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Technology Is Changing the Way Kids Learn
… And the Classrooms in Which They Do It.

Advertising supplement provided by Paxton / Patterson
By Stephen H. Daniels

Last year, for the third year in a row, U.S. school construction spending exceeded $20 billion—a little more than half of it in new facilities. Nearly 40 percent of the new high schools, and about 10 percent of the new middle schools, included technology labs. Of the nearly $10 billion in renovation of existing schools that was completed in 2002, a significant percentage was for converting existing industrial arts classrooms to technology education facilities.

“The philosophical change from industrial arts to technology education has involved the renaming of programs, the restructuring of courses and changes in facilities,” says Kenneth S. Volk, former assistant professor with East Carolina University’s Department of Business, Vocational and Technical Education, now a senior lecturer with the Hong Kong Institute of Education’s Department of Engineering and Technology Studies.

Between 1970, when the first university renamed and restructured programs from industrial arts to technology education, and 1990, the number of industrial arts teachers graduating from U.S. universities declined by more than 70 percent, according to Volk, and the decline over the past decade has been even more precipitous. Volk predicts the demise of industrial education in the U.S. by year 2005.

Dr. Michael DeMiranda, a Distinguished Technology Educator (DTE) at Colorado State University, says such a prediction is unfounded. “Some form of trade and industrial education will continue,” he says. “We are not replacing anything” DeMiranda says.

 

Toll Middle School, Glendale, CA

“I think that is true,” says another technology education industry source. “Educators are too inertia-bound to eliminate probably 30,000 (industrial arts) programs in the next two years. We have, in fact, seen a resurgence in ‘shops’ in the last year or so” says a supplier.

However, “thirty years ago, in California alone, there were six schools which produced 200 student teachers per year in industrial arts,” says John Waltemeyer, a former industrial arts teacher who today is an educational consultant for a modular education supplier. “Today there is a single school in the state training industrial arts teachers; it produces fewer than 10 graduates a year, and less than half go into teaching,” says Waltemeyer.

High school and middle school administrators and industrial arts teachers interviewed for this article say this trend is apparent: as current industrial arts teachers retire, their shops are closing and being converted to other uses.

In their place, with increasing frequency, are modular learning programs, developed by outside equipment suppliers who once served the industrial arts marketplace. In place of wood shop—often in the same facility that once housed a school’s wood shop—are modular technology classes that engage an increasingly cross-gender student group in such subjects as alternative energy, architectural design, bioengineering, communications technology, construction technology, digital electronics, environmental technology, manufacturing technology, materials science, multimedia production, robotics and automation, and transportation technology.

The modular learning programs come with a new tool set, and facility demands, all their own—wind tunnels, race tracks, stress-testing apparatus for engineering modules, a six-ft.-long apparatus for experiments that teach the principles of magnetic levitation. A construction technology program is accompanied by a four-sided light box that demonstrates the heat transmission values of four different window glass combinations, including a low-e sandwich. Students use the equipment to gain hands-on experience with real-world materials and gain an understanding of real-world alternatives.

Technology education’s hardware and activities have been incorporated into other disciplines. Math and science teachers are now using robotics, CAD and modular hardware typically found in technology education in order to provide concrete applications to their lessons. English classes, now often called “communication,” incorporate video production, desktop publishing, and other “tools” found in technology education’s communication cluster.