ARHS hosts Advanced Pathways forum for educators
Over the last few years, ARHS has grown its commitment to engineering, and this year that included hosting a regional forum about engineering pathways and hiring a new staff member in that field.
On Friday, December 8, ARHS hosted an engineering and technology event that drew more than 20 attendees from schools across Massachusetts who “are developing and implementing Innovation Career Pathways,” according to an email from Interim Superintendent Doug Slaughter.
In attendance were faculty and staff from schools in Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden County schools.
The event included looking at the Advanced Manufacturing Pathways learning spaces and hearing from a panel of students in the Engineering for Social Good class at ARHS taught by John Fabel.
ARHS participants included STEM participants Fabel, fellow technology teacher Nick Harrison, and the Engineering and Technology Department Head Nat Woodruff, along with many other staff and administrators.
ARHS has a large engineering program with many classes dedicated to different kinds of engineering and manufacturing design. But this year, the school also adopted an Advanced Manufacturing plan, sponsored by the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education, designed to push students forward and boost ARHS’s already extraordinary engineering programs.
New staff member and coordinator Meshia Begin, who formerly worked in Innovation Pathways at Northampton High School, is now in that role at ARHS
The Advanced Manufacturing Pathway is one of seven programs that schools can adopt. These programs were first designed in 2017 and six years later Amherst is fully on the popular bandwagon.
“The Advanced Manufacturing Pathway program is designed to give students an idea of what they might want to do in the future,” said Begin. “We present students with the possible paths they can take and support them as they pursue these goals.”
For a long time, teachers at ARHS such as Fabel, Woodruff, and Harrison have wanted to expand the engineering department to push students further. Over time, ARHS has bought new and advanced equipment for the engineering department but they haven’t always been able to build full classes around the new resources.
“A new class we will be rolling out will advance that,” Woodruff said. The class will allow students to do sophisticated computer-aided design, and “instead of doing everything in the woodshop, we will be using new advanced manufacturing equipment,” he noted.
Harrison is excited to be able to expand on the existing curriculum and offer much more real work experience to students in the engineering field. “We have not been able to put students into internships or work-based learning opportunities like this before,” said Harrison. “We needed to hire someone [like Begin] to help us coordinate this.”
The entire Advanced Manufacturing Pathway is free for students and aims to offer necessary resources to increase access for all who are interested in engineering to learn about it. The Pathway will even provide transportation for internships and work-based learning.
“It’s a shift in how we do and think about traditional high school and it has students working on developing their career interests long before they graduate.” said Begin.
