My maternal grandfather was a tough guy to impress, particularly about the role and value of education. He was a traditional Italian-American man, with an endless work ethic and had dropped out of formal education after 8th grade in order to work to support his family through the Depression. He had a long career as a bus mechanic for the city of New York and an active side business of fixing the neighborhood’s cars in the garage behind his house in Bayside, Queens, where he could often be found in the late afternoon, evenings and on weekends.
Given his background and experiences, my grandfather did not automatically connect to what I wanted to do with my life and career. The idea of making your living researching, reading and writing was not intuitive or obvious, and my decision to not attend the same college my dad did in Queens did not go over well either. Higher education was distant from his day-to-day reality, and though he and my grandmother supported my educational goals, there was always some skepticism about its value compared to the workplace.
Making a connection
Once when I was in high school, I had nominated one of my teachers for an award, and we had a conversation about it at a Sunday family dinner at my grandparents’ house. “What did your teacher do for you?” my grandfather asked, not one to be impressed by my teachers. “He really helped me to learn how to write,” I responded.
This connected to my grandfather’s experiences. “There was someone who taught me how to fix cars…” he started off and told me about a man who took him under his wing early in his career. People learn to fix cars one on one over many hours in a garage. And the time my grandfather’s mentor had invested in him had paid off. Learning the trade of repairing cars and buses allowed my grandfather out of the category of teenage unskilled laborer to move up to mechanic, and gave him a skill that provided a wage and pension and part-time work up to and into retirement.
Guiding aspiring teachers
I thought about this conversation with my grandfather after a curriculum review of our upcoming degree apprenticeship program for aspiring teachers currently working as paraprofessionals. We had just been through a redesign with the faculty and adjunct instructors of our program, including some shifts in modality, moving as many classes as possible to the later afternoon/early evening, finding instructors interested in the program, and building in student support.
At the core of this new program is an apprenticeship model for aspiring teachers, currently working as paraprofessionals in schools. They will be using activities in the workplace as material for their assignments, and the program will allow them to work full-time for a school district and to maintain a full-time pace toward their degree. In their school building, they will have a mentor assigned to help them make the transition from paraprofessional to teacher, and to help connect classroom learning to real-world practice.
With the help of the Smith Family Foundation, the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, the Parker Foundation and Reach University, we have been building toward the launch of classes in apprenticeship degree starting this June. We will begin recruiting paraprofessionals and other school staff starting this spring, trying to help folks working full-time in schools that they have the potential to become fully licensed teachers.
At a time when public, government and employer support for higher education is wobbling, the idea of the apprenticeship degree has the potential to bring many more people into a positive experience with higher education. While many adults have had poor experiences in secondary and higher education in the past, almost everyone can point to someone at their workplace who helped them learn the ropes and invested in them as a mentor.
A path to something better
Apprenticeship degree programs are designed to help higher education value these learning experiences that take place in the workplace, and to connect these to the classroom and theoretical learning that is the core of our academic programming. As we give more value and respect to the learning that can take place at a workplace, like at a school building, participants are more likely to respect and value higher education, and to see an associate or bachelor’s degree or certificate as an attainable goal.
As we have been signing up paraprofessionals for classes, I have been struck by how full their lives already are – they work full-time at a low-paid job, they bring their children to appointments at the college, their families call and interrupt their advising meetings. But with a program designed for them, and academic support available, they seem ready and eager to tackle the challenges ahead.
Like my grandfather when he was a young man, these paraprofessionals are looking for something better – higher pay, more reasonable hours, not having to work multiple jobs, greater job security. And like him, they need people who are willing to invest in them and to take a chance on their potential.
Even though my grandfather’s apprenticeship experience was almost a century ago, the concept and practice of workplace apprenticeship and mentoring remains resonant and powerful today for a new generation of potential students and points the way toward a more responsive higher education system.
