NCRVE MDS-885 - About This Book

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About This Book

This book is the work of over 25 people from four national organizations and four schools. It attempts to document four approaches to implementing AAI reforms and to explore some of the strategies employed, not only by AAI reformers, but by those leading related efforts. The case studies are not, as is usually the case, dispatched in the cool, detached tone of the academic researcher, but instead are told by the immersed, often overwhelmed, and deeply committed voices of the teachers involved.

The educators and organizations involved in this study were convened by NCRVE. Concerned about the lack of knowledge at the local and state levels about what is meant by "all aspects of the industry" and by the paucity of research on how to implement it, NCRVE invited the Center for Law and Education, Jobs for the Future, and the Learning Research and Development Center to join in a collaborative project, working directly with schools to explore ways to implement AAI. The schools selected (and willing to commit ever-scarce time to the endeavor) were the Health and Bioscience Academy at Oakland Technical High School in California; the Rindge School of Technical Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts; South Division High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the Pennsylvania Youth Apprenticeship Program in Pittsburgh.

Over the course of the 1993-1994 school year, teams of educators from the four schools met with staff from the organizations and with one another to exchange ideas, dilemmas, and strategies for implementing AAI in the context of their differing school structures. At the conclusion, they put pen to paper--or more often, fingers to keyboard--to share their experiences and thoughts. (For some, this reflective process stretched over the next year and more, and the discerning reader will notice in some of the case studies the inclusion of information on the 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 school years.)

The resulting case studies, which comprise the next four chapters of this book, present not only different curriculum ideas for implementing AAI, but also diverse perspectives on how AAI relates to other types of vocational and secondary education reforms and ideas for thorny implementation problems and dilemmas. The ambitiousness of the teams' goals and the extent to which the AAI effort influenced other initiatives at the school varied widely:

The Oakland team worked to incorporate AAI throughout four of the major components of the Health and Bioscience Academy, including worksite learning experiences, student portfolios, curricular projects, and postsecondary articulation.
The Cambridge teachers used AAI as the theme for reshaping their tenth-grade curriculum to better integrate exposure to different career paths with the provision of transferable vocational and academic skills.
Milwaukee's team expanded an existing Hospitality Management Project to encompass more aspects of industry and designed a larger-scale project for future implementation.
Pittsburgh's educators produced an assessment rubric based on AAI for the purpose of assessing work-based learning projects in Pennsylvania Youth Apprenticeship Programs, and also developed an all aspects Bridge Project.

In each site, efforts to implement AAI brought issues of curricular depth to the forefront. After initial responses of "we're already doing that," many of the teachers began to probe how well they were doing it, whether they were teaching enough about labor issues, and whether students were really getting sufficient experience in planning and management. The Oakland team reported, "One of the first things that became clear to our team as we thought about implementing AAI in our curriculum was that we were not entering uncharted waters." That fact that the waters were charted, though, did not mean that they had already "been there, done that." Their case study is rich in new ideas and augmented goals.

AAI proved to be a useful tool for integrating critical thinking. The rigor of the new work in some of the schools makes a compelling case that vocational students have the capacity for doing challenging intellectual work--despite the forces and stereotypes that may have led them to vocational studies. The Cambridge team writes,

Some of the most successful AAI course content was actually quite sophisticated. We spent the better part of two weeks in Humanities exploring how the Industrial Revolution affected labor/management relations, using simulations, lectures, discussions, and reflective writing. A good deal of the content revolved around the transition from "task-oriented production" to "time-oriented production" and the impact of "Taylorism" and related "time-study" management systems on the workplace. It was gratifying to see Cambridge public high school students grapple with the same ideas that would be taught across the street at Harvard in a course on Labor History.

Multidisciplinary projects were an important strategy at all of the sites. Oakland even found a way for students to make real contributions in a field with major obstacles. "In health care, we face an obstacle to this strategy [student enterprises]--students cannot perform clinical tasks with patients. Health education is an area in which students can create real products." The Pittsburgh team focused on projects and assessment of student work on projects because the PYAP curriculum utilizes projects throughout. Projects served multiple functions--even beyond providing a motivating and hands-on setting for learning. In Cambridge, small-scale projects enabled teachers to experiment with ideas that later formed the foundation for a new course, while larger-scale student enterprises served as the setting for extensive work-based learning. The Milwaukee team used a project to demonstrate the AAI approach to other teachers and to convince them to join in larger efforts.

In addition, the initiators of case sites noted the value of AAI as a rubric for assessing not only student learning, but educational settings and curriculum ideas. The Pittsburgh team decided after developing its project assessment rubric that the rubric was applicable for assessing not only senior work-based projects, but for any work-based projects. Moreover, it was valuable as a design tool for teachers planning projects. Milwaukee teachers noted, "AAI forces us to look at the internship sites where our senior-level students are placed. It places an emphasis on finding training sites that offer students an opportunity to experience all aspects of an industry."

Back in 1993, the four school sites were chosen in large part because of the different industries and program structures they represented. As work progressed and everyone became better acquainted, the similarities between the programs became far more striking. Each team struggled with how best to introduce ideas to other teachers and to get buy-in from the other teachers who would be involved. All searched for common planning time, which was sometimes as elusive as the Holy Grail. At times, goal overload threatened to swamp each effort.

In the course of the collaborative initiative, it became clear that the four teams shared a great deal--not just with one another, but also with academic reform efforts. All of the sites were trying to create, or had created, small learning environments. In all four cases, AAI efforts interwove with vocational and academic integration. The schools utilized a range of experiential and field-based learning settings such as service learning, apprenticeships, internships, and school-based enterprises. To gain some insight from other education reformers employing these strategies, the final chapter in this book investigates and elicits advice from seven complementary reform efforts: The Coalition of Essential Schools, the Center for Collaborative Education, the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative, Service Learning Programs, Foxfire, REAL Enterprises, and City/ Community-as-School.

None of the efforts documented in this book are "over." All of the teachers continue to adapt, expand, enrich, create, and perhaps most importantly, to question. The most valuable impact of AAI as a concept may well be as a catalyst and a tool for probing for what we--educators, students, parents, community members, employers, policymakers, and others--want from our schools.

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