Are We Compromising Safety in the Preparation of Technology Education Teachers?

Abstract

As our curriculum has evolved over the 40 plus years that I have been invested in technology education (formerly industrial arts education), I have observed with interest the various changes that have occurred. I entered industrial arts (IA) as a junior high school student in a mixed woods and metals class in the early 1960’s. My school experience was almost entirely an unhappy one save for my “shop” class. Yes, even though leaders in the field of IA had already begun encouraging the abandonment of the word “shop” in favor of the more academic sounding “laboratory,” we kids called it “shop.” And, we knew what the class was about too. From our perspective, shop was about “makin’ things.” In hindsight, as a professor with a Ph.D., I now know that the goals of my teachers and the classes that they taught little resembled “makin’ things in shop”—rather, the projects and other activities were both the sugar to make the medicine go down and the learning activities that transmitted information and skills more effectively than mere lectures and reading. I still have the chessboard, candy dish, lathe turned bowl, carved salad servers, model cannon, tool tray, and (the ubiquitous) lamp that I made in my two junior high shop classes. What’s more important, I have a great deal of knowledge and skills that I can apply to many problem solving situations which neither I nor my teachers could have envisioned back then. And I know how to be safe in a lab and safely use equipment. In high school I took one year of drafting and three additional years of Woodshop (by that name). The solid cherry drop-lid desk (secretary) that I built in advanced woods was the one thing that kept me from dropping out of high school and eventually led me to both a scholarship and a career as an alternative to the petty criminal track that I had already begun to enter. When I accepted the scholarship to become a shop teacher and entered the nearby college to receive the education, I was exposed to new ideas. The professors ____________________