In Pathways, students spend each quarter exploring one of the four career paths around which junior and senior studies are structured--(1) Business and Entrepreneurship; (2) Arts and Communication; (3) Industrial Technologies and Engineering; and (4) Health and Human Services. Rather than having students rotate to different areas, each taught by a different teacher (as in Industries), Pathways is taught mainly by one teacher, who was a member of our AAI team. Teachers from the different career paths join the Pathways teacher to help design projects and co-teach the class. Pathways integrates job shadowing, career interviews, presentations, projects, inventions, and case studies. A chart in the Supporting Materials titled "Overview: Our School" shows the elements of the course, which is one period a day.
The text for Pathways is work--not just careers, but the relationship of work to society, to the daily living experience. We want students to think about what work is and what a career pathway might be. Projects and writing assignments call upon students to relate academic skills to the demands of workplaces and involve students in reflecting on the value and meaning of work in their lives.
Based on the work done the year before, we have used AAI as an ongoing theme for Pathways. In each quarter, we highlight two aspects. For instance, in the first quarter, while students investigate the Business and Entrepreneurs Career Path, they focus on finance and management. In their job shadowing experience at Smith Barney or at Ledge Multimedia (a local multimedia start-up company), students focus on those aspects of the industry. They then work in teams to prepare presentations. As two new aspects are introduced each quarter, students gather information on those aspects--in addition to the aspects introduced in previous quarters--as they do job shadows and projects.
The job shadows are the cornerstone of the class because they make the rest of it more real to students. At the beginning of each quarter, each of the participating employers joins us for a "Job Shadow Fair," where they make presentations to the students. Based on that information, students sign up for job shadows and then follow these steps:
Each student does two job shadows per quarter, with each job shadow lasting about three hours (either a morning block or an afternoon block). (Our urban setting gives us the advantage of having many public and private employers within the distance of a bus or subway ride.) Because class time is spent largely working on projects, it is not a problem that different students are away at job shadows on different days. We have had only occasional difficulties with students missing their other classes. But since it is only eight times a year, students are not missing the same classes each time.
In terms of liability, we treat the expedition like a field trip. Parents sign a release, and we rely on school insurance. Only one parent out of 75 students in the 1995-1996 school year would not agree to the release. We compromised, agreeing that the student would have to do job shadows at sometime before graduation.
We want students to learn to take responsibility and to feel confident in going outside their neighborhoods and in talking to business people and potential employers. Students begin to build these skills in the ninth grade in CityWorks, where they interview people and produce guides to the city of Cambridge. When students make their Pathways job shadow appointments and set up their own transportation plans, they are strengthening those skills. This may not seem like a major issue to some, but it is in an urban environment. We have to deal with turf issues and the continuing segregation of immigrant communities. Some of our students have never been to downtown Boston, just a subway ride away. In the future, we would like to experiment with having students take an increasing amount of responsibility for setting up their job shadowing experiences--identifying potential firms or agencies and then calling them to explain the program.
Complementing the job shadow, students complete a variety of projects. During the first quarter, while studying in the Business and Entrepreneurs classes, students develop and run a microenterprise. Much of this curriculum draws on the Industries curriculum, but the enterprises are on a smaller scale. Limiting "the market" to other students and school staff gives us more flexibility, so that students have time to generate and follow up on their own business ideas. (Similar projects are used in the Entrepreneurs class, which is described below.)
We also use smaller projects to introduce skills and to stimulate students' creativity. In the Slug Slime Project, teams of students list all the things they could make with Slug Slime. They then pass the three hardest or worst product ideas on to another team. Each team then has to pick the one they think is the worst and create posters extolling the virtues of that product.
Taking a different spin on the spoon exercise from Industries, we teach product differentiation using pens. Students analyze features of different pens and survey other students and school staff to figure out what sells and why. Then they design a different pen with the consumer in mind.
Pathways includes a career speaker series, drawing in part on contacts we made during our research for Industries. We also take whole class field trips. One such trip was to USAir, where students saw ticketing, piloting, and air traffic control functions in the new facility at Boston's Logan Airport.
We try to build on the community development focus of CityWorks in job shadows (particularly when studying community issues) and with projects. One project we are thinking of is "Where do you spend your money?" Students would draw maps of their neighborhoods showing where they spend their money each month. To determine whether the money they spend stays in the neighborhood, they could call or visit the businesses to find out whether the owners and employees live there. In interviews of friends, adults, and elderly people in the neighborhood, they could ask them what they buy locally, what they leave the area to buy, what the most important considerations in their spending decisions are, and what products or services they would like to have available in their neighborhoods. Using the results of their surveys, students could identify some kinds of businesses that might do well in their areas, perhaps because there are no businesses of that type or because the local businesses are too expensive, offer poor services, or are unsatisfactory in some other way.
As in most of the Rindge classes, Pathways requires that students keep journals, sometimes assigning specific topics. Students keep their reports and projects in portfolios, which along with written exams and vocabulary quizzes, form the basis for their grade.
With the Pathways program, we can better integrate the humanities with vocational studies. Both courses use different lenses to view the world of work. The Pathways teacher previously co-taught Humanities. This has also helped to facilitate integration because the Pathways teacher understands the goals and the flow of the Humanities class, and because the two teachers have built a strong professional relationship and are comfortable in one another's classes.
Our team's curricular work of weaving AAI into Humanities is still utilized. Labor issues, in particular, remain a major theme in Humanities. In Humanities, we take a broad brush at industrial history, how labor and industry have developed since the Civil War. Many of the readings are snapshots of people dealing with labor issues at different points in time. The curriculum is built partly on The Power in Our Hands and Law in U.S. History books/curricula, and it includes videos on the Depression and Out of Darkness: The Mine Workers Story.
While there is no common planning time or direct coordination between the Pathways staff and the Humanities teachers, the Humanities program continues to stress issues of labor and power relations and now places an increased emphasis on developing student skills that will be of use to students in almost any employment setting, be it blue-collar or white. For example, students work together in cooperative teams, present findings and projects to the class on a regular basis, and are coached in skills such as public speaking and interviewing.
We would like, in the future, to have students do oral histories--to view the different aspects of an industry and historical changes through the eyes of an individual. We originally wanted to have students do them in 1993-1994, as part of Industries and Humanities. We realized then that we could not because it required building students' skills first, especially in interviewing. We would like to try to build up to oral history projects in future years. Students could first interview one another and their teachers about work experiences--"How did you get your first job?" "What did you like best?" "Least?" "What were health and safety issues?" "Were you in a union?" and "What kinds of technology did you use then?" We could build from there to more extensive interviews and then to videotaped projects.
1995-1996 is the first year that we were able to offer tenth-grade science within Rindge. Most Rindge tenth graders now take Introduction to Technology, which gives science credit, but also includes a good deal of mathematics. A design team of five technology teachers and one science teacher worked on the course during the summer of 1995 and now meet weekly to continue its development.
Introduction to Technology utilizes Cambridge Physics Outlet's materials: simple, hands-on equipment that is fun and academically rigorous. Using a car and ramp, a pendulum, a roller coaster, and other pieces, Introduction to Technology helps students to understand the relationship between what they see and a scientific formula. It also integrates graphing and algebra. (More information on the Cambridge Physics Outlet is included in this book's resource chapter.) Students will also study uses of technology in the school such as energy management. Because this is a new course, we are still working on how it will relate to Pathways and Humanities.