From the start, teachers who had experience in industry found the AAI approach validating; it affirmed what they knew from their own experience. For other teachers, the relationship to community issues resonated with their own concerns. They were excited that vocational reforms allowed them to address some of the city's problems.
There are two mindsets at Rindge about how AAI should be taught. Some staff members feel it should be taught by instructors in a classroom setting--for example, planning, finance, and management should be taught by a business teacher; and labor and community issues taught by a history teacher. One problem with this approach is that learning becomes fragmented. It is difficult to see how the piece fits into the whole picture, and it takes a creative approach to maintain student interest. On the plus side, it makes a nice, neat package; it is easy to schedule and coordinate curriculum because you are controlling the experience, unlike an actual workplace.
The other mindset holds that AAI should be woven into common themes, school-based-enterprises, and projects across the program, in both vocational and academic courses, with an experiential focus. This is the approach Rindge has been taking, for the most part, and it is our preference. Students learn about AAI through doing, as they work on enterprises and projects, and they learn about it with the help of a mix of teachers, businesses, and community people. More traditional classroom teaching reinforces the students' experiences. Students experience the need to know, realize how the piece fits into the big picture, and develop an understanding, which is arguably better than knowing information, but not knowing how to use it. On the flip side, the drawbacks to this approach are the logistical nightmares and the challenge of finding ways to integrate different aspects and issues so that students see how what they learn in one class or project relates to what they learn in another. This approach also demands that teachers coach students to help them sort through information from different people and perspectives--a challenge, but a good one, because it helps strengthen students' critical abilities.
AAI needs a context to be meaningful. We struggle constantly with how to make it real and concrete. It is good for students to learn what planning is, management, and so on, but if you have a separate exercise on each aspect, it becomes too detached from what the students are interested in. Kids tune out. Some of us feel, though, that it is important for students to see that various aspects are differentiated--that there are labor issues (and other aspects) that they should be able to recognize as such. The challenge is to include and identify the aspects without making it too abstract. We use microenterprise development a lot because it helps us to strike that balance.
The same challenge--of avoiding being too abstract--arises in discussions of vocational and academic integration. Some things seem to fit together beautifully in curriculum meetings, but they just do not connect for students. In CityWorld (the ninth-grade social studies course), we tried to build the curriculum partly around cities in other times, such as Mesopotamia, where students study many of the same systems and issues that they examined in CityWorks, in the context of their home city, Cambridge. It was too abstract of a connection. For 1995-1996, CityWorld is trying a new approach. Students began the year by watching the movie "Frankenstein" and discussing the nature of being human. Is one born human, or can you become human? Students were excited and engaged. The plan in CityWorld, then, is to segue from human development into ever-widening groups and structures (cities, nations) as the year proceeds, and in that way relate to the study of the city going on in CityWorks. With less reliance on a common theme, integration of learning in the ninth grade is more explicitly oriented with teaching certain habits of mind, like the scientific method mentioned earlier in this chapter.