Tag: Vocational Education

Curriculum Integration and the Political and Moral Purposes of Schooling

The movements to reinforce the occupational content of high schools, from of the turn of the century to the present, have all tended to reinforce a particularly utilitarian conception of education. The school reform movements since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) have similarly been driven by economic concerns, with employers clamoring for a better trained workforce while policymakers worry about reforming schools to improve the nation’s competitiveness. Occasionally, commission reports over the past decade have reminded us of the importance of political education. For example, A Nation at Risk repeated Thomas Jefferson’s dictum:

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion. (p. 7)

However, such comments have largely been afterthoughts, and the political and moral aspects of education—the central purpose of the public when they were established in the nineteenth century—have been by most reformers and policymakers.

Current efforts to integrate academic and vocational education have generally followed the same path. The academic subjects included in integration have been those that are the most necessary to occupations: math, reading and writing for comprehension (“communication skills”), biology and chemistry for the health fields, and electronics and physics for technical occupations. The curricula associated most closely with political and moral education—literature, government or civics, history, and social studies or the social sciences—have almost never been included. This tends to justify one potential objection to these efforts: that they intend, like career education 20 years ago, to turn high schools into wholly vocational institutions with no commitment to the political development of students, no place for students to acquire the capacity to be socially critical (including the ability to evaluate the limits of existing occupations and of American capitalism generally), and no place for the exploration of values and sensibilities that goes hand in hand with the humanities.

Yet this need not be true. Occupations, understood in their broadest sense, provide ways to approach virtually any subject, as John Dewey argued when he advocated education through occupations. Occupations can provide contexts for understanding the importance of history or civics; they offer ways to make relevant to present life, and to adolescent dilemmas, those disciplines that students often find irrelevant and arcane. An occupational focus also provides a way of balancing the emphasis within history and civics on political issues—an understandable legacy of the nineteenth-century concern with preparing individuals for life in a democracy—with a greater appreciation of economic problems and roles. Following are some ways of incorporating literature, history, and social studies into programs that integrate academic and occupational education.¹

THE LITERATURE OF WORK

In efforts to incorporate material from the English curriculum into vocational programs, the emphasis so far has been on “communication skills.” For example, the Applied Communication sequence produced by the Agency for Instructional Technology (1988) emphasizes reading for comprehension (as one might read a technical or instructional manual), writing in such “practical” forms as resumes and business letters, aural comprehension (following directions), and speaking abilities (speaking with supervisors, co-workers, or clients). The literary side of conventional English curricula has been largely neglected, though there have been a few attempts to identify literary works suitable for a “literature component” in applied communication courses.² However, the potential for incorporating literature describing work, its special complexities and relationships, the tensions between life at work and life in other spheres, and changing attitudes toward work has been little explored.³

WHY STUDY LITERATURE ABOUT WORK?

Reading literature is an excellent w ay to develop critical thinking. It is also a powerful means for learning about character and values, showing, for instance, the difference between ambition and greed, loyalty and servitude, liberty and license. Literature has the power to capture the intensity of experience—as with romance, or pain, or work—and can thus conjure powerful scenes and feelings. And perhaps more than any other mode of expression, it pulls the reader in, confronts basic assumptions, and then leaves the reader to work out his or her own solutions. Accordingly, reading literature permits the student into the lives and work of other individuals and to observe representative and relevant experiences that are otherwise inaccessible.

Most people will spend much of their lives as workers. Over 30 % of the average person’s normal waking experience is related to work outside the home. Events at work encompass the full range of human emotion—courage, honor, loyalty, ambition, fear, love, pain, and greed. Through these emotions, people derive differing degrees of satisfaction from work. Some have to drag themselves daily to a dull, meaningless job, while others receive from work some of the most exhilarating experiences life offers. Because of unemployment, work is often unequally distributed, and perhaps meaningful work even more so. However, whether one likes work or not, an individual’s identity is often tied to the work one does.

