Pedro Nava’s scientific contributions

The silo structure and neoliberal rationality of Career Technical Education (CTE) secondary pathways limit student learning and propagate the purpose of education as the creation of human capital, not a socially aware citizenry (Brown, 2017; Jacobs, 2010). Despite its history of racial tracking, CTE pathways still neglect critical thinking/dialogue around social/environmental justice issues, drastically hurting workers’ ability to confront these inequities (Darder, 2017; Oakes & Saunders, 2011; Shor & Freire, 1987). Using a qualitative research design that employs ethnographic elements, this study found that constructivism, critical pedagogy, and interdisciplinary collaboration can positively impact the experience, participation, and critical consciousness of students and educators in a CTE building and construction pathway; however, more research is required to fully understand how these pedagogical shifts can be more effectively integrated into other CTE pathways.

Integrating interdisciplinary collaboration and critical pedagogy with CTE.

The separation of disciplines in secondary education is an inherent obstacle to project-based learning (PBL): educators go years without meaningful collaboration, critical feedback, or self-reflection (Jacobs, 2010). As a result, many inhabit an isolated bubble where no space is given to interdisciplinary collaboration; this isolation limits the authenticity of the projects students can produce. Compounding the dilemma is neoliberal logic, which disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities (Brown, 2017). The curriculum is depoliticized; students are motivated to excel academically so they can compete in the market rather than work towards more societal equity. Additionally, marginalized groups are tracked into vocational pathways that focus only on basic skills training and give no space to critical thinking, which hurts the worker’s ability to confront and transform inequitable neoliberal policies (Darder, 2017). While PBL in STEM and vocational pathways have positive impacts on teaching and learning outcomes, implemented without a critical pedagogy framework, PBL has not been shown to increase critical consciousness (Montoya et al., 2018). This research aims to discover how PBL and an interdisciplinary curriculum (Montoya et al., 2020) implemented through a framework of critical pedagogy can impact the critical consciousness of students and teachers.

Too often, research into postsecondary workforce and engineering education focuses solely on curricula and ignores student matriculation to high-skill high-wage careers. The purpose of this study is to investigate this subject through dual ethnographies in Project-Based Learning (PBL) Career and Technical Education (CTE) workforce pathways in Silicon Valley. This study looks to better explain functioning pathways. The authors take inspiration from three publications: past research found that seven PBL essentials form good learning outcomes [1]; a measurable outcome of PBL is higher attendance [2]; to which Applied STEM CTE (AS-CTE) [3] framed attendance as a predictor metric of the efficacy of a workforce pathway. We ask which metrics help explain successful workforce CTE pathways. Our ethnography uncovers two distinct postsecondary PBL pathways and explores a new predictive metric of social mobility, which helps to reveal the pathways' struggle to support marginalized students' mobility into the high-skill high-wage building workforce. Despite these challenges, a Labor-Union-administered apprenticeship pathway showed promise in aiding social mobility. The authors uncovered early evidence that social mobility may be added as a metric to a predictive ontology framework of pathway success.