AAI entails a different set of expectations and opportunities. Rather than preparing students solely to be employees, programs redefined around AAI prepare students to be economic and social actors, making decisions and choices. These programs reject putting any limits on what students can choose to do.
The AAI approach integrates content, context, and method. The content includes, but goes beyond, technical skills. Federal vocational education and School-to-Work laws identify eight aspects of industry: (1) planning; (2) management; (3) finance; (4) technical and production skills; (5) the underlying principles of technology; (6) community issues; (7) labor issues; and (8) health, safety, and environmental issues. The aspects identified in federal law are meant to serve not as a checklist of rigidly defined content areas, but, rather, as an outline of the different functions performed within an industry and the forces that shape it. Some of the most interesting learning opportunities have to do with how different aspects relate to and influence one another (for instance, how changes in technology affect finance issues in the health industry; or the interplay between planning, finance practices, and community issues in the construction industry).
When fully implemented, AAI fosters critical thinking skills by teaching students to compare different perspectives and explore interrelationships. Students study not only labor issues in the industry, but also a labor perspective on management and finance practices; not only community issues, but also a community perspective on environmental issues. Almost every industry faces dilemmas and is alive with healthy (or sometimes not so healthy) conflicts. Within the context of an industry, students can learn to analyze, to ask probing questions, and to form their own opinions.
The context of a particular industry is what keeps AAI content from becoming too abstract. Teaching principles of technology could be quite dry, but it is less likely to be so when students are studying those principles in the context of how they have led to new products and practices in an industry, and when students are simultaneously learning to use equipment based on those principles. It does not matter, ultimately, if the student works in the specific industry. The skills and knowledge are, to a large extent, transferable, but the industry gives a specific context that helps students gain and apply knowledge.
AAI builds on the best of traditional vocational methodology. Using the abbreviation "AAI" sometimes misses the full concept--"to provide students with strong experience in and understanding of all aspects of the industry they are preparing to enter." In order to provide students with experience, as well as understanding, teachers find they must move away from lecture-style, passive learning models to more active, project-oriented teaching. In one of this book's case studies, Milwaukee teachers discuss their transition to more experiential pedagogy:
It is much easier to teach students AAI through a project. It wasn't always that way. We used to lecture with overheads as we individually dissected the parts of entrepreneurship, business, etc.; curriculum becomes more meaningful and applicable when taught through projects and woven in and out of the curriculum.When most effective, AAI is not seen as a separate reform to be implemented as yet another add-on to the educational program, but as a guiding principle underlying all. In part because it integrates content, context, and method, AAI ties many aspects of school change together. In another of this book's case studies, Oakland educators offer the following view:
While incorporating AAI can seem like a burden at first, we now have a very different perspective on it: We believe AAI should serve as a set of guiding ideas that can give our program coherence: Coherence for students so that the different parts of the program relate to each other; coherence for staff in the midst of the stress and turbulence that is teaching; and coherence through time, to ride over staff changes, schedule changes, new opportunities and new difficulties, and arrive at the other side a richer and better program.AAI is strongly related to vocational and academic integration. Analyzing and solving the problems facing an industry and the enterprises within it draws upon both basic and advanced skills and knowledge in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Labor issues, community issues, finance, and environmental issues lead teachers and students back into history, politics, and the social sciences--subjects which are rarely integrated now. Reading the case studies that follow, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between AAI and integration efforts, so closely are they intertwined. That is not to say that AAI is the same as integration--there are many integration efforts underway that just integrate selected academic subjects with occupationally specific technical skills. However, when a school takes both as goals, the two complement and complete each other.
As discussed in this book's final chapter ("Learning from Experience: Advice from Complementary Reforms"), some of the most extensive school reforms today focus on restructuring schools into small learning communities in an effort to move away from the shopping-mall model of high school (in which students choose from a large number of courses, often based primarily on social or other non-educational criteria). This movement also springs from an increasing awareness of the negative consequences of tracking (the division of a school into different sequences of classes, with students placed into more or less challenging tracks). Educators and communities are seeking routes that retain some student choice in curriculum, while ensuring that all students are prepared to meet high academic standards. Smaller settings enable teachers and students to get to know one another, to coordinate integrated curriculum, and to make decisions as a group.
The most common vision of a small learning community is one that is built around a particular theme. AAI can serve as the underpinnings, or theme, for the reorganization of a school into smaller learning communities. Industries are natural themes. The problem historically has been that industry- or vocationally oriented programs have focused solely on preparing students for work, in effect cutting off their options for college, particularly four-year college. Low academic standards for vocational programs contributed to the problems of tracking. In contrast, a learning community organized around teaching AAI and integrating vocational and academic education can be very effective. As long as the industry is defined broadly enough to encompass career paths that require baccalaureate degrees and those that do not, AAI lends itself naturally to preparation both for work and for further education. Of course, it is not necessary that all learning communities use work-oriented themes. But if the theme is work-oriented, AAI and vocational and academic integration are vital to ensuring high academic quality. Some schools use non-industry themes (such as New York's Peace and Justice Academy and Philadelphia's African-American Studies Charter), either solely or side-by-side with industry themes. On the other hand, some school districts now seek to prepare all students for both work and further education, and there, in particular, AAI is a vital concept.
AAI's relevance is not limited to within the school building, or to schools and workplaces. Larry Rosenstock, Executive Director of the Rindge School of Technical Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, explains,
Teaching all aspects of an industry is not just a pedagogical technique. It has a practical goal as well: To prepare students for an active role in the development of their own communities. Most vocational students come from low-income communities where few high-wage, high-skill jobs are waiting for them. A further challenge to vocational education, then, is to involve students in job creation and the development of local enterprises.