The literature of work is also concerned with acting within the human community. Through this literature, one can examine work life and the emotions it stirs from another person’s point of view and learn to take responsibility for one’s own work: “Literature plays an important part in developing awareness of the commonness of the human drama. What an impact a work has when the reader finds in it a fellow sufferer, one who obviously knows ‘what it is like’!” (Burton, 1970, p. 10). Success at work is usually built through effort, and often the greatest success comes witheffectively working with others. Studying the literature of work can provide new insights into what is significant about human life, the ability to empathize with others through the development of an understanding of human needs and problems (Coles, 1989, p. 120).

Studying the literature of work offers other important advantages Because of the major role of work in daily life, it is important to understand its function in society, and the individual’s relationship to it. By reading about work one can also learn about historical events from a perspective that differs from the “great men / great events” focus usually found in social studies textbooks—whether the events be the rise of the factory system in New England, the struggles of the ”Okies” during the Great Depression, or the development of corporate business culture in post-World War II America. Through literature, for example, one can gain new insights into labor conditions, the rise of unions and other social and political movements, as well as the background of work-related legislative acts for which work literature itself has sometimes served as a catalyst (Holt, 1989). For the large and increasing portion of the labor force who are not only workers but also women and mothers, usually with special familial responsibilities, literature can serve as a way of exploring the relation between work and family life, the sense of meaning in work that women have come to find, together with the special conflicts they experience. Literature also affords the opportunity to gain a greater appreciation of the contributions, struggles, and feelings of individual working people who have built this world, from homemakers to space—age technologists, from blue-collar workers to middle managers, from street messengers and peasants to corporate executives. Few of us will end up being one of the great “movers and shakers” profiled in conventional histories, but we will nearly all be workers.

Work-related literature thus operates like a mirror that reflects historical material, and also like a microscope that examines it in detail. It not only presents an author ’s point of view at a moment in history (as exemplified in Upton Sinclair’s criticism of slaughterhouse conditions in The Jungle, and Sinclair Lewis’s insight into American business in Babbitt), but it also analyzes as a case study the events occurring around the moment, as well as the actions of individuals whom the author posits as. representative of the time. This literature, furthermore, ”… contributes to the social vision and moral development in the growth of sensibility and exercise of imaginative alternatives” (Nelms & Nelms, 1988, p. 214). Readers of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, for instance, discover a number of economic and social obstacles to the formation of workers’ unions as they read about the struggle of the load family to find a place to live and work in California during the Dust Bowl era. As Rosenblatt (1983) stated, what is

particularly important is [the] discovery that various groups within our society hold up diverse images of success, and that there are kinds of work   despised or ignored by [one’s] own group that others considered socially valuable … the craftsmen, the technologists, the artists, the scientists, the scholars offer personal goals and systems of value often strongly in contrast to those represented by the dominant image of the successful businessman. (p. 194)

The literature of work articulates the lives of men and women who run the machines, plow the fields, sign the contracts, sew the clothes, work the assembly lines, and sit in offices. It can be enjoyable and informative, thought-provoking, and perhaps even unsettling. Some novels and stories focus on the laudable side of work, while others criticize or satirize the more unpleasant or burdensome aspects—Upton Sinclair’s The jungle, joseph Heller’s Good as Gold, and a larger literature exploring the oppressiveness of the modern corporation—thereby capturing the full range of experience surrounding work. Certain pieces of work literature represent efforts to defy What they see as a conspiracy on the part of business and government to dehumanize individuals or to characterize businesspeople as Babbitts or unlettered philistines. Others attempt to right a perceived prejudice against labor and labor leaders. Some contemporary critics hold that “literature …  serves a purpose. It can integrate the reader into culture, inviting him to define himself against a background of cultural expectations and to modify that background” (Probst, 1988, p. 249). When seen in this light, the literature of work can aid in the transition from academic to work life by encouraging a more total human development, raising the stakes of the individual’s interest in the curriculum material presented.

Lastly, through reading the literature of work, it is possible to capture the romance and human drama of the work and business worlds—the good and bad, the excitement and boredom, and the nobility and rascality. In these creations, dry economic theories are given flesh and blood explorations and interpretations.

