Changing Moving Targets: Ethnography & Educational Culture in a Teaching Hospital vs. a Teaching Factory.

Diane R. Pawlowski
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

This paper discusses anthropological research in two studies - one ongoing, and one complete - about changing occupational education cultures. Data is drawn from a teaching hospital as well as a unique "teaching factory" that educates and socializes urban youth and adults entering technical, manufacturing, or engineering professions. The Body Shop, site of a two-year NIH funded study, is a rehabilitation hospital returning to the community individuals with bodies altered by illness, injury or violence newly socialized to adapt to society's behavioral norms. Simultaneously, this hospital trains, teaches, and transforms allied health interns and resident physicians into medical rehabilitation clinical and research professionals. Run by a multi-service human rights organization, Focus:HOPE (FH), and resembling a teaching hospital with its reality-based educational goals, Teaching Factory is a first tier automotive industry and U. S. defense department parts supplier. FH recruits motivated, undereducated adults to teach, train, and return to the community as skilled machinists ready to fill high-paying jobs. Machinist Training Institute graduates may enter the multi-university, industry-sponsored, NSF-funded Greenfield Coalition program blending internship-type factory rotations with reality-based coursework to earn undergraduate engineering degrees. GC develops transferable, reality-based courses designed to alter engineering education culture. Utilizing a cultural model based on cognitive psychology and anthropological theory developed by Marietta Babba, this paper discusses selected, key cultural factors inherent in both institutions' social universes and the implications of those factors for improving occupational educational opportunities for underrepresented minorities and people with disabilities entering professions in competition for careers in an emerging global marketplace.