High School Internships: Challenges to the Common Wisdom

1. High School Internships:Challenges to the Common Wisdom David Thornton Moore New York University December 10, 2010

2. The Problem • Original mandate: How experiential learning in the school (and related interventions) might have an impact on workforce readiness • Revised: How and under what conditions does experiential education contribute to students’ building what the conference is calling ‘cognitive’ skills, especially as those have a bearing on both college and career readiness?

3. Forms of Experiential Learning • Internships • Service-learning • Cooperative education • Others: • Community-based research • Job shadowing • Career academies • Experience-based career education

4. The Common Wisdom: Claims • Academic reinforcement: • Reading, writing, problem-solving • Skill and career development: • SCANS-like skills • Knowledge of careers, industries, professions • Youth development • Psychosocial maturation, responsibility, teamwork • New modes of thought • Problem-formation, flexible solutions, higher-order thinking

5. Sources of the Approach • Pragmatism: • CS Peirce, William James, John Dewey • Interactionism • GH Mead, Herbert Blumer, Howard Becker • Constructivism • Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner • Activity theory • LS Vygotsky, A. Luria, James Wertsch • Situated cognition, situated learning • Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, JS Brown, Lauren Resnick

6. The Basic Position • People ‘learn’ by participating in communities of practice in which certain kinds of knowledge and skill are deployed in the service of accomplishing certain kinds of collective, meaningful purposes • The nature of thought, knowing, and learning varies according to the features of situations in which they occur • Thinking and learning processes are mediated by history, culture, and tools • Thinking and learning are socialas well as psychologicalprocesses; that is, knowledge-use is stretched across participants in situated activities, not just located inside heads

7. The Radical Challenge • Activity systems think and learn: the construction and use of knowledge happens not just inside brains, but in systems of people, activities and tools • The objective is not to ‘build better students,’ but to create opportunities for students to participate fully in contexts where knowledge is being constructed, distributed and used

8. The Studies • School for External Learning • Big-city high school granting academic credit for work experience • Observed and interviewed 35 students in field placements • Working Knowledge: IEE/Teachers College • Variety of career academies, experience-based high schools, and cooperative education colleges around Northeast • Observed and interviewed 25 students in field placements • Observed school classes where experiences were part of the curriculum • Teaching from Experience • Seven higher-education institutions in New York metro area • Observed and interviewed 12 students doing internships with related classes, both on site and in class, and interviewed six interns not doing related classes

9. Task Analysis Framework • How tasks were • Established • Accomplished • Processed • Features of the work • Socio-cognitive task demands: ‘content’ • Pragmatics: • Centrality and demandedness • Error cost • Prestige or status

10. Environmental Analysis • Features of the activity system • Production process: division of labor (cognitive, physical, social) • Distribution of and access to knowledge • Bernstein: classification and frame • Workplace culture • Features of the larger environment • Market conditions: competition, demand • Regulation: government, labor unions • Technology: pace and nature of change

11. School-Based Elements • What does the school do to • prepare the student for the placement? • process the experience during and after? • connect it to other learning? • Examples of school-based strategies • Pre-field seminars • Matching process • Learning contracts • Journals and writing assignments • Concurrent seminars

12. Case One: History Museum • Student: Heather • Upper-middle class, white, strong grades • Setting: the education department • Flat structure, mostly volunteers (docents) • Culture of learning, fascination with history • Task activity: the class tour • Regular sequence of interactions, each with embedded knowledge and skill, participation structures • Specific incident: ‘doing the artifacts cart’ • Key aspects of learning experience • Access to full participation, authentic role • Scaffolding: gradual removal of supports

13. Case Two: Veterinary Clinic • Student: Fred • Working class, white, small-town • Interested in animals, but a mediocre student • Setting: two-vet animal hospital • Hierarchy: vets, technicians, clerks, intern • Tasks: • For vets and techs: operations, spaying, diagnosis • For Fred: cleaning cages, walking animals, setting up equipment for operations • Factors shaping learning • Strong classification: professional work by vets, support work by staff, marginal (‘pick-up’) work by intern • Framing: culture of deference; error cost; legal regulations, licensing

14. Assessing the Claims: 1 • Academic reinforcement: • Not much school-like knowledge-use • Not much interaction between work-knowledge and school-knowledge • Skills and career development • Some limited skill acquisition, but in specialized form; raises transfer of learning issue • Narrow vision of career and profession

15. Assessing the Claims: 2 • Youth development • Interns did experience responsibility, being ‘treated like an adult’ • New modes of thought • They were often thinking in ways not done in school: more practical, more technical, more team-oriented and collaborative • They did not do much planning, complex problem-solving, problem formulation, higher-order thinking

16. Conclusions • Current practices • Not much better than vocational education or part-time jobs • Not designed to enhance academic learning, prepare students for college • Reasons • Student roles tend to be peripheral, low-level, rarely working toward full participation • Teachers are not trained to process experience, and tend to focus on career preparation • Epistemological gap: knowledge used at work is not easily mapped onto knowledge in school

17. Suggestions • Deep processing: lead students to analyze experiences in more rigorous terms • Organizational behavior, workplace culture • Psychological issues: motivation, satisfaction • Ethics, history, literature • Critical pedagogy: give students opportunity to interrogate their experiences critically • Ask why things are as they are and how things might change • Resist tendency to reproduce class structure • Cf. Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Roger Simon