There are, to be sure, utilitarian reasons for reading work-related literature. Businesses often complain that their workers are not able to read and communicate at appropriate levels, and that they lack the requisite higher-order capacities. By studying literature, students can gain new insights into work habits, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and problem solving—skills that business leaders consider just as important as technical abilities. Literature can, furthermore, help develop a stronger corporate citizenship by promoting a sensitivity to the needs and desires of others in a work setting, and a sensitivity to the problems within a work setting. One business Instructor teaching a course called Wisdom for the Workplace, used literature, together with case studies from business, to “teach students that the wisdom of Great writers from the past is still pertinent to the solving of contemporary job-related problems.” This instructor described the process as follows:

I have also discovered why my business-career students generally falter When faced with complex problems in their business or technical core courses, especially those that deal with human issues. The juxtaposition between the humanities—which always ask questions about life, happiness, and freedom—and the courses that fill their career programs (always focusing on the absorption of accepted processes or pragmatic applications) is so strong. [My course] is a wild mix that asks students to question first, and then to justify their opinions convincingly, rather than to simply accept (Smith, 1990)⁴

The use of literature as an approach to problem solving may strike some—particularly some traditional English teachers—as overly utilitarian in this sense, but it is also a way of allowing students to view the world from radically different perspectives.

THE ADOLESCENT AND WORK LITERATURE

Critics have pointed out that the typical secondary school English literature curriculum lacks appeal to many students (Probst, 1988, p. 114). Must such curricula utilize a majority of works from the classic canon. Junior and senior high school literature programs are still often organized historically and not thematically. In contrast, high school years are a time of orienting oneself to the central goals and purposes of one’s life. An adolescent “is concerned about relations with peers the gradual assumption of responsibilities. He wants to understand work, love, hate, death, vengeance” (Probst, 1988, p. 4). Hence, a literature curriculum that does not include a substantial number of selections that relate directly to work may be less interesting and relevant to students.

In view of the increase over the past two decades in the number of high school students who also are working, it is rare to find students today who have not had at least a summer job, or done baby-sitting, or chores for pay. Their own experience, in turn, makes them keen observers of the work world around them: “Students are simultaneously observers, beneficiaries, victims of their parents’ work lives, continually assessing the merits and drawbacks of their work choices, their moods after a work day” (Hoffman, 1990, p. 56). Most are eager to recount their own experiences with bosses or customers. For adolescent students, jobs are boring, exciting, oppressive, heroic, difficult, and satisfying. They can already begin to realize that Work can transform lives by imbuing them with significance and meaning—or conversely, that work can be “a drag.”

Moreover, high school students are often already preoccupied with their own work futures, but are pressured by adults and peers to declare future professions based on woefully inadequate information—few have a sense of the day-to-day experiences that lie behind even the most familiar jobs (Hoffman, 1990, p. 55). And many lack realistic views about what the future will hold for them: “Most secondary students will not become professional literary scholars they will more likely drive cabs, wait on tables, sell real estate, [or] work in an office” (Probst, 1988, p. 3). Adolescents are developing independence from parents and other authority figures. They are struggling with the almost universal concerns of growing up and of accepting adult roles. Reading literature can provide an opportunity for adolescents to exercise independent response and critical judgment. Work literature often deals seriously with these recurring themes.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM

Students in both general and vocational tracks often are assigned less literature in school than are students in the academic track (Ravitch & Finn, 1987, p. 171). Perhaps it is time not only to reverse that trend, but also to enrich the spectrum of what students in all classes read with choices ranging from works that concentrate on personal life to those that relate the experience of the individual at work and in other social contexts In some states, students are ”expected to read provocative works” (California State Department of Education, 1987, p. 8). These could include works giving a more balanced view of relations between labor and labor leaders and businesspeople—perhaps striking a responsive chord in students by offering substance that relates to what they have experienced and will experience—to keep interest alive (Probst, 1988, p. 5).

