Here is a slightly different version
of a commentary published as “Reframing Career and Technical Education” in Education
Week, May 7, 2014.
***
The English teacher is reviewing a list
of vocabulary words drawn from an essay she assigned to her eleventh graders.
She writes “aesthetics” on the board and invites discussion. After a few
minutes, a boy who is a talented student in the school’s Wood Construction
Academy raises his hand and respectfully submits that the word “doesn’t have
anything to do with us.” This fellow daily engages in woodworking activities
that have an aesthetic dimension to them—in some cases tasks that centrally
involve aesthetic judgment—yet sees no connection between the concept as
discussed in his English class and his artful work on a table or cabinet.
I witnessed or heard of a disturbing
number of moments like this when I was doing the research for The Mind at
Work, a study of the often unacknowledged cognitive demands of physical
work and the effects this lack of appreciation has on education, work, and
civic life. Our nation’s egalitarian ethos notwithstanding, there is a tendency
in our culture to diminish the intelligence of those who do manual work, from
negative editorial characterizations of nineteenth century laborers to contemporary
autoworkers I heard labeled by one supervisor as “a bunch of dummies.” This
tendency is amped up in our high-tech era, as anything associated with the “old
economy”—from manufacturing to restaurant service—is glibly labeled as
“neck-down” work.
Young people who are interested in
working with their hands grow up amidst these commonplace beliefs and
utterances, and even in a post-curriculum tracking world, pick up the biases of
occupational status in school. At a key developmental juncture, students have
to form their sense of self and their conception of their ability within a web
of attitudes that diminish the potential richness of work, that lead a
promising woodworker to think that nothing he does involves aesthetics.
This situation might change as
computer technology and design are incorporated into some areas of Career and
Technical Education (or CTE). And there is increased interest at the policy
level to get more young people into trades and mid-level technical occupations,
with a favorable push by the President and his Department of Education toward
community college certification and degrees. But virtually all the policy talk about
Career and Technical Education in briefs, opinion pieces, and speeches is strictly
functional and economic: This training will lead to good jobs. You will be hard
pressed to find a sentence in all this discourse that addresses intellectual or
social growth, or civic participation, or aesthetic judgment, or the involvement
in a craft tradition and the ethical stance toward work that tradition can
yield.
If we are serious about improving Career
and Technical Education and creating more and better pathways into the world of
work, then we need to think hard about the deeply ingrained attitudes we have
about certain kinds of work, and the public language that issues from those
attitudes.
During one of my visits to high school
occupational programs, I spent several weeks with a plumbing instructor who had
his students doing volunteer work on old houses—low-income projects, women’s shelters—for
old houses present a host of plumbing and construction challenges. Students
will encounter previous generations of fixtures and layer on layer of repairs.
The teacher and his junior crew replaced sinks and toilets and did a variety of
repairs that called for troubleshooting and problem solving. The teacher spent
much of his time hovering over his students, peppering them with questions,
having them explain what they were doing and why, and probing the logic of what
they said.
After a long day when I was checking in
with him about what I had seen, he began talking about the mental “library” of
mechanical knowledge his students were developing, a library of devices and
fixtures, how they’re constructed, and how to work with them.
I couldn’t get the teacher’s use of the
word “library” out of my mind. It’s not a word you hear used in conjunction
with plumbing, yet it fit. The library metaphor suggests that the knowledge
these young people are developing is cognitively substantial, emerges out of a
tradition, and matters to society. Our culture deems it worthy of study.
From the Renaissance through the nineteenth
century, mechanics and engineers developed a variety of picture books and
charts that classified and illustrated basic mechanisms and mechanical
movements: gear assemblies, for example, or ratchets, or levers and pulleys.
These books and charts had names relevant to the present discussion: a
“Mechanical Alphabet,” for example, or “Theaters of Machines.” As we continue
to try to improve Career and Technical Education, we need to push our thinking
by considering CTE in the unfamiliar but generative terms of libraries and
alphabets, aesthetics and ethical traditions—for those terms reveal the kinds
and range of knowledge inherent in work.
I’m not simply asking for rhetorical
flourish; a change in language alone would simply be a semantic do-over. I’m seeking
a way to unsettle the limited ways we typically describe the substance and
goals of CTE, limitations that reflect our biases about physical work. My hope
is that such a shift in understanding would affect the way we teach students in
CTE, how we talk to them and about them, and the policy discourse we use to
define what they do.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment