Learning Matters: Conferences stress 21st-century education needs
Technology is hot. It’s a buzzword — Tech with a capital T — in our city, school district and across the country. One local business creates maps based on cellphone use, showing just how hot Tech is in the region. It’s highly topical and widely sought.
In K-12 education plans, the letter T stands out among the acronyms: CTE (Career Technical Education), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), STEAM (STEM plus Art). “Technology” in these plans usually refers to information technology and how to incorporate it into instruction.
Parents want their children to learn “the language of coding.” State and federal education and labor agencies offer grants to prepare future employees to fill the skill gaps in our digital-age workforce. Much of that grant money goes to purchasing equipment, as evidenced by the $6-million California Department of Education grant to the Glendale Unified School District and its partners to develop career pathways in digital media and advanced manufacturing.
Students in those pathways are now working with laser printers and gaining experience in computer-assisted design. Student animators and filmmakers are learning their crafts with newer equipment and software.
In Glendale, the city’s Economic Development Corp. is winding up its first Tech Week, which offered panel discussions and other events focusing on start-up companies and computer applications (start-ups and apps), all planned to “offer a fun and inspiring environment to strengthen the innovative ecosystem in and around Glendale,” according to the Tech Week program.
Judging by the crowds on Wednesday — including many young people — hobnobbing on the Alex Theatre forecourt and in the stunningly remodeled and high-tech Masonic Temple office of real estate firm CBRE, Glendale has an appetite for Tech’s entrepreneurial promises.
A lot of young people want to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, superstars of the Tech world.
The appetite for more basic technologies, such as the hammers and wrenches that go with the computerized machines used in building our homes and offices, roads and water systems, is not so robust. The buzz is not so hot, though the need is arguably more urgent.
At a Linked Learning conference I attended last year, employers at the Port of Los Angeles reported that 30% of the port employees would be eligible to retire in 2016. In the next five years, 85% of journeyman electricians could retire, along with 40% of oil refinery workers.
The L.A. Times ran a story (Business, Sept. 2) on the lack of skilled construction workers to build new housing and repair our aging infrastructure. These are all skilled trades with good wages and benefits.
To get a better perspective on career education in these fields, I visited recently with members of the Vessella family, one of Glendale Unified’s premier teaching dynasties. The Vessellas boast three generations of teachers, and they have at least a 20-year history in career-technical education in Glendale.
Tom Vessella Sr. is a retired coach, teacher, and administrator, still active in the community. Tom Vessella Jr. established the Construction Academy at Glendale High School in 1995 and now serves as dean of academic affairs at Pierce College, supervising career-technical education programs.
Teri Vessella joined her brother in the academy when it started and continues teaching English and special education, in collaboration with her sister Betsy Astor, who chairs the special education department and serves as adviser to the Architecture, Construction, and Engineering, or ACE, Club.
The fourth sibling, Eileen, introduces herself as “the one who doesn’t teach,” but she works for an engineering company that sponsors the ACE Club.
Tom Vessella Jr. designed the Construction Academy to function with cohorts of students sharing academic classes related to construction. English classes — taught by Teri Vessella — emphasized technical reading and writing.
Students quickly realized how math — Tom Vessella Jr.’s area of expertise in addition to industrial technology — applied to construction, and they used physics to build bridges and frame buildings. Eventually, Betsy Vessella brought her special education students into the program, providing them an experience of success Tom Vessella Jr. is still gratified to recall.
Though only two of the four teaching Vessellas are still together at Glendale High School, the Construction Academy and the teaching vocation remain “the family business,” and after 20 years, they continue to delight in the successes of their students.
Tom Vessella Jr. recalls the student who, after one year in the Construction Academy, became a top student at Los Angeles Community College’s Trade Tech and went on to a successful career. He quoted the data he’d heard that seven skilled workers support every engineering position.
Betsy Vessella said she was particularly proud of a group of girls who were recruited to the ACE Club, and the college scholarships they received last spring.
Both Teri and Betsy Vessella greet their students as they enter their classrooms, encouraging them in their schoolwork and in their lives. As Betsy Vessella says, “All education is career education.” High Tech or not.
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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of the Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.
