This commentary recently appeared
in The Chronicle of Higher Education (9/10/2012). It is drawn from several chapters
in my new book, Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at
Higher Education.
***
Since the passage
of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education and Technology Act of 1990, there
has been a concerted effort to enrich the vocational curriculum with academic
content. Today there is a new burst of energy around “contextualized learning,”
the attempt to make a particular subject matter more relevant and
comprehensible by teaching it in the context of another subject – for example,
teaching mathematics through fashion or automotive technology. A lot has been
achieved, but I think attempts to integrate the academic with the vocational
curriculum will be limited or subverted unless we address the cultural and
institutional factors that created the academic-vocational divide itself.
For
a very long time in the West, there has been a tendency among intellectual
elites to distinguish between physical work and technical skill – labor, the
mechanical arts, crafts and trades – and deliberative and philosophical
activity, which emerges from leisure, or, at least, from a degree of distance
from the world of work and commerce. The distinction carries with it judgments
about intellectual acuity and virtue. This distinction runs through America’s
cultural history – odd in a country with such a strong orientation toward
practicality. It was evident when Post-Revolutionary War mechanics were
portrayed in editorials as illiterate and incapable of participating in
government, and it contributed to the structure of curriculum tracking in the
twentieth century comprehensive high school.
At
the post- secondary level there is a long- standing tension between liberal
study and professional or occupational education. Is the goal of college to
immerse students in the sciences and humanities for the students’ intellectual
growth and edification or to prepare them for work and public service? With the
increase in occupational majors since the 1960’s, the vocational function is
clearly in ascendance, yet you don’t have to work in a two or four year college
very long to sense the status distinctions among disciplines, with those in the
liberal tradition, those seen as intellectually “pure” pursuits – mathematics,
philosophy – having more symbolic weight than education or business or, to be
sure, the trades.
This
tension plays out when arts and sciences faculty are brought together with
faculty from occupational programs. The way subject areas and disciplines are
organized in school and college leads future faculty to view knowledge in
bounded and status-laden ways. And there is no place in, let’s say, a
historian’s training where she is assisted in talking across disciplines with a
biologist, let alone to a person in medical technology or the construction
trades.
These
separations are powerfully reinforced when people join an institution. The
academic-vocational divide has resulted in separate departments, separate
faculty, separate budgets, separate turf and power dynamics. Now egos and
paychecks enter the mix. These multiple separations lead to all sorts of
political conflicts and self-protective behaviors that work against curricular
integration. And it certainly doesn’t help that efforts at integration are
often framed such that the academic side will bring the intellectual heft to
the vocational courses, a laying on of culture.
If
these conflicts are mild, there are still limits in the way curricular
integration typically proceeds. From what I’ve seen, the work of integration
tends to stay at the technical, structural level: where in carpentry or nursing
is math used, and how can we teach it in that context? This is a reasonable
focus – the specific work that needs to be done. But one could also imagine
discussing the ways carpentry and nursing are mathematical activities. Or how
the math being learned can transfer to other domains. Or how thinking
mathematically opens up a way to understand the world: carpentry and nursing,
but also employment and the economy, social issues, the structure of the
physical environment. There is a tendency to teach mathematics in vocational
settings in the most practical, applied terms, and to locate the further
mathematical topics I raise as the domain of liberal study.
The
academic-vocational divide also leads us to think about vocational students in
limited ways: They are narrowly job-oriented, hands-on, not particularly
intellectual. This characterization is reinforced by loose talk about learning
styles. Now, it is true that a significant number of vocational students did
not have an easy time of it in school and can barely tolerate the standard
lecture and textbook-oriented classroom. It is a grind for them when, in
pursuit of a degree beyond an occupational certificate, they must take general
education courses.
But
dissatisfaction with the standard curriculum does not necessarily indicate a
lack of interest in liberal arts topics. We have countless examples of people,
young and not-so-young, coming alive intellectually when the setting is
changed, from museum-based educational programs to staging Shakespeare in
prison. And the change in curriculum and setting doesn’t have to be that
exceptional. I think of a welding student in his forties, a tough,
goal-oriented guy, who excitedly told me about a field trip for his art history
class, and his amazement and pleasure that he was able to identify
architectural structures by period and knew something about them.
If
we sell our students short, we have done the same with the vocational
curriculum. Despite all that John Dewey tried to teach us, we often
underestimate the rich conceptual content of occupations. One of the powerful
things about contextualized learning is that it forces us to articulate the
conceptual dimensions of the vocational course of study. Likewise, occupations
have a history and sociology and politics that can be examined. And they give
rise to ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical questions: students confront
traditions and standards and have to make decisions about right action; they make
aesthetic judgments; they are moved to reflection about the power of the tools
and processes they use and what deep knowledge will enable them to do; and they
begin to identify with and define themselves by the quality of their work.
As
I noted, faculty on the liberal studies side of the academic-vocational divide
aren’t primed by their training to see all this, and, sadly, vocational
education itself has participated in this restrictive understanding. The
authors of an overview from the National Center for Research in Vocational
Education conclude that historically “[V]ocational teachers emphasized
job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content.”
And as a profession, vocational education has kept from its curriculum the study
of the economics, politics, and sociology of work, further restricting the
education of its students.
The
assumptions about work, intelligence, and achievement that underlie a
curriculum are as important as the content of the curriculum itself. A lot of
historical debris has kept us from bridging the academic- vocational divide –
now is the time to start sweeping it away.
You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader
through the "Share" function located at the top left- hand corner of the
blog.
