job-tasks do 80% of the employees perform effectively where 20% of your employees just can't seem to do it correctly?
2. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of some new technology changes in the workplace?
3. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of their lack of basic math skills?
4. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of their lack of basic reading skills?
5. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of their lack of understanding of how to relate to patients effectively?
6. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of their lack of understanding of how to relate to customers effectively?
7. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of the lack of understanding of spoken English?
8. What specific job-tasks do some employees have trouble performing which may be the result of their lack of understanding basic medical terminology?

We examined the minutes of meetings with personnel from separate hospitals, showing the responses of these hospitals to some of these questions. The minutes show that for one hospital the problems included the following (set forth by department):

Environmental Services

• reading chemical labeling in order to get each chemical into the right bottle (some are color coded but some employees are color blind)
• measuring skills for proper dilution of chemicals
• reading supply order slips
• reading signs in hospital including various danger signs for certain chemicals
• reading and completing time cards properly
• understanding verbal orders
• completing the six-page self-performance appraisal (mostly an ESL problem--variety of languages range from Ethiopian to Lebanese)

Nutrition Services

• reading and understanding job procedures such as menus and the production sheet for proportions
• understanding how each part of a job fits with the rest
• reading recipes and measurements

The minutes of meetings at a second hospital revealed areas of concern to be medical terminology, ESL, reading building plans, following verbal instructions, and mixing chemicals.

Minutes from one other hospital identified recent computerization of certain hospital operations as a problem area. A further problem area was "how to relate to patients." At this hospital a problem among cooks was making conversions between metric and imperial measurements. This hospital was moving toward multitasking, requiring workers to be able to understand both systems.

Minutes from yet another meeting showed employee problems such as the following:

1. understanding instructions given by supervisors
2. needing to understand the layout of the hospital--to get from one part to the other
3. reading labels
4. relating well to patients when entering a room in order to clean
5. communicating well verbally
6. communicating well on paper in tasks such as completing incident reports, grievances, and performance appraisals
7. following the procedure for mixing cleaning chemicals

As indicated above, while there were hospital-specific problems, there were others that transcended them. It can be seen that the problems articulated by the departments focused on workplace basic skills as set forth by Carnevale et al. (1988) and in the SCANS report (1991). From the milieu of problems revealed by the needs analysis process, the curriculum specialists at the college developed the following six courses: Working With Others, Reading on the Job, Measuring for Success, Writing That Works, Getting Computer Comfortable, and Understanding Where You Work. Table 2 (e.g., Appendix C) provides sample content items for each of these courses. It can be seen from the table that the content was decidedly workplace-related and specific to the circumstances of each of the hospitals. Taken together across the courses, the content was consistent with conceptions of workplace literacy one sees in the literature. The course Working with Others emphasized interpersonal and communications skills. Content here included (1) "answering telephones appropriately," (2) "communicating appropriately with patients," (3) "behaving properly in elevators," (4) "working as part of a team/listening skills," and (5) "using good listening skills." The course Reading on the Job emphasized both "reading to do" activities (e.g., reading food labels or reading supply order slips) and "reading to learn" activities (e.g., understanding the relationship between calories, fat, salt, sugar, and cholesterol in food) (e.g., Sticht, 1978). This course will be discussed further when we examine each approach to instruction.

Measuring for Success was what the curriculum developers titled the course in basic mathematics in order to try to reduce math anxiety among workers. The content of this course included skills such as (1) "taking food temperatures," (2) "estimating when product will run out," (3) "mixing chemicals for cleaning solutions--changing proportions of chemicals," (4) "reading instrument gauges," and (5) "completing time cards effectively."

The course, Writing That Works, emphasized skills such as (1) "writing basic reports"; (2) "writing correct messages from telephone calls"; (3) "requesting changes in trays and diets for patients"; and (4) "writing basic memos, incident reports, and grievances."

Multiskilling

As indicated in our discussion of curricular philosophy, Pete had explained that a goal of the hospitals was to create a multiskilled worker. Rather than specializing in one aspect of service, each worker in a particular unit would perform several functions. As Pete pointed out, the hospitals were saying the following:

We want to organize the workforce by [units].... So instead of having the kitchen person be the one who does the food, serves the food, brings it back, and the nursing assistant person be the one who measures the intake and output of who ate for the medical charts, and the environmental services people be the ones who come in and measure this and measure that, and clean the rooms and make sure everything is fine, now they want to assign a cadre of people to that unit and they do all those things. And it's just a simple example of the change in the job that prevents people from keeping up because they don't have the prerequisite skills to do all that.

This problem fitted the description of what Pete had described as workplace literacy. The jobs of these workers were changing. We wondered whether the functional context approach was applicable here as well. Could the functional context approach lead to a curriculum geared to multiskilling?