As already mentioned, there are few examples of curriculum material designed to teach the literature of work. One purpose of such material would be to provide another perspective about work and its consequences—since the conventional approach in high school has been to stress the skills and knowledge necessary for work but not otherwise to explore what working means in an individual’s life. Through such material, students would explore and analyze attitudes toward work and learn to appreciate what is significant about this important part of human life. Another purpose would be to lead students back into literature; for the large number of students who view literature as a chore, or who think of reading in purely utilitarian terms, it might be possible to use literature about work to move from purely informational uses of reading to more literary concerns. In this way, students could become more competent in the interpretation of literature and in the understanding of other symbolic expressions and, thereby, develop their abilities to communicate about basic human experiences such as work. Finally, another purpose of such material would be to allow students to analyze a significant component of human life—work—and to understand that no single interpretation of it (as either insignificant or all-important, as viewed from a capitalist or a labor-union standpoint, and so on) is sufficient.

How does one approach the literature of work in the classroom? One of the first steps is to identify the literary works suitable for the classroom. Because there are few resources, teachers may have to develop their own plans using books, bibliographies, and other materials at hand. In the realm of fiction, Koziol (1992) has compiled an annotated bibliography of nearly two hundred works written in English or available in translation that teachers can use to help students at the secondary and college levels to think critically about the world of work. The bibliography also includes references for teaching resources about work that can provide a background for discussion of an author’s insights on the work setting. The fiction in this bibliography is primarily about work and the major characters’ reactions to it. There are, however, several selections in the list, some considered part of the “canon,” where the main story does not directly concern work, but in which work does figure prominently in one chapter or section. The paint factory chapters of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and the introductory chapter, “The Custom House,” of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter are two examples.

As for the actual incorporation of this material into the classroom, one possibility is simply to include examples of this literature among the types of literature to be studied, or among the themes to be examined, which already exist in the curriculum. The following provides some brief illustrations of how this could be done.

Example I

The short poem “Relief Locations Managers” by Herbert Scott (1976, p. 38) could be used, along with other more traditional pieces, in a class on free verse, or in one exploring human relationships.

Relief is everywhere
at once. He’s on his way
up. When he works the front,
the register jumps
under his fingers,
groceries flashing past
like landscape,
his arms almost
screaming with motion.
If he comes to help you
in your section, you know
you’re moving too slow.
You go home ashamed
of your thick clumsy hands.
Relief’s bucking for manager
in a new store. You hope
he’ll make it.

After the class reads the poem, the teacher could then stimulate discussion about type of poem, its structure, and its general meaning. Next, the teacher could assign activities based on the piece in which students discuss their reactions to the poem as a piece of literature about work.

1. In small groups, exchange anecdotes about times you or someone else has not followed directions or made mistakes on a job. How did you feel about your errors? How did your boss or co-workers react? How would you react if you were them?

2. With the members of your group, compose a set of directions or guidelines to help fellow workers avoid making the same mistakes.

Unlike the usual questions about literature, which focus on facts of plot and character, these questions are designed to move students toward a consideration of both personal experiences and their implications for others.

Example ll

Students would be assigned a reading of John Updike’s ”A & P,” a short Story about a checkout person who quits his job to make a point. Then they Can be asked the following questions, which again move beyond questions Of plot to those of interpretation and meaning within work contexts:

1. Skim the story to identify the four male A & P employee characters and scan to locate details about these characters and the reaction of each to the young female customers.

2. Why did Sammy quit his job at the A & P?

3. Discuss the meaning of one character’s statement to Sammy: ”You Don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad.”

4. Speculate on Sammy’s final comment: ”… my stomach kind of fell As I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Have you experienced something similar?

Another possibility for incorporating this material into the classroom would be to structure a class directly around the theme of work and its many facets—personal, social, and economic. For example, when studying a great work like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, students could explore the whole of the work instead of merely concentrating on the major theme—the obsession for revenge against a perceived evil. They could examine the historic and economic background of the whaling industry, the methods used in recruiting a crew, and the details of the search for whales, and then discuss how all this fits into the plot and major theme. Another focus could be on worker relations: what would it have been like to work on a whaling ship: the cramped living conditions; living, working, and eating with all different types of people; relations with co-workers and supervisors. Melville, after all, conceived of his work as a whole, not merely as story of a man revenging himself against a whale.

