For several years, academy teachers have worked together and have had technical assistance from Far West Laboratories, Jobs for the Future, the California Department of Education--Health Careers Division, the California Partnership Academies, NCRVE, and others to increase the use of portfolios, projects, problem-based learning, and performance assessment. As a team, we strive to integrate curricula--the technical and the academic, secondary and postsecondary--around health and bioscience themes. Our primary focus is on providing a powerful learning experience for students; our methodologies emphasize increased student ownership of the learning process. We foster students as active learners, thinkers, and makers of meaning and foster student commitment to producing quality work. Ours is an ongoing conversation around issues of what it is that we want students to know and be able to do; what conditions promote that knowing/doing; how to best connect school, work, and community; how to assess complex learning, mastery, and student performance; and how to best organize ourselves as a learning community in which students, teachers, industry and postsecondary partners, parents, and community work together. The academy is a place where students are encouraged to use their hearts, their hands, and their minds well.
As a school-within-a-school, we face many challenges. As is true for most teachers, we have impossible demands on our time. Our ideas about how students and teachers should work together and with others have sometimes been difficult to implement within the framework of a traditional (albeit changing) high school. We have strong administrative support, but still fight battles about scheduling and procedures. Many of our students deal day to day with issues of poverty, racism, social injustice, urban violence, and drugs; thus, it is especially important for them and for us not to focus on deficits and excuses, but to, instead, view each student as a community resource and as a potential creator of high-quality work; to build on strengths; and to always expect and support excellence from all.
All Aspects of the Industry: Where We Started
In October 1994, we were invited to participate in a project funded by the Joyce Foundation on developing curriculum related to AAI. Our research team consisted of four academy teachers; one community college radiology instructor, who is part of our Tech Prep partnership; one health educator from our Kaiser Permanente partnership; and facilitators from Jobs for the Future and NCRVE.
One of the first things that became clear to our team members as we thought about implementing AAI in our curriculum was that we were not entering uncharted waters. Many AAI concepts were already embedded across the academy curriculum and in the reflective writing which accompanies students' work-based learning experiences. We work hard to broaden our students' perspectives about health and bioscience using history, literature, drama, and ethics. Student projects and portfolios have assumed an increasingly important role in the academy and are vehicles for direct student exploration of the industry. An expanding relationship with our industry partners continually creates new work-based experiences for students and teachers, but also requires that we find better ways to flesh out the learning potential of each new worksite, further connecting school and work.
In a more fundamental sense, many of the convictions and commitments we began with as a Partnership Academy already directed us toward AAI:
In general, we see AAI not only as a set or ensemble of concepts essential to curriculum, but also as a tool that encourages program improvement. We want our students to use AAI to develop systemic thinking about industry and to apply AAI in many projects, including community development. We need to help students build on what they already know; provide a series of increasingly independent opportunities for them to experience, practice, and apply AAI; and then support students as they become expert practitioners in their own uses of AAI. At the same time, we need to use AAI to rethink, assess, and fine-tune the academy. AAI should be a tool for program design, helping us to enhance curricula, workplace and community experiences, and student projects and portfolios so that students can gain useful knowledge about AAI themes and experiences in applying them. We also know that a deep understanding of AAI will result in broad, transferable skills for other career paths our students might pursue.
We redesigned our first year (ninth/tenth grade) curriculum in order to explicitly introduce students to AAI and to explore strategies to deepen students' and our own understanding of each aspect and how--as an ensemble of aspects--they integrated into a coherent system of practice and theory. Students need to encounter AAI in multiple themes, projects, and experiences across the curriculum during the three or four years they are in the academy. As they participate in workplace experiences, including internships and their first health and bioscience jobs, they will use AAI to understand the organizations and systems they encounter. Then, in a series of student-chosen projects and community development activities, students will use ideas for themselves. Since students choose their own topics and methodologies, we can also use student projects as feedback on our curriculum, in AAI and in other areas. Which topics and aspects did students choose to investigate? Are there important AAI themes that are not represented? What learning situations might encourage an even richer student exploration of AAI?
We would add one aspect to the general set. Ethics is a fundamental aspect of our industry (and at least an important one in many other industries). Students must understand bioethics and medical confidentiality before we can send them out to internships. Many of the health care controversies in the news--about the right to die, about who gets transplants, or about universal coverage--are primarily about ethics. Our students are acutely aware that medical care is unequally distributed, and they want to understand, criticize, and change this. Ethics is also powerfully embedded in the literature and history of health and science. We cannot imagine our curricula being complete without this dimension.
