Alan Phelps

Alan Phelps, director of the Center on Education and Work, and professor of educational administration and vocational education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, talks about tech prep staff development initiatives featuring summer internships in business and industry. Excerpted from NCREL's Rural Audio Journal (Vol. 2, No. 3), From School to Work - and Back Again: Youth Apprenticeships in Wisconsin (NCREL, 1994).

"Well at lot of our tech prep staff development initiatives to help teachers to better understand all this is focusing on summer internships in business and industry, so if you go to Lake Shore Techo College for example and look at what some of the teachers there are doing. They're spending four to six weeks this summer in hospitals and banks and various kinds of manufacturing and production facilities, trying to understand not the specifics of what individual workers are doing, but what's happening within in the company in terms of their efforts to modernize, to bring in automation, how are they using computers, how are they using math and communication skills broadly in that company, what do the career ladders look like and the counselors are out there asking questions about the kind of academic preparation needing associate degrees or bachelors degrees that certain firms are interested in trying to find in the next five years."

This Critical Issue summary was researched and written by Victor M. Hernandez, assistant researcher at the Center on Education and Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Date posted: 1995