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Analyze

Essential Elements of High Road Training Partnerships

Yvonne

1) Industry Led Problem Solving. This element stresses the importance of rethinking industry analyses in order to create quality jobs. Thinking as industry as a whole enables just transition planners to set industry boundries and lift as much of the industry onto the high road as possible. 

2) The Partnership Itself is a Priority. This category streeses the importance of leadership committment as well as problem-solving structure and culture building. 

3) Incorporate Worker Wisdom throughout Partnership Efforts. This component stresses the importance of valuing the industry workers' opinions and evaluations, and including them into the training process and partnerships. 

4) Industry-Driven Education and Training Solutions. This key element stresses the importance of coming up with appropriate an doable education methods. 

The 8 Parternships

Yvonne

The California Workforce Development Board is cooperating with 8 other organizations as partnerships to implement just transition. 

The Shirley Ware Education Center (SWEC)

The West Oakland Job Resource Center (WOJRC)

Building Skills Partnership (BSP)

The Hospitality Training Academy (HTA)

Joint Workforce Investment (JWI)

The Port of Los Angeles (POLA)

Jewish Vocational Service (JVS)

Worker Education and Resource Center (WERC). 

Each organization is partnering with other different cooperations, institutes to implement the plan of just transitions according to the ECJ approach. 

Foreign Schools

tschuetz

This news article focuses on the 140 "foreign schools" that the German state runs in different countries. However, only 30% of the schools' funding comes from the German government, while the rest is raised through fees paid by parents. The article reports that due to school closures, funding has dwindled rapidly and according to self-evaluations, 64% of schools face bankruptcy unless the German state offers emergency support. The article reports that back in November, the German government decided to foster the schools as a means of cultural and educational foreign politics.  A web conference to discuss the issue is planned for next week.

Our project could keep tabs on how foreign schools as spaces of transnationalism become reshaped during COVID-19.

asking the right questions

ntanio

I filled out a TA multiple choice questionaire recently about teaching during pandemic. Did I feel supported in access to remote teaching tools? Did I need workshops on how to run an online discussion, test prep,? etc.

What was unasked and therefore unstated is the trauma students are facing amid an administrative effort to carry on, do our best, and talks about our "Fill-in-the-Mascot" Family. In my class we hear stories of students forced to leave campus and return to unsafe family home environments. Many students lost their on-campus jobs, yet are still stuck in rental contracts, with full tuition fees, and reduced campus services. Many students discovered they were on-call "essential" workers which has played havoc with their health concerns and class engagement. We also have students with COVID19 trying to stay on top of their course workload because they are supposed to graduate this Spring. 

Meanwhile as I talk to students I hear that most of their classes are recorded lectures taught asynchronously. They tell us that they often binge listen to these at 1.5x speed just to get through them. --This is the mode of online learning that Robert Post in his NCA post describes as "effective and efficient" for the "tramission of information." I wonder who isn't he talking about.

In trying to teaching using zoom during the pandemic, Sharon Traweek and I have held synchronous online class discussions. Many students have told us this is their only synchronous class this quarter. We have tried to teach students to think critically in/of zoom as a built environment. To ask what  assumptions, hierarchies, epistemologies are built into our online classrooms. We have struggled to find ways to disrupt those pathways with alternative strategies.

In answer to the question what is being foregrounded and obscured? I think in all the reflection about the future of residential and online learning and about the multiple crisis Universities, as well as the rest of us, are facing; what gets obscured is how important and how difficult it is to teach to students that they must think critically with and about the tools they are given and expected to learn.

Feeling, Mentoring and Recognising the Pedagogic Limits of the New Normal

AmandaWindle

After reading the essays attached to this question, I was left overwhelmed. I had to walk away before finishing them as it was just way too much...  Returning to any sense of a  “normal” state of affairs is undesirable. And, to remain in the present, I would convey that there is a greater need for mentorship and encouragement of independent thinking/doing.

There are further challenges more specifically related to appropriate ways of guiding and enabling kinaesthetic learning. Those teaching practical subjects usually taught out of a studio will face tactile challenges and many more.

In relation to the online educational spaces, it's really hard to read the micro-expressions of either solidarity or dissent in online interactions. It’s more than just exploring the literacy of online asynchronous online pedagogy, it’s about understanding the limitations of the tools, be that Zoom or Skype or another tool like Slack, Micro, Trello, etc. 

cuts, proposals and the need to democratize university decision-making in the United States

Kim Fortun
Roddy Reid shared these links on May 5: - Bryan Alexander on the first wave of cuts to universities: https://bryanalexander.org/higher-education/the-first-wave-of-pandemic-cuts-to-colleges-and-universities/?fbclid=IwAR0hjYH_X9H9MfAT-sOnVgPH0Op9tCKf2K4EzOzFvJNdrMWQfosYFvJuzfc- SF Art Institute to stay open:https://www.artforum.com/news/san-francisco-art-institute-to-stay-open-with-limited-academic-offerings-82913?fbclid=IwAR0s9j17a7nWDVTF7mR4acdiJ26hJK8PLsF5GjrLInmAXUxEY1cD9BdHA5c- free access to special issue of Academe by the (American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the context of attacks on higher education: “The Politics of Knowledge”, including Judith Butler’s dissenting view on the AAUP’s "Statement of Knowledge" and Chris Newfield on the need to democratize university decision-making- Adjunct lecturers' low pay (report):https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/20/new-report-says-many-adjuncts-make-less-3500-course-and-25000-year?fbclid=IwAR1b-vyB-Ab2gQM6MuomOuJAgdEAngvVWhoUiqsa-_A_5mTVQi47T6xZ5fU- The American Prospect on student debt and the Federal Reserve: https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/student-debt-and-the-fed/?fbclid=IwAR3IPC-KdvSYdM6DHl2Si9vX4eLnWSpFgTSOIXoupPPk4bW8Y-KIm4hz5W0Change.org petition on reinvesting in higher education nationally: https://www.change.org/p/elected-officials-immediately-protect-and-strengthen-higher-education-for-the-post-covid-world?fbclid=IwAR0Gy_fEn7pKUNaN3Z4oeYlnyy_4FGSt8fwTYZVFnODIh36zoy6mnIQ0v-A

pece_annotation_1478450805

wolmad

This film follows the story of USMC Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger. After the death of his 9 year old daughter to lukemia, he searched for the cause of his daughters illness, and his persuit led him to discover a Marine Corps cover-up of one of the largest water contamination incidents in U.S. history at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune. The film follows Jerry's investigation and persuit to make the truth known to the public and to force the Marine Corps to be "always faithful" to the thousands of Marines and their families exposed to toxic chemicals at the camp, and at other military bases across the country where similar occurances took place.