Pete: I can tell you how we do it. If you're mopping floors and that's your job, the first thing we do is to find out what problem areas you have in mopping floors. And there will be areas like mixing the chemicals properly to mop the floors. OK. Then that is a job function, mopping floors. And then we find some other things that you don't have the prerequisites for. So we start with where they are on the job, find out where the needs are there and then [ask], "What else do you do in your job that you're having problems with?" And then we go beyond that and ask, "What's coming down the road?" "What are they going to introduce, what kind of technology?" Anything that's going to be introduced in six months, a week or whatever, in your hospital that is going to change your job and in some cases, prepare for that change. Computers is an example. So we start with where they are and the job they do, find out what the problems are, and expand that into the other.

There was consistency here, from curricular philosophy to curricular approach. Literacy meant the ability to do one's changing job, and the task of the curriculum specialist was to find out what these changes were and to design a curriculum that would ready the worker to perform under these changes.

Clustering

As described above, one curricular challenge of the project was to fit individual workers so that they could perform multiple jobs. A corollary challenge was preparing workers from a variety of jobs to perform common tasks. The solution here was to decontextualize the curriculum so that tasks that transcended jobs could be pooled. Measuring, communicating, and working with computers were examples of such tasks. The approach was to cluster them into topics, as the following dialogue shows:

Pete: The union groups represent four, five, or six jobs that are sort of parallel--environmental services ... clerical people ... nursing aides.... So those are potential lateral areas. So what we do is we go find out what they all need and then we look at them and we say, "We've organized the curriculum around a topic area." So lets say "measurement." We found that all these groups needed some kind of measurement. So we designed the curriculum to be measuring for nursing assistants, measuring for dietary aides, measuring for environmental services. So if you're now a nursing assistant and you go into this class, you're going to measure chemicals in the class, with the idea that you don't do that on your job everyday but you may be doing it and you may want to be doing that or you may have the opportunity.

Researcher: So what generic stuff, what transfers or transcends all of these areas?

Pete: In the examples we use, then, for teaching each of those things, are the actual things they do on the job.

Researcher: That cut across the three or four things ...

Pete: So let me sum it up a different way. Say, we interviewed Nursing Assisting, Environmental Services, and Housekeeping and we found these five calculation kinds of problems they had in one area, and these four kinds of calculation problems in another area ... [we] looked at them and figured out a way to organize them into one training course. So any one of those members of those three groups that takes the course will get experience in the kinds of measuring that is done in the other jobs. But there are still the problems that they have on the jobs that become the content ... the actual forms, the actual calculations, the menus. We took menus ... right off their menus, and used those as the content of the training. So that's context-based.

Testing

To pitch the curriculum to the reading level of participants, a section of the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE) (e.g., testing vocabulary and reading comprehension) was administered to a sample of workers on a voluntary basis. Jane expressed the view that the reading levels encountered ranged between the seventh and ninth grade.

Literacy Beyond the Workplace

Though workplace literacy had to be tightly defined, project staff indicated that they were mindful of needs beyond the workplace. Pete pointed out that "a secondary goal" of the grant was "a general overall improvement of the person's life, personally as well as professionally." The curriculum had to take this goal into account, since it was to be a point of evaluation. He provided an example--the use of calculators--indicating how the curriculum development process met this goal:

Pete: Using the calculator was a perfect example of that. You can do mathematical calculations without a calculator ... but a calculator is a part of these people's lives and their kids are using calculators. Somebody, as a result of our course, [may] be able to go back and have a conversation with their own child about computers, that they now understand is going to improve their lives and their families' lives as well. And that was one of the underlying goals of how we tried to proceed.

As we suggest in our earlier examination of the definition of literacy adopted by the project staff, when taken from the perspective of the worker, literacy must move beyond the functional. In the case reported by Gowen (1992), it was shown that workers often might prefer a curriculum that extends beyond their jobs. Pete was saying that such a consideration was indeed a goal of the project--a secondary goal--one that had to be taken into account in considering the curriculum. We engaged him in further dialogue on this point by expressing a value:

Researcher: Literacy ultimately must mean what you just said there--an improvement in one's life and being, and so on. [This is] one of the reasons why I am looking at the functional context--although you've discussed functional context in a very liberal way that I'm OK with. You're talking about mobility and so on and not "fixed." One of the things that I think that literacy must do for somebody is improve their life--make them freer and freer to move, and so on. So I am happy to hear that sort of thing is in there [Note: in the approach to curriculum].

Pete replied that many would consider the course, Working with Others, one of the six developed for the project, to be esoteric and not within the realm of workplace literacy. But he pointed out that the aim of that course was to

primarily work on building [the workers] self-image--their ability to stand up to a supervisor and assert themselves when they should; their ability to accept criticism when they should; their ability to interact with their fellow employees and their management people.

What Pete was saying here was that a residual effect operated in the curriculum, redounding to the intrinsic benefit of workers. Assertiveness on the job could transfer into assertiveness off the job. As Gowen (1992) points out, the premise of residual worker benefit is integral to the mainstream conception of workplace literacy. What is good for the employer is assumed to be good for the worker.