What We Did
Over the course of the year, we worked to incorporate AAI into four different elements of the academy. We are still in the early phases of full AAI incorporation, but we have already learned many important lessons that we hope will be valuable to others.
The four areas of incorporation this year are as follows:
Organization of the Case Study
This case study is organized around the four areas delineated above. The material which follows describes where we began and how academy curricula and learning experiences were perceived and reworked to further incorporate AAI. Various sections were written by different members of our team. As a result, individual parts may reflect slightly different voices, experiences, and learning. We conclude our case study with some general conclusions about the important role AAI has to play in building strong school-to-career programs.
Some Advice for (Some of) Our Readers
Some of you may read this introduction and feel that, while what follows might be interesting, it will not be useful to your program because you face a very different set of circumstances (i.e., "It was easy for them to implement AAI--they were already doing all of this"; "Our program is only starting"; "I'm one teacher with one class"; or just "Our school/program is very, very different from what you've described"). Throughout our case study, we have tried to distinguish between a variety of approaches to incorporating AAI into curriculum and to identify likely starting points. We hope that one or more will be useful to you at whatever your school's/program's/system's stage of development.
We believe that the broad principles outlined above (an industry rather than occupation focus, curriculum integration across disciplines around broad-based career themes, student-driven projects, systematic workplace exposure) mutually reinforce AAI. Your strengths in any of these should provide a strong base for AAI implementation.
What we present in the following pages may make academy activities sound highly organized and completely thought through; the reality is somewhat more chaotic. We did not become the program we are today overnight. We have brainstorms and then try new approaches, succeed or fail, rethink and refine, and try again. Opportunities for working with health industry partners emerge and we scramble to make them work. Different individuals or teams of teachers and students assume responsibility for various program components and/or concentrate on elements of what we agree to do. New partners join us with fresh dreams of what they hope to accomplish. Sometimes a particular teachers or an industry partner takes us in new directions. Sometimes students or parents lead the way. There is never enough common meeting time. We tear our hair out, laugh, yell, and console one another in empty classrooms after school. Some of our deepest conversations take place in hallways and parking lots or late at night over the phone.
The way the program can grow and stay coherent in this chaos is through our common vision. Every year (there have been ten of them now), we rethink our ideas of what school should be; of how students and teachers can and should learn; and of how best to connect school, work, and community. We factor in external demands and come to a consensus on particular elements that need our attention. We chose these elements carefully with an "any stone that hits less than two birds is rarely worth throwing" approach. Through this process, we develop or reaffirm guiding principles about what we are trying to accomplish each year, which are understood by everyone involved, and come to some agreement about priorities. We attend conferences and work together in the summer to develop our agreements and plans and to orient new staff members. We write curriculum together, but the reason that it gets implemented at all is not primarily that something is down on paper, but because the larger ideas are in our heads.
Many of you may object that it is already a struggle to fit what students need to learn into the time available without adding in AAI or student projects and portfolios. Some of us felt that pressure when we started, but we all agree that, "You'll get over it! Learning about all aspects is worth any additional or initial effort." A curriculum infused with AAI includes the intangibles that knit everything together. AAI shapes our collective thinking and provides an imperative for learning. This process has led to an increase in what students really understand and master because they are more engaged with what they do study. Administrators, teachers, parents, and other visitors to the academy are impressed with the high quality of work that students are doing, and with the palpable energy and excitement they find, rather than worried about particular lectures or multiple-choice tests that are missing from the class structure.
AAI should serve as an interrelated set of guiding ideas (where the whole is always more than the sum of its parts) that gives the academy coherence--coherence for students, so that different learning experiences relate to one another; coherence for staff in the midst of the stress, turbulence, and joy that is teaching; and coherence through time to ride over staff changes, schedule changes, fresh opportunities, and new challenges and arrive at the other side--a richer and better community of learners.
Student projects, career-technical portfolios, and Work-Based Learning Portfolios can add significant AAI content and experience to a class or program even if you are not yet ready to rethink your entire curriculum. For us, these projects and portfolios have also been important in drawing teachers into integrated and student-centered approaches. They can be used as a relatively easy means for a team of teachers to work together, and there is not a more eloquent way to persuade teachers than for them to experience the pride, thought, energy, and effort students put into projects and portfolios and the powerful student learning that results.