The Importance of Technology education Education in Middle Grades Curriculum

The Importance of Technology education Education in Middle Grades Curriculum

Introduction

Although the most popular and accepted definitions for “industrial arts” and “technology education” may differ in wording, there has been very little difference in meaning between definitions for the two over the last seventy years.

Discussion

Industrial arts is a study of the changes made by man in the forms of materials to increase their values, and of the problems of life related to these changes. This interpretation of the meaning of “industrial arts” was written seventy years ago by Frederick Gordon Bonser and Lois Coffey Mossman of Teacher's College at Columbia University. Lux, characterizing this definition as “famous” and “widely accepted,” credited Bonser with leading “a major thrust to redirect industrial arts away from activities and studies based on discrete materials or selected trade skills and toward broader conceptualizations such as how humankind provides itself with clothing, food, and shelter”. The definition has three major elements: education, technology, and society (see Figure 1). Industry is not mentioned. This definition was hardly obscure in Bonser and Mossman's time or ignored since. Smith (1981) wrote of the definition, “even to this day it has created much excitement and given much direction to curriculum development in industrial arts”. However, Smith goes on to note, as the definition originally appeared in Industrial Arts for Elementary Schools, “many practitioners have found it difficult to make the transition and apply... Bonser's philosophies to industrial arts programs that have traditionally been established in the secondary schools”. In fact, acceptance of Bonser's ideas may have been hampered by his reputation as a “leader in the area of elementary education”.

In 1948, shortly after quoting Bonser and Mossman's definition in his Industrial Arts in General Education, Wilber defined the industrial arts as “those phases of general education which deal with industry — its organization, materials, occupations, processes, and products — and with the problems of life resulting from the industrial and technological nature of society” (p. 2.) Wilber's definition is constructed similarly to Bonser and Mossman's, but substitutes the concept of industry for technology. Like Bonser and Mossman's definition, Wilber's was prominent.

If technology education and industrial arts are not significantly disparate philosophically, then perhaps the difference between them, assuming it to be more than nominal, is methodological. Kemp and Schwaller, in editing the 1988 CTTE yearbook, repeatedly (e.g. p. xiii, 36, 205) divided “approaches that are recommended as instructional strategies for technology education” into six categories (and devote one chapter to each): “the teaching of concepts, using an interdisciplinary approach, emphasizing social/cultural impacts of technology, developing problem solving skills, being able to integrate the systems of technology, and interpreting industry. It is suggested,” they went on to say, “that the technology teacher incorporate as many as possible into the classroom and/or laboratory.” Four of those six categories will be used individually to illustrate that, just as the philosophy of technology education is not new, neither are the teaching strategies associated ...