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CREW encourages the participation of faculty, staff, and graduate students. We hope to promote new collaborative undertakings, starting with individual members' existing interests. Initial discussions have already revealed hitherto undiscovered intellectual connections. Our excitement about CREW arose from the interplay of ideas among people who have been considering similar issues from different points of view.
CREW PEOPLEThe following faculty members were instrumental in the formation of CREW. This series of statements, in their own words, illustrates the collective thinking of CREW members more accurately than a synthetic statement by one person could. Presenting these statements therefore demonstrates our understanding that CREW will belong to everyone who participates in it, and will not be controlled by one or two individuals. It also substantiates the claim that the School of Education already contains a powerful latent group of researchers in this area, who have lacked an organizational vehicle for collaboration. The listing that follows is in alphabetical order.
Norton Grubb is one of the country's leading authorities on the relationship between school and work. He has played a central role in the National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE), through which he has articulated models for integrating academic and vocational curriculum; has produced definitive studies on the effects of occupational programs in community colleges; and has described the connections and conflicts among various parts of the education and training system. He would like CREW to explore how learning related to work occurs in several different contexts including schools and colleges, job training, informal community settings, and work itself.
Rogers Hall has been conducting innovative studies about how people solve problems at work, in particular problems related to design. He views research on education and work as important because calls for reorganizing education usually rest, in part, on the idea that we need to prepare students for various kinds of work, and, at the same time, there is reason to believe that people learn much of what they will do in the workplace when they enter a new area of employment or change jobs within the same area of employment. But past research has started from a traditional, information-processing model of human thinking, and has generally approached human activity in the workplace as an inventory of skills. Much the same has been true in studies of problem solving, inference, learning and the like in schools. He would like CREW to help overcome the limitations of past research, by combining ethnographic and micro-interactional approaches to questions of doing, learning, and teaching in selected areas of work and schooling. Such studies can form the basis for a more powerful theory of competence in both work and school.
Glynda Hull has been producing influential research on the literacy requirements of work in traditionally organized and high-performance workplaces. Her studies of circuit board assembly in the Silicon Valley from a socio-cultural perspective are yielding detailed analyses of the reading and writing activities that are increasingly expected of frontline immigrant workers, as well as accounts of the tensions and contradictions that attend changes in work culture. She sees CREW as an opportunity for participating faculty and students to exchange insights about learning and work from different theoretical and methodological perspectives.
Jean Lave is famous for her socio-cultural theories of learning. She maintains that relations of labor and learning are crucial to the conception of either one, and have been for a very long time. Her research on craft apprenticeship in West Africa has led in some interesting directions with respect to relations between learning and labor: towards questions about the nature of labor and learning in industrial settings and connections to labor process sociology; towards questions about the nature of labor and learning in science laboratories and connections to Science, Technology, Society studies; to conceptions of labor embedded in theories of learning and thus to critiques and reformulation of social perspectives on learning; to the nature of labor and learning of national identities in a diasporic enclave of British port wine exporters in Porto, Portugal and to historical, political dimensions of labor, learning and practices of identity. She views CREW as a vehicle for pursuing issues related to work over the life cycle; the influence of race and ethnicity; critical research on corporate education; and the unequal power of teachers and learners.
Michael Ranney has been working on the Theory of Explanatory Coherence. In this framework, he has used a connectionist computer model to simulate and predict the belief evaluations of various people. A recent software interface called Convince Me, a kind of "reasoner's workbench," allows a user to explicate arguments about a difficult quandary, and provides feedback on both the coherence of the argument and the plausibility of the considered beliefs. This system's software-plus-curriculum is as applicable to work decisions (e.g., whether to move a corporate headquarters, or how to remedy a persistent defect on a manufacturing line) as it is to the sorts of scientific reasoning for which Convince Me was originally designed. In addition, teaching his course, "Getting Your Doctorate and Getting a Good Job" (ED 290C), has increased his interest in issues of the workplace and how people regard their employment situations. He sees CREW as a place to elaborate the connections of his research and teaching to work settings.
Alan Schoenfeld is renowned for his research on mathematical problem solving. He would like to investigate the question of defining and cultivating competence more generally, and in particular at work. How much of competence at work is general (communication skills, etc.), how much is specific to domains (reading a radar screen), how much is functionally embedded in communal practices, etc.? To understand how learning occurs through problem solving at work would entail finding out what skills the individual brings to the task, what challenges the task presents to the individual, what adaptations the person makes, how long-lasting the learning (new adaptability or knowledge) is, and what else it applies to. Working through these questions would be part of the research agenda for CREW.
Harley Shaiken does research in two work-related areas: the division of labor in the global economy and new way of organizing work. His research on the new international division of labor indicates that schooling and training are central factors in determining the location of advanced manufacturing and the definition of comparative advantage in the global economy. His research on high performance work organization looks at the nature, impact, benefits, and problems of organizing work in new ways and the relation of schooling and training to the structure of the workplace.
Carol Stack was approached five years ago to undertake a study of why so many inner-city youth have abandoned the labor force. Her initial response was contrarian: Do we know anything about inner-city youth who are in the labor force nowadays? In particular, what do we know about the kids who are working at, say, minimum-wage fast-food jobs, where teenagers are typically employed? What motivates these young people to toil for low pay, when so many of their friends and neighbors are giving up on paid work and investing their energies in illegal enterprise? Where did their work ethic come from, and where might it take them? Are they the good kids of the ghetto, spurning the temptations of the street, or are they life's losers, cycling forever in and out of the same lousy jobs? What does their experience teach about aspiration and possibility? Does their work build character? She has explored these questions in an ethnographic study of youth employed in fast-food jobs. For her, discussions with CREW colleagues would stimulate reflection on the meaning of work in the lives of these young people, as well as other groups.
Richard Sterling, as Director of the National Writing Project, has contact with English teachers affiliated with 160 local centers throughout the country. He perceives a major crisis for these teachers arising from the lack of any coherent strategy for dealing with students who are not intending to go directly to college. Without subjugating education to the merely utilitarian purpose of preparation for work, Sterling would like CREW to provide information that teachers need about education and work, and involve teachers in the research.
David Stern has studied the relationship between education and work from serveral angles. He has done research on "career academies" and other innovative high school curricula designed to prepare students both for college and for careers. He has also studied the effects of part-time work on students' performance in school and subsequent success in the labor market, and he has conducted case studies of companies that have been making deliberate efforts to engineer learning into the work process. He has been a involved in NCRVE since 1988, and has served as Director since 1995. His main desire for CREW is to advance theory and research on work as an educative process, by bringing together cognitive, socio-cultural, organizational, and economic perspectives.
Mark Wilson is an authority on measurement of educational outcomes and processes. He is interested in how generalizable knowledge accumulates for individuals through the work process. An important strategy in getting to grips with this idea will be to engage in a an interactive debate and investigation of the relationship between the idea of generalizable knowledge and its measurement. He hopes that CREW could provide some support and framework for such work. Especially important in its initial phases would be the development of relationships with researchers who are doing the cutting-edge development of the concept.