My mom was a waitress when I was growing up. I watched as her hard work, dedication, and skills were undervalued by customers, employers, and society at large. When I picked up (does it count as picking up on a Kindle?) a copy of the book The Mind at Work by Mike Rose, I felt like it vindicated my mom and people who work as hard as she did with no recognition. The book takes the reader through a host of blue collar professions (including waiting tables) and identifies all of the different skills and intelligences that these workers use on a daily basis. It also showed some of the dangers of making the classroom too cerebral, as students lose the ability to execute a project fully, to work in groups, to engage with their environment on a concrete level, and to respect all people around them that contribute to the economy and society. It also showed how our devaluing of the mental prowess behind some "menial" professions causes us to develop vocational training that is just as mind-numbingly bad as the fact-based education that "more successful" peers receive, stripping it even of the practical value it is supposed to have.
As I have argued before, there is a strong reason to have more practical, hands-on elements to all students' education. For me, this includes a variety of things from languages to the arts to computing to vocational education. As I noted, they improve test scores and higher order thinking (problem solving, creativity, etc.) and strengthen teamwork and community service. In fact, my lack of a shop class left me restless for work to do with my hands, and I am really excited to begin wood-working classes this year to fill this gap in my education. That said, I am excited by two different models that attempt to integrate the vocational with the "intellectual" and at the same time pull student learning outside of the school and into the community.
The first model (video) comes from Emily Pilloton, a designer who relocated to Bertie County, NC, with her husband and was inspired to add new skills and new life to her new community by teaching her craft. Initially, Ms. Pilloton saw the community as a place ripe for her practice, lacking architects and designers. She redesigned spaces within the school (like the computer lab) to make them more dynamic spaces in which the students interacted with one another rather than mindlessly receiving a brain dump. Then she decided to share her talents by creating a unique, hands-on design course in which students learned how to identify a need in their community, practice developing the idea, design a prototype to see if it was viable, and then build something for their community. They were hired using private funds to carry out their projects. The community became the classroom, kids were learning practical skills and earning money, and community members could see the concrete results of what the class was doing. Their first project is reclaiming an abandoned property to create a farmers market. The next two projects are a bus station and a care facility for the elderly. It is nothing short of inspiring, and kids that are not as engaged by classroom learning have really taken to the program.
The second model (pdf) is called the Studio School Trust (html), a form of charters in Great Britain that takes the same concept (video) but makes it the entire educational experience for kids age 14 to 19. Studio schools recognized that so many children don't learn well in an artificial setting and noticed a widening gap between the labor market and education system. The model thus makes a school that operates in concert with local business, teaching children using projects. The schools get kids knee-deep in their learning and teach them CREATE skills (Communication, Relating to people, Enterprise, Applied learning, Thinking, and Emotional intelligence). The schools are committed to making children ready to work without sacrificing their ability to go on to university, should they so desire (something Ms. Pilloton also highlighted about skills in her classes).
Many people may be quite surprised to see me advocating for a class and school system that are effectively charters, given my previous critique of charter schools. I obviously argued very passionately that I think that applying charters on a systemic level is largely unproven to bear fruit and has the effect of segregating kids so that the worst performers and most challenged students are ghettoized. I further find the whole concept uselessly duplicative: why create a parallel, supposedly-better school system when you could just fix the one that already exists? That said, my problem largely comes from how charter advocates have forgotten why charters exist: charters were supposed to be monitored laboratories that generated unique models that could be applied in the public school system (not to create a private system that would destroy public and high-performing private education like Catholic schools). I think these models have it right because they identify a specific set of the population that doesn't do well in traditional schools and offer a program that is tailored to their needs without giving up on their success. Further, success in these models is well-rounded in a way that most vocational schools are not designed to be.
To update my previous opinion: charters are not the problem, policy-makers that have mistaken the bottle for the Robitussin are the problem. It's not the new bottle that makes you better, it is the different type of medicine that suits your particular cold that does. Charters have enormous potential, and I LOVE how they bring the community and big tranches of private money into educating kids who really need our support. That said, they are not systems, and they are not an alternative to reforming the schools that already exist. They should, however, inform how we educate a diverse child population with its diverse educational needs. I think these particular models highlight that the death of shop classes and truly vocational education (not remedial "you are going to fail at life" education) have pioneered something that can be scaled for some kids and that might improve our whole system by adding some hands-on components to more traditional curricula.
As Marge Piercy says in her poem "To Be of Use," "The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real." Our children aren't pitchers to be filled endlessly with facts, isn't it time we gave them work that is real?
As I have argued before, there is a strong reason to have more practical, hands-on elements to all students' education. For me, this includes a variety of things from languages to the arts to computing to vocational education. As I noted, they improve test scores and higher order thinking (problem solving, creativity, etc.) and strengthen teamwork and community service. In fact, my lack of a shop class left me restless for work to do with my hands, and I am really excited to begin wood-working classes this year to fill this gap in my education. That said, I am excited by two different models that attempt to integrate the vocational with the "intellectual" and at the same time pull student learning outside of the school and into the community.
The first model (video) comes from Emily Pilloton, a designer who relocated to Bertie County, NC, with her husband and was inspired to add new skills and new life to her new community by teaching her craft. Initially, Ms. Pilloton saw the community as a place ripe for her practice, lacking architects and designers. She redesigned spaces within the school (like the computer lab) to make them more dynamic spaces in which the students interacted with one another rather than mindlessly receiving a brain dump. Then she decided to share her talents by creating a unique, hands-on design course in which students learned how to identify a need in their community, practice developing the idea, design a prototype to see if it was viable, and then build something for their community. They were hired using private funds to carry out their projects. The community became the classroom, kids were learning practical skills and earning money, and community members could see the concrete results of what the class was doing. Their first project is reclaiming an abandoned property to create a farmers market. The next two projects are a bus station and a care facility for the elderly. It is nothing short of inspiring, and kids that are not as engaged by classroom learning have really taken to the program.
The second model (pdf) is called the Studio School Trust (html), a form of charters in Great Britain that takes the same concept (video) but makes it the entire educational experience for kids age 14 to 19. Studio schools recognized that so many children don't learn well in an artificial setting and noticed a widening gap between the labor market and education system. The model thus makes a school that operates in concert with local business, teaching children using projects. The schools get kids knee-deep in their learning and teach them CREATE skills (Communication, Relating to people, Enterprise, Applied learning, Thinking, and Emotional intelligence). The schools are committed to making children ready to work without sacrificing their ability to go on to university, should they so desire (something Ms. Pilloton also highlighted about skills in her classes).
Many people may be quite surprised to see me advocating for a class and school system that are effectively charters, given my previous critique of charter schools. I obviously argued very passionately that I think that applying charters on a systemic level is largely unproven to bear fruit and has the effect of segregating kids so that the worst performers and most challenged students are ghettoized. I further find the whole concept uselessly duplicative: why create a parallel, supposedly-better school system when you could just fix the one that already exists? That said, my problem largely comes from how charter advocates have forgotten why charters exist: charters were supposed to be monitored laboratories that generated unique models that could be applied in the public school system (not to create a private system that would destroy public and high-performing private education like Catholic schools). I think these models have it right because they identify a specific set of the population that doesn't do well in traditional schools and offer a program that is tailored to their needs without giving up on their success. Further, success in these models is well-rounded in a way that most vocational schools are not designed to be.
To update my previous opinion: charters are not the problem, policy-makers that have mistaken the bottle for the Robitussin are the problem. It's not the new bottle that makes you better, it is the different type of medicine that suits your particular cold that does. Charters have enormous potential, and I LOVE how they bring the community and big tranches of private money into educating kids who really need our support. That said, they are not systems, and they are not an alternative to reforming the schools that already exist. They should, however, inform how we educate a diverse child population with its diverse educational needs. I think these particular models highlight that the death of shop classes and truly vocational education (not remedial "you are going to fail at life" education) have pioneered something that can be scaled for some kids and that might improve our whole system by adding some hands-on components to more traditional curricula.
As Marge Piercy says in her poem "To Be of Use," "The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real." Our children aren't pitchers to be filled endlessly with facts, isn't it time we gave them work that is real?
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