Johnstone, Douglas B. "College at Work: Partnerships and the Rebuilding of American Competence." The Journal of Higher Education 65 (1994): 168-182.
In the article College at Work: Partnership and the Rebuilding of American Competence, Douglas B Johnstone’s focus is on how we can make critical literacy available for high school graduates who are about to enter the workforce. He believes that “our schools are not preparing students to be effective citizens” (170); to combat this, he argues for work towards literacy, and a rebuilding of our educational paradigm through a corporate and college collaboration so that our students and employees can learn necessary skills while both studying and working. To achieve this, Johnstone, as Dean of SUNY’s Empire College collaborated with NY Telephone to give the new employees of NY Telephone a non traditional college education with the hopes of improving critical literacy skills.
Beginning in January of 1991, NY Telephone and Empire College began a case study “aimed at the development of functional workplace competencies” (173) which would enable employees to work towards a college degree from SUNY Empire College while also working for NY Telephone. After recruiting 100 students from NY City schools, as well as twenty recruits from outside of the company, and 30 from within it (173), the case study began. One of the most important aspects of the study was combining working and going to classes, so students often carried a “light academic load—usually four credits” (175). Seminars students took “drew on students’ actual workday experience for such things as essay writing, for practice in oral communication, for study of stress and how to manage it, and for illustrations of cross-cultural issues” (175). There have been many positive results from this case study: students are passing employment tests, are becoming better sales people, and are actually developing hidden talents; moreover, some are enrolling in advanced degrees.
Evaluation: Not only was this an interesting text, and an interesting case study, the most important aspect of this text was that corporations are actually taking steps to help educate their employees, especially employees who may not have been able to obtain a traditional college degree. A limitation of this text is that the case study does happen to include non-traditional learners, and while the case study does offer a look into possibly changes in educational strategy, it does not look at students enrolled in a traditional 2 year or 4 year college. It would be interesting to see the results now, since this study was conducted over 10 years ago (which may well also be another aspect that deems a limitation), and since it continued even after Johnstone published this piece.
Smith M Cecil, Larry Mikulecky, Michael W. Kibby, Mariam Jean Dreher, Janice A. Dole. “RRQ Snippet: What Will Be the Demands of Literacy in the Workplace in the Next Millennium? Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3. (Jul. - Aug. – Sep., 2000). 378-383.
This snippet offers the opinions of five different academics on what the 21st century will demand from workers. Each of these authors is concerned about literacy in connection to composition studies via the necessity of critical thinking, of good problem solving skills, as well as good analytical skills. By offering a diverse group of opinions, readers are able to glean what may possibly be the more important issues of the millennium, especially in regards to composition and college education. All of the authors are interested in identifying what students will need to learn and what skills they will need in order to perform well in the workforce once they are out of college.
Cecil argues that the demands for the millennium will include technological literacy, effective communication both within the job itself and with clients, as well as “evaluate information for accuracy and validity, apply and produce usable knowledge” (379), and argues that under prepared “persons tend to be poor, of color, immigrants, and those for whom English is a second language” (379), asserting that we need to tend to the needs of these students so as to prepare them for the workforce; for Mikulecky, the millennium will bring about a need for more training in “specialized vocabularies and concepts” (379), and that skill demand will increase for the worker, especially in regard to “top paying” (380) jobs, which she claims will be fewer. Kibby, on the other hand, argues that we will need to become multiliterate so that we can succeed, which “will require accessing numerous knowledge bases” (380). Dreher argues work place demands will require “problem solving” (381), and that “there will be more literacy demands and those demands will be increasingly complex” (381). Finally, Dole emphasizes the expansion of literacy and of critical thinking.
One of the strengths of this article is that it offers 5 concise view points from 5 different academics, and most likely produced much intellectual conversation in response. Reading different view points in one article made the topic rich, and though each response was relatively short, the article offered more than one view point in response to it, and thus showed the subject to be diverse as well as complex. Of course, the shortness of each article could be cited as a shortcoming, and there is the issue that not each one of the snippets offers thoughts on the very same subject. Yet reading it was certainly invaluable as it has now helped me to consider the topic from different angles that I had not previously considered.
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