For more than a half-century, preparing students for work meant sorting out the "sharp" ones from those deemed less able. Students seen as college material took a core curriculum of challenging academic courses in preparation for a professional career. The rest got less academic content and, perhaps, enough vocational training to take a low-skill entry-level job.
This practice is slowly changing, however, with the introduction of efforts called "applied learning" or "applied academics," or, simply, "integration." These are all names for an approach that better integrates the academic material in courses such as English, math, and science with the knowledge and competencies used in actual workplaces. Experts on school-to-work transition say that regardless of the path students take through school, they are more motivated to learn the content when they see how academic skills are used in real workplaces.
As a student, "I always asked: `Why am I learning this?'" says Brett Lovejoy, acting executive director of the American Vocational Association (AVA). "It wasn't until I took carpentry and had to cut the rafters for a house that I knew what the Pythagorean theorem was for." Schools "need to drastically change curriculum to make it more practical and applicable," Lovejoy says.
The idea of linking academic and vocational content has emerged as a key component of the new thinking about how to better prepare students for the world of work. The Perkins Act, the federal government's major program for vocational education, requires schools to integrate academic and vocational content to receive funding under the Act. And some schools are using applications from the workplace to illustrate academic concepts even in classes not populated by students in the vocational "track."
A Focus on Health
At the Oakland Health and Bioscience Academy in Oakland, Calif., a program for students interested in possible careers in the health field, applications of academic concepts are a central feature of the curriculum. In David de Leeuw's anatomy and physiology course, for example, students learn about the human body and how it works through a study of diseases.
In one unit, students study health problems related to particular occupations. Students first interview workers about typical health problems in their occupation. For example, a student interviewing a worker in a frozen foods factory might find that employees, who move items in and out of room-sized freezers, often get respiratory infections. The student then researches the topic and writes a report, using material from the research and the interviews, suggesting what relationship might exist between sudden temperature changes and respiratory infections. Such an activity "helps students see the relevance of their academic classes," says de Leeuw.
Information about occupations and the workplace can be woven into different subject areas. Workplace safety, for example, may seem like a dry topic marginally related to traditional academics. But a curriculum developed as part of the Pennsylvania Youth Apprenticeship Program shows it can be a fertile theme.
In social studies, students read about and discuss the 1911 Triangle Waist Company fire, which killed 146 people trapped in a crowded, unsafe factory. The fire spurred major changes in worker safety laws and had a substantial impact on New York City politics for years to come. In science, students learn the scientific principles behind what firefighters call "lapping in," which happens when fire in one floor of a building shoots out the windows and enters through the windows of the floor above. And in math, students calculate volume in order to see the inadequacy of the regulation that required 250 cubic feet of air space per factory employee. Before the fire, there were no restrictions on where the air space should be. So many factories with high ceilings placed workers elbow to elbow—a condition that kept many employees from escaping the Triangle fire.
A curriculum that links academic and vocationally oriented content is not only more motivating to students, it is better able to accommodate students of different academic standing, de Leeuw believes.
"People sometimes shy away because they feel that the curriculum is too difficult for students," says de Leeuw. "It is more challenging, but kids aren't complaining that it's too hard." Further, the material is appropriate for students on different career pathways. Students who take the course and go on to four-year colleges "feel they're ahead" of their peers from other schools, he says. And students who are academically behind are more motivated because the academics are placed in a real-life context. Students in his course have to learn 160 different terms the first semester, de Leeuw points out, but they keep up. "It's just not true that the kids with `lower' academic skills can't do higher-order thinking and find it satisfying.
A Long Road
Finding links between vocational and academic content "is not hard to do," says Dave Pacolay, a master teacher with the Pittsburgh public schools who has worked on the Pennsylvania apprenticeship plan. But it requires working with partners in business to find out what skills and knowledge are most in demand and then bringing teachers together to develop the curriculum. "Our key constraint is time."
In 1987, the Southern Regional Education Board launched its "High Schools That Work" program, which now encompasses 300 sites in 19 states. A major thrust of the program is linking academic content and applications drawn from the world of work, says Gene Bottoms, who directs the program. As a precursor to greater integration, schools in the program eliminate low-level academic courses, he says. "There's no need to integrate low-level academics and low-level vocational studies."
Schools in the SREB project use a variety of ways to integrate. Some embed academic content in existing vocational courses; others offer new applied learning courses, often using commercially prepared materials. Team teaching, which brings together teachers from the academic and vocational departments, and project learning, where students do projects that require them to integrate academic and occupational content, are also popular strategies. Although integration takes considerable effort and at least five to seven years to institutionalize, the results are positive, Bottoms says. Some schools have increased student enrollments in higher level courses in math and science, for example. One school, he says, went from offering physics every other year to offering five sections per year.
Efforts to integrate academic and vocational content are on the upswing, but they are still relatively rare. The National Assessment of Vocational Education (NAVE), a recent report to the U.S. Congress, noted that "Integrated education as the norm in American high schools is a long way off."
One barrier is that traditional divisions among academic and vocational teachers persist. "Academic teachers are more likely to coordinate courses among themselves than with vocational teachers, and vice versa," according to the NAVE. Much of the pressure to integrate courses has been directed at vocational education, for example, through the Perkins Act, but educators in the academic subjects have not been pushed in a similar fashion, notes Lovejoy of the AVA. In addition, developing and delivering integrated courses requires both time and money. The state of Washington, Lovejoy says, will spend $26 million just to buy time for teachers to plan integrated coursework together. "It boils down to money."
Those offering more integrated courses say such barriers can be overcome. The benefits, moreover, are worth the struggle. Even students who have been unsuccessful academically often thrive when they begin to see connections between what they learn in the classroom and what they may eventually do on the job. "We have honor students fighting to get into this program," says Patricia Clark, director of the Oakland Academy. "Every student is looking for this kind of contextualized learning."
Aviation Program Piques Student Interest
Most children have some idea what they want to be when they grow up. "A doctor." "A sports star." "A firefighter." Their dreams rarely reflect an understanding of what such jobs—and the industries within which they fit—are really like, however. For the most part, these early aspirations are put aside or forgotten, and serious thinking about a career doesn't begin until high school, if then.
Some programs are beginning to educate students about the workplace at a much earlier age, however. When information about industries and occupations is infused in the curriculum, even young students can benefit from a better understanding of careers and how academic skills are used in real jobs.
Aviation 2010, developed by the Regional Airport Authority serving Louisville and Jefferson County, Ky., is a K–12 program with a strong curriculum component directed at young children.
"School-to-work [transition] starts in kindergarten," says Rande Swann, public relations director for the Regional Airport Authority and a former specialist with the Jefferson County public schools. The program has numerous goals, Swann says, among them motivating students to learn the academic skills needed for future aviation jobs and introducing students—especially women and minorities—to career opportunities.
The Aviation 2010 curriculum includes numerous activities that use information on aviation and the airport to buttress instruction in basic academic skills. In one activity, students look at the number of passengers and tons of air cargo carried at a local airfield. The activity requires students to use information in graphs and charts and to hypothesize reasons for increases and declines. In other activities, students build paper airplanes and whirlybirds to learn more about concepts such as lift, drag, thrust, and gravity that are crucial to aviation.
Tangible examples from the world of work can help students become more motivated about—and better understand—academic content, says Susan Rostov, co-developer of the curriculum. "Today, you're competing with TV and video," she says. "You've got to make it relevant."
Swann agrees. Students "want to know: `Why do I have to learn about positive and negative numbers?' If you can say: `This is how you're going to learn it, and here's how to apply it,' kids become more interested." In fact, Swann found that even after students "learned" positive and negative numbers in school, they still struggled with the idea of time zones. How can a westward traveler take a flight that begins at 10:30 a.m. and ends at 10:17 a.m.? So one of the activities in the curriculum puts flight schedules in students' hands and has them plan an itinerary for a band on a nationwide tour.
Business involvement in developing curriculum is sometimes criticized as self-serving, but Swann says Aviation 2010 enjoys solid support in the community. The curriculum was not "laid on" teachers, and the airport authority has been clear about its goals, such as helping to attract students into aviation careers and to educate students about the importance of the airport to the local community. "We've been real up-front about what we've been doing from the beginning," she says. The airport authority is in the midst of a $400-million expansion that will bring new jobs, she says. If efforts to teach students academic skills and the aviation industry don't begin early, "we won't have the workforce we need" to take advantage of the new opportunities, she says.
