Conclusions about the Importance of AAI

The topics we have included in our case study are not the only possible applications for AAI we see in the academy. We still need to look at existing course outlines and interdisciplinary projects and figure out where there is already AAI material that might be explored more explicitly and where other AAI concepts and applications might be added. We need to design more projects that focus on one or more aspects of the health care and bioscience industries. We plan to use the school-based clinic and Health Education Center as working laboratories for applying AAI knowledge. We are working with both health care employers and postsecondary partners to create better articulation and quality youth apprenticeships that will demand a whole new level of mastery regarding the industry during the academy senior year.

Teachers and students will create, over some years, more projects, small and large, that tie our classes to industry and to one another. All of these will involve, among other things, applying the AAI themes. Events in the world and in our community, as well as student curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm, will sometimes lead us to focus on some particular AAI aspects more than others. We will grow to a deeper understanding of how AAI is actually a form of systems thinking and of how the various aspects interplay. We will learn to integrate the AAI aspects rather than simply explore or apply them as if they were somehow separate. In the best T. S. Eliot sense, we "shall not cease from our explorations" until we experience a fundamental shift in what we know and in our ways of knowing. It will be some years before AAI becomes as natural to us as breathing, and even then the AAI lens will be one that lives, shifts, changes, and supports the learning we do with students and the new directions this takes.

There are aspects of our industry that will require us to develop brand new curriculum and projects rather than fine tune what we have. The economics of health care needs far greater student investigation as do the politics of health care. In 1994-1995, our senior English and Government/Economics classes will be team taught and block scheduled as a senior institute which will support major student projects and encourage community involvement/development. The fact that there is always more to do underscores for us one of the most important points about AAI: AAI is not a one-time fix, but a set of ideas that can help guide the program/school/worksite/community/system over time.

AAI and Student Outcomes

If we want our students to succeed in the world of work and in their lives, we need to find ways to give students a real understanding of the facets of AAI. If we narrow our goals to particular occupations or to job readiness skills, we do our students a real disservice. Students who cannot upgrade their skills over time, who understand only one occupation, and who fail to see how their job fits into the industry's larger picture are not going to go on to successful careers in health care at any level. When our students go out to their internships and we talk with their supervisors and coworkers, we often hear comments on how well-prepared academy students are, how well they understand what each department does, and how well they can relate what they are learning and doing in their internship into the total health care context. Health employers want employees with multiple skills and an understanding of the entire industry; the fact that our students learn about the industry as a whole makes employers more interested in working with us and in hiring our students.

At one point in our discussions of AAI this year, we made a list of student outcomes--what we want our students to know and be able to do by the time they graduate from the academy. Our goals may be a little lofty, but they give a sense of our vision and why AAI is a necessary tool in reaching our goals:

• We want students to graduate with health and bioscience career paths in mind and with clear ideas of the health care and life science environments that appeal to them. We want them to be able to spend time in a department or lab and to "size it up" correctly; to identify the formal and informal chains of command, the skills and the technology involved, and the personal attributes required; to know how they might fit in; and to know whether this is a place they might want to work. We want them to have realistic expectations about how to proceed through the multiple paths through school and work toward their future; we want them to realize that all these paths require hard work, planning, and sacrifice, and that all contain challenges, risks, opportunities for learning, and the potential for successes and joy.
• We want our students to graduate with the knowledge and skills necessary for postsecondary education. Young people must know how to learn and develop a passion for and a commitment to lifelong learning in order to succeed. For all our students who continue in health careers, the next years of their lives especially will involve additional education and training, whether at four-year colleges, community colleges, professional/technical schools, or on the job.
• We want our students to have both health care job skills sufficient to support themselves--whether they work full-time right away or work their ways through college--and the transferable job skills necessary to be a flexible part of a rapidly changing and highly technological society.
• We want our students to have entrepreneurial skills so that they can create community health positions for themselves and can understand and act upon emerging health career opportunities.
• We want our students to be active citizens, to know how to carry out a project in their own community, to be the formal or informal health care experts and advocates for their families and their communities, and to participate in the health care debates.

AAI and Program Coherence

Related to the development of the kinds of rich experiences for students that the outcomes above require, we think that AAI has a central role in maintaining and developing coherence in our program. If you want to build a program which is both complex and coherent, you need a vision that includes key concepts--understood by the staff and students--that can inform the many projects, classes, and experiences and opportunities that make up the program. Some years there are new academy teachers and/or course offerings. There are always new employers, departments, or postsecondary schools that are interested in working with us; new instructional supplies or equipment, new insights; new directors; and new funding opportunities which change the way we work together as a learning community. No one person can oversee everything. Without some guiding principles, this constant change easily becomes incoherent. Attempts to impose coherence are made by having an expert team develop a program design which specifies the place of each course and learning experience ultimately fail for similar reasons: The year-to-year process of change erodes the edifice, and the new does not fit with the old. Only if the staff as a whole understand some guiding ideas and apply them in areas and efforts that each of us take on in a year can the many components that make up a powerful learning community become a coherent whole.

AAI is one of those key concepts or ways of thinking that can give a program coherence. AAI is a framework for seeing the industry as a whole; for seeing interrelationships, patterns, and interconnectiveness between school and work, academic and technical, and different disciplines and different ways of constructing knowledge. AAI can help make workplaces into learning places; help infuse the knowledge and experience of industry into classrooms; help in designing student project benchmarks; help in connecting school and work to community; and help students to be successful interns, critical thinkers, reflective practitioners, and lifelong learners.

We urge you to find successful ways to use AAI.