In dealing with Melville’s novel and with the works of other authors, instructors should require students to look critically at the World of work that is presented—to examine and pose questions about the nature and politics of work, its necessity, its rewards, and its pitfalls. The biographical interviews of working people in Studs Terkel’s Working, for instance, could be read to bring out these motifs: money versus meaning in the choice of work; the impulse to leave a lasting mark on the world; the unjust stereo- types with which most jobs are weighted. Students could then be asked to write about their own visions of their personal work futures. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the author at first presents a rather sympathetic view of an uprising of the animals against a farmer who exploits them so that he can gain the maximum profit. However, students learn further on in the work that applications of the socialist-like society the animals themselves devise are also difficult.

An entire curriculum could also center on the general theme of work. For example, a one-semester course focusing on literature and labor could include works of fiction such as: The Factory Girl by Sarah Savage, the earliest American novel with a working person as the main character; Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, a story in which workers react to the introduction of machinery; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposes the abuses of workers in the meat—packing industry in Chicago and the struggle of organized labor therein; Anthony Bimba’s Molly Maguires, about a coal miner’s strike for better conditions; and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. There are also biographies available for classroom use that deal with the lives of labor leaders, such as ]ohn L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers, “Mother” Jones, and Caesar Chavez. These all provide excellent opportunities for creative writing, allowing students to explore the biographical form, or work histories of people they know, or their own work lives.

In the category of the most comprehensive approaches to integration, it is possible to develop courses that incorporate literature, vocational studies and other elements of the school curriculum in an all-encompassing fashion. One such course was created at Mastbaum Vocational—Technical School in Kensington, Maryland. There, a class in Shakespeare was transformed into an investigation of the aspects of Elizabethan life and culture that were relevant to the students’ vocational studies. Students came up with projects in carpentry, food science, home economics, cosmetology, and drafting adopted from what they had learned from the literature and history of the age.

In all of these alternatives, attention can be given to open discussion about the merits and demerits of each author’s interpretation of the work reality, about the author’s views of his contemporaries, and about the contribution of historical insight to understanding the views presented in the selections. Students should learn to be critical of a Babbitt, for example, but also be able to see what positive lessons for work and for life (for example, the importance of integrity in business dealings) can be drawn from that piece of literature. While reading Death of a Salesman, students can focus on the many ways that author Arthur Miller demonstrates Willy’s alienation from his family, his job, and society as a whole. They can examine why Willy cannot comprehend Biff ’s rebellion against rigidly prescribed modes of behavior and the hierarchy of the business world, and why, for Willy, there is no other way of living.

Authors writing about work and the lives of real people often use a realistic style. Work literature often contains language culled from the work experience, which may at times be quite raw and explicit (Hoffman, 1990, p. 55). Two prime examples of this frank expression and approach are Studs Terkel’s candid interviews of ordinary workers in Working, and the graphic descriptions of a coal miner’s life and family in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Discussion of this type of literature could focus on the living and working conditions of the characters, and on the traits that enable them to endure adversity and to relish personal triumphs.

Finally, literature about work provides opportunities—as does literature in general—for examining a number of themes connected to multicultural perspectives in the curriculum: the particular conditions of women at work, the special experiences of African Americans and Hispanics, the conflicts between historical and “modern” patterns of work among Native Americans, and so on. (For a partial listing of some appropriate literature, see Koziol, 1992) Within this large area, there is room for stressing both the similarities and differences that exist between the general experience and the experiences of particular groups: for example, differences that include the experience of particular groups with discrimination in employment, relegation to menial work or to ”woman’s work,” and conflict between different cultures and their approaches to work; and similarities in the realm of what all workers must face (both the joys and pains of work), the ambitions of twentieth century Americans for progress through work, and the disappointments connected with ambitions that are limited by conditions beyond our control.

Of course, it is unnecessary, and probably inappropriate, to choose one Type of literature over another. The literature of work need not be used to The exclusion of all other kinds of literature. Instead, instructors can find a better balance, correcting the pervasive neglect of work-related themes in the high school that restricts the range of issues that students can explore through literature. Given the richness of the literature about work, a greater variety of reading material provides one way of allowing all students to explore the work-related issues they will confront, while at the same time preventing the potential excesses of applied and overly utilitarian approaches to reading and writing that can exist in academies, clusters, and magnet schools with an occupational focus.

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© 1995, Kenneth Koziol. All rights reserved.