We decided to use AAI as the mechanism for integrating Industries and Humanities. While in Industries we tried to teach AAI, it was only within the confines of a microenterprise, making it hard to bring out historical changes or issues that arise in larger enterprises such as changes in technology and labor issues. Humanities teachers, on the other hand, had already planned to do a unit on labor history, but it was mostly focused on understanding and knowledge, as opposed to skills.
Our general approach was to use the vocational course to teach all aspects of an enterprise, and the humanities course to broaden that to the industry as a whole and to bring in a critical perspective. For instance, Industries teachers looked at the organization of labor in the enterprise and Humanities teachers taught labor history. This both solved some dilemmas (we had not been able to figure out how to teach labor issues very well within the confines of microenterprises) and allowed us to bring the two courses together.
In Industries, we sought to treat the high school as an economic community and to operate the enterprises as regular businesses. We adopted approaches and materials for the Industries curriculum from REAL (Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning), which has developed an experiential curriculum for business development. This curriculum breaks a business plan into exciting hands-on activities and terminology easily understood by students and staff. For marketing and sales activities, we used projects from NIFTE (National Institute for Training in Entrepreneurship). A member of our team, who was trained by REAL, was available to come in if the technical teacher felt uncomfortable leading the exercise.
At the beginning of the year, to help students get accustomed to thinking creatively about potential products and to introduce the concepts of product design and development, Industries used an exercise from REAL: Each team of students was given a spoon and asked to design a better product to accomplish the same task. Then the course segued into the first technical area. Each quarter, students conducted health and safety audits for that technical area and did some hands-on activities in the shop to build some skills with the tools and technologies.
As part of their research and planning for the enterprise, students assessed human and material resources and needs within the school, in part through interviewing school staff about what the staff did. Field trips enabled students to learn about other firms in the industry. Using REAL exercises, students profiled potential customers. As in the Electric Vehicle Project, Industries incorporated library research. Students used a directory of manufacturers and relevant magazines to identify suppliers and then priced stock.
To start the enterprise, students produced a prototype--be it a calendar, a wooden cutting board, or another product--and established the time of production. They then wrote an operating plan and job descriptions, and developed a system to keep track of orders. The teachers wanted students to do break-even analyses. To introduce the idea and skills involved, they led into it with a personal futures exercise, in which students envisioned where they wanted to be and how much money they wanted to make ten years hence. Using the yellow pages and calling stores, they estimated the cost of furniture and other needs and determined the cost of living. Having gotten used to the methods, they did break-even plans for the enterprise. After students had operated the enterprise for a few weeks, the plan was for them to break it down and evaluate it in the last week of the quarter. (Thus, each quarter, students spent only a few weeks actually operating the enterprise.)
The Humanities course complemented Industries. We found that an integrated humanities approach lends itself readily to the goals of AAI instruction. Some aspects, such as technical and production skills, clearly fell within the purview of Industries. We addressed others, such as management, planning, and finance, mostly on the microenterprise level within the Industries course. Humanities touched on those issues, but did not spend a great deal of time on them. However, we spent a great deal of time exploring community issues, labor issues (in part through a unit centered around the novel Of Mice and Men), and even the underlying principles of technology (one of our team members has worked as a historian of technology).
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. This unit also included a discussion of the ways in which public schools mirror the organization of a traditional factory and some historical background on the ways in which public schools were designed to meet the needs of factories.
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. We designed our assignments to test understanding of these concepts, not merely memorization; it was even more gratifying (and perhaps even a bit surprising) to see how many of our students had truly mastered